What is Involved in SEO?
Every online marketer wants to drive as much traffic as possible to their website. For this reason, many turn to the best SEO company to help them optimise their sites. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, can be confusing, especially if you are a beginner. SEO aims to maximise the number of quality visitors to your website by ensuring your pages appear high on search engine results pages (SERPs). Read on to find out what is involved in SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which ensures you get free organic traffic from search engines. SEO aims at improving your website’s position on the SERP since organic search is the most prominent way for people to access the content. An excellent SEO strategy improves your traffic quality and quantity. SEO recommends efforts that benefit users and search engines. For instance, it helps you create quality content that fulfils users’ needs and enables search engine bots to crawl and index your website. SEO strategies will help your website rank higher on the SERP, so you can receive more traffic. The aim is to rank on Google’s first page for terms (keywords) that mean the most to your target audience. As such, SEO is about understanding your audience and the technical nature of how to configure your website.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Bing and Google use bots, or crawlers, to gather information they find on the internet. The bots begin on a known page and follow internal links to other pages within your website and external links to other sites. The content on these pages helps search engine bots understand your website and how it’s semantically connected to other pages on the internet. When people type a keyword or query into the search box, the search engine uses its algorithm to show the most accurate and valuable results for that query. The results can include web pages with images, videos, text, and local business listings. Working with the best marketing companies will help you understand SEO and how to leverage it to rank high on the SERPs.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is an effective way to improve your brand’s visibility on search engines. Visibility ensures you attract traffic to your website, leading to sustainable and reliable growth for your business. Here are a few benefits of SEO for your business.
Increased Visibility and Ranking
Internet users are more likely to choose websites that appear at the top of search engines when looking for online products and services. An excellent SEO strategy helps you rank high on the SERP, increasing your visibility and the chances of more customers clicking on your site. Appearing on the first page of search results also makes users more familiar with your business. For this reason, they are more likely to remember your brand name and visit your website the next time they are interested in what you offer. Some customers may search for your brand name when they want your products or services.
Increased Web Traffic
You will miss many opportunities if potential customers cannot find your website. SEO can help you increase search engine traffic, meaning you will sell more. The best SEO company in Australia can help you develop an effective SEO strategy to increase your website’s ranking and traffic.
Develop Trust
SEO optimisation will increase your website’s ranking, and more people will know about your brand. Appearing high on the SERPs lets people know you are a reliable business, meaning they can trust you. Customers tend to avoid recommendations provided by search engines. As such, ranking high on the search engine results page will solidify your product or service as trustworthy in the user’s mind.
Improve User Experience
An SEO-optimised website clearly shows the products or services offered, how to obtain them, and answers questions surrounding the product. User experience is also a significant ranking factor, meaning an SEO-optimised site will appeal to both search engines and users. If users struggle to navigate your website, chances are that search engines will as well.
Business Growth
SEO is essential to your company’s growth. The higher you rank on the SERPs, the more organic traffic your website attracts. A well-optimised website will help you gain more customers and make more sales, increasing your revenue. Users are likely to share your content on social platforms if they find your website ranked highly on the SERPs.
What are the Pillars of SEO?
Knowing how to rank high on the SERPs and how SEO evolves will keep you ahead of your competitors. While SEO changes constantly, its primary pillars remain constant, and the best SEO company in Australia can help you optimise your website. Here are the three pillars of SEO.
On-site SEO
On-site SEO refers to the improvements you make on your website to make it search-engine friendly. Optimising your website for search engines means you want to signal to search engines what your website is about. On-site SEO covers your website’s structure. Here are the primary areas of attention when optimising your on-site SEO.
- Keyword selection
- Content optimisation
- Link profile
- Meta titles and descriptions
Keyword selection will help you create relevant content that meets user intent. Internal and external links build a robust connection between pages and other sites. This helps you build a reputation and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. On-site SEO also ensures you organise your content well for search engine crawling and indexing.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO involves efforts outside your website but helps you rank high and attract traffic. Link building is the primary element of off-site SEO. Building a robust link profile is a sign of trust in search engines and can help you increase your ranking. However, you must ensure the links come from reputable, trusted sites. Don’t use black hat tactics to gain backlinks since search engines will recognise them and penalise your website. Different backlinks have varying values. Backlinks from trusted and high-authority sites provide more value than those from low-authority websites. Here are a few ways to earn high-quality backlinks.
- Guest blogging
- Ask your business partners
- Ask websites that mention you to link back to your content
- Use influencers to share your products and services
- Create sharable content
- Publish original research
- Fix broken links
Working on your backlinks and internal links is an excellent way to build trust and earn a reputation as an authority in your industry. You can do competitor backlink research to gain insights about the link-building that helps your competitors rank high and target those domains in your link-building campaign.
Local SEO
Do you own a local business that only serves your area? Please ensure you use local SEO to increase your local traffic. Search engines use the user’s location to suggest businesses within a specific range. This helps users make a quick decision instead of sorting through brands that are far away at that moment. For this reason, a user will type a query on the search box, browse the top results around them, and choose the most appealing business. This means you may lose clients if your business does not appear as a top result for local searches. The best ways to improve your local SEO are to include your city or area in your keywords, claim your directory listings, and create pages for your business on platforms like Google My Business and Google Maps.
Should You Use SEO?
The short answer to this question is yes. SEO is a data-driven approach to increasing your business’s digital marketing and visibility. Although SEO is a complex and ever-changing practice, the best SEO companies in Australia can help you optimise your website for search engines and users. SEO agencies are continually updated with new technology and play a significant role in your business’s success in digital marketing.
CONCLUSION
SEO is essential for your online business. But where do you start, and how do you know what you are doing is positively impacting your business? Working with an SEO Adelaide company like ours can help you answer these questions.