Simple guidance for you in SEO

The not-so scary world of SEO

Setting up, owning or even managing a business can be an exciting time. It can also be highly stressful, whether it’s the first time or the seventh! Regardless of what stage you are at, however, you will undoubtedly find that there are plenty of steep learning curves to navigate. 

If you don’t know much about SEO, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s some kind of dark art. Witchcraft, if you will. But once you have a bit of an understanding of it, you will start to appreciate the difference it can make to your business. 

So, let’s dive in and take a closer look as some simple guidance for you in SEO!

What exactly is SEO?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a term related to your business’ website and is concerned with how easy your site can be found on the various search engines. Everyone has heard of and uses Google, a lot of people use Bing, and in the past, plenty of us have also used Yahoo. These are your search engines – your go-to places to type in what you’re looking for and to find websites that show you precisely what you want to see.

When you have put in your ‘search terms’ to the search bar, two types of result will show – adverts and the ‘organic’ results. The adverts are what companies have paid for with what is called Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. The ‘organic’ results are selected by your search engine of choice as the most relevant to the search terms you have specified. 

The search engines use an ever-changing and complex list of criteria to select what they classify as the most relevant results. There are algorithms and crawling spiders all at play to ascertain who goes to the top of the list. If that sounds intimidating, don’t worry; it’s actually a little easier to ‘optimise your site’ than you might realise! And the more traffic that visits your site, the higher up the search engine rankings you go, so it’s a win-win!

Why should you care about SEO?

Well, the main reason that businesses have a website in the first place is to showcase products and services to potential customers in the hope that they might choose you when they require what you offer. If your website can’t be found by those searching for things relevant to what you do, your site is mainly being wasted – and we bet it wasn’t that cheap to set up in the first place! 

Your website can, of course, be found via other channels. You could spend a lot on PPC advertising, for example, or you can promote it on social media. But the reality is, most people still search on the traditional search engines, and as such, that’s where your site needs to be displayed to get the best traffic to it. 

If done correctly, there are many benefits to SEO, including:

• Saving you a fortune in advertising costs
• Ensuring that you get the right sort of traffic onto your site (i.e., potential customers with a genuine interest in what you do and, therefore, have a much higher potential to convert)
• Giving you a major competitive advantage over the other businesses within your field
• Inspiring trust within customers and prospects, as users understand that to appear top, you must be doing something right

How to improve your website’s SEO? 

There are things you can do with ease and things you might need some support on. The most important point is to have plenty of content on your site that is relevant. By relevant, we mean includes the right keywords. These are the actual words that potential customers will put into the search bar, ones that you want to be found for. For example, think ‘kitchen makers ‘Maidenhead’ for a kitchen designer based in Maidenhead!

The relevance of the content is also better when it is newer, so you need to regularly update your site with new stuff. Think news posts, blog articles, landing pages and the like.

Other posts that you might be interested in include:

1. Getting Your Technical SEO right for E-Commerce
2. SEO resources for small business online marketing
3. 3 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

If you’d like to learn more about what your website needs in terms of search engine optimization, please pop us a message at hello@avidmode.com and we’ll set up some time for a chat.