Marketing

Beginners guide to Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation, (aka ‘SEO’, ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ search) involves a variety of techniques which are used to improve your natural search engine rankings (i.e. the listings on search engine results pages which are not paid for).

This differs from Paid-search marketing, (aka ‘Pay Per Click’, ‘paid search’ or ‘sponsored links’) which is the process of using paid-for — or sponsored — listings to make your product, services or brand more visible on search engines. However, Pay Per Click campaigns are significantly more successful if you get Search Engine Optimisation right.

Why is Search Engine Optimisation, (SEO), important?

• Search can help you achieve your business goals – Get more customers, more leads and more sales. Consumers have lost their fear of buying things online and search engines are often the starting place for a product search.
• Brand visibility / findability – About a quarter of all web searches contain a brand term, such as a product or company name, either on its own or combined with other generic keywords. When consumers add brand terms to generic searches it is a great indicator of purchase intent.
• People prefer the natural results and tend to choose natural search results over the paid-search listings.
• Concerns about PPC (pay per click), click fraud – Although the search engines have played down the significance of click fraud the perception remains that investment into paid search carries the risk of fraudulent clicks, and therefore damage to return on investment.
• People trust Google – Specifically, people trust Google to deliver relevant results. It is the reason why Google became synonymous with search. If Google says your company is number one for ‘car insurance’ then in the mind of the searcher it probably is.
• SEO helps you build a better website – better user experience, better usability. better fulfillment paths. Happy customers mean higher satisfaction rates and more repeat business.

So what exactly is Search Engine Optimisation?

• It has nothing to do with ‘sponsored links’. SEO is aimed at achieving the highest position possible in the ‘organic’ listings on the search engine results pages, not in the ‘paid’ listings.
• There is no charge for organic listings to be displayed, nor when a link to your site is clicked on.
• SEO is a longer-term play. It doesn’t happen overnight and can often take months.
• Search engines do not reveal how their algorithms work, so SEO is a combination of experience, experiments and educated guesswork.
• Google alone has more than 200 ‘ranking factors’. Some factors are more important that others.
• People love to search, and when they do they are about twice as likely to click on an organic result as a pay-per-click ad.
• Search is demand driven. People are ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ when they search.
• Accordingly searchers looking for products or services have a high propensity to convert (if they find relevant pages).
• You don’t have to be number one in Google to do well. Users that drill further down into the search engine results may be a) looking for something specific, b) further along the purchase path, and b) more committed to the buy.
• Plenty of evidence exists that shows business are continuing to investment in SEO.

Creating a Roadmap for SEO

SEO is increasingly becoming a science where most businesses and organisations need the services of an expert. Long gone are the days where you simply add keywords to your HTML pages. Successful SEO requires planning and optimisation is many areas. Whilst the following is not exhaustive, it provides a high-level road-map you could use for selecting and working with an SEO provider.

Consider your target audience:

• Identify who wants what you are selling?
• What keywords would THEY use to get to your site or products?
• More detailed keyword research and discovery, (variations of the main keywords)
• How are your competitors driving traffic to their sites and which keywords do they use?
• Which sites or where do your customers go online to find your product or service?

The ‘technical bits’ that your SEO provider will help with in terms of website structure:

• Ensuring a spider, (the program the search engine uses to index your site), friendly website design
• Optimising page Title tags and metadata
• Optimising Keyword tags and Description tags
• Ensuring Headings where possible are using appropriate tags
• Ensuring Content relevance and keyword density
• Internal and Back Linking which makes the search engine think that the site is popular and is of high quality
• Optimal content types
• Optimal link types
• Use of page 301 redirects

There are many other activities and some of the above break down into more detailed activities. However, the above roadmap has purposely been kept simple in order to provide the reader with a general understanding of the process and to recognise that SEO is a vital component that is often overlooked in the website design process.