What is SEO and how can it help my business win new business?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the ranking of your website in the search engine results of search engines such as Google and Bing. For small and medium sized businesses, SEO can provide a cost-effective way of marketing your business by ensuring your website, your brand, products or services are seen by as many potential customers as possible.
The higher up your site is in the search results the greater the chance that visitor traffic to your website will increase, giving you greater opportunities to gain more business. Ideally your website should be on page one for search keywords that are meaningful to your business; this will mean that you are seen by people who are looking for your products or services.
Whether you can get your website on to page one often depends on two things: your competitors in your business market and the amount of effort you are prepared to put into SEO. For example, in business sectors such as car insurance or telecoms, you’d need a huge budget to get your website high-up in search result rankings. However, if your business sells a more niche product or delivers a service in a specific geographic area, you stand a good chance of gaining page one results with a modest budget by using the following tried and tested SEO techniques.
Make your website’s content rich in important keywords
When Google and other search engines automatically visit your website they analyse the text on each page to try to understand what your website (and therefore your business) is about. Search engines then use the keywords and phrases they discover on your website as an important factor in determining your website’s relevance. When a potential customer or client searches for a particular keyword or phrase, the search engines use the keywords they find on your website to decide where it should rank against other websites in the search results.
This is why an effective SEO strategy starts by looking at the search habits of your target audience. This research should then be used to focus efforts on those search keywords or phrases that potential customers might be using to look for your products or services. Target keywords should be researched carefully so that you focus your SEO efforts on search phrases that potential customers are most likely to use when looking for your business.
Once you’ve identified your target keywords you need to make sure that they are mentioned in your website. You should ensure that your target keywords are used in your website copy and page titles as well as in the meta data, (this is the hidden data that tells search engines about your web pages). Once you’ve added your focus keywords to your website, search engines will soon revisit your website and discover that your website is relevant for new keywords and search terms.
Create website links
Website links are great for helping to show the search engines that your website is trustworthy and that it is an authority for the search keywords that your potential customers are using. If your website has in-coming links from other important websites, some of their authority is passed through to your website which in turn helps to improve and maintain your ranking in Google. Whilst it can be a lot of hard work to get other important websites to link back your website, you can help the process by linking back from your business social media accounts such as Twitter, Google+, Linked-In and Facebook.
An area that shouldn’t be overlooked is the internal menu and link structure of your website. By carefully developing a good internal link structure you will help to increase the time that search engines and people spend looking at your website. Information about the amount of time that people spend browsing your website is saved by many search engines and will be fed back into the algorithm that they use to determine your search ranking.
Keep your website fresh and up to date
By regularly adding new website content that is written with your target market in-mind, you will increase the breadth of search keywords that your website will rank for in the search engine results. New, fresh content also encourages search engines to re-visit your website on a regular basis. One of the easiest ways to keep your website fresh (and increase your keyword reach) is to create an on-site blog or news section. You’ll then need to allocate a small amount of time each week or month to write something interesting that focuses on your keywords.
Keep on going with your SEO
Once you’ve optimised your keywords, generated back links and sorted-out your internal linking structure, it can take anything between a couple of weeks or a few months before it starts to move up in the search engine rankings. When your search engine ranking starts to improve it can be tempting to sit back and think that your SEO work is completed. Unfortunately SEO is never finished. If you want your website to keep its top ranking and to keep generating new business, new enquiries, customers and increased sales, you’ll need to keep working at your SEO strategy.
There’s some great advice available at Google’s webmaster tools help centre website if you want to do-it-yourself, or you could always ask a local specialist SEO agency like Bluehoop Digital who are always happy to provide informal advice to all Yorkshire based SMEs.
Article by Gareth Lisle
Gareth is search engine optimisation (SEO) and web design expert at Bluehoop Digital. Bluehoop Digital specialise in developing and marketing business & ecommerce websites that work hard to attract new enquiries and new customers.
For more information or to contact Bluehoop Digital: www.bluehoop.co.uk
