What is SEO? Why it matters, and how to implement it

Search engine optimisation is the organic, long term process of bringing more traffic to

your site.

That means, it’s not like pay per click where you pay every time your ad is clicked by someone

to enter your site.

Learn more about the difference between SEO and PPC if you’re unsure.

Before we get into the different forms of search engine optimisation, let’s establish why it matters to you and your business.

At the end of the day, your end goal for your website is to get people on it and to convert.

That means either making a transaction or submitting an enquiry.

To convert your users to customers, the first step is to make your website accessible, crawlable and indexable.

In other words, you need Google to be able to find your website. It then needs to be able to quickly understand how all of the pages relate to each other and which ones are going to be of the most important value to your users. Only then can it properly comprehend your website and begin to rank you in the SERP space.

Of course, your website needs to be optimised for organic search as well to appear on the first page of Google, but we’ll go into that later.

How do you know if Google will access, crawl and index your site?

You can check if your website is being indexed by doing a simple search for site:yourdomain.com into Google. If your site is being indexed, you should see a list of links to your website. But if you return a ‘your search didn’t match…’ message, you know you’re not being indexed.

Here are some tips to get Google to notice you, and index your website:

 

• Get signed up on Google Search Console and Google Analytics – so Google knows you exist
• Create a sitemap and submit it to search console – so Google can quickly get an overview of your site structure at a glance
• Publish high quality content regularly – so Google and your users see you as the authority website in your field
• Add internal links to your website – so Google understands the relationship and value of all of your pages… find out more about internal linking in SEO
• Use robots.txt files – to indicate to Google which pages you want and don’t want appearing in the search results
• Make sure your internal links don’t have a ‘nofollow’ tag – Google won’t access these

 

Those are some of the basic things you need to do as a first step. Then, you’ll want to optimise your website to rank appropriately. There is a lot involved, and different types of search engine optimisation.

What types of search engine optimisation are there?

 

Local SEO

What is local SEO? It is the process of building up your brand’s website to be seen by people in a certain location. For example, this might be being optimised to appear as the nearest physical shop for women’s clothes.

How do you optimise for local SEO?

• Claim your local business listing with Google My Business – don’t forget to choose appropriate categories to help Google understand your business better
• Build your reviews up over time – they will help to form positive social proof for potential new customers
• Remove any duplicate local listings on the same platform – it’s confusing for users to know which is which, and you’ll want your ranking strength all in one place

 

Voice search

What is voice search? Voice search is when you create a search by speaking, rather than typing into Google. In fact, 27% of people online are using voice search, as of 2020.

Searches made by voice search can often be question phrases, starting with ‘what’ or ‘where’. Those ‘what’ queries are likely to be users who are interested, but aren’t ready to purchase yet. For example, ‘what hiking boots are available’. Whereas, those users with a voice search ‘where can I buy hiking boots’ are much further down the funnel and are more likely to buy.

How do you optimise for Google’s voice search?

As voice search queries are much more conversational, you will need to make sure your content is optimised for longer tail keywords, which are keywords with 3 or more words in. One way you could start doing this, is by creating content that answers the questions of your readers.

You could include structured data, so that Google under the purpose of a given page on your site better. You can add structured data in the meta data of your page, which is a code to Google that your page has, for example, a ‘recipe’ or ‘product’ on.

You could optimise your page to appear as a featured snippet. To do this, you’ll need to research question keywords and use the ‘People Also Ask’ section in the results to learn what questions users are asking. Then, create your content that directly answers this question to try and rank as a featured snippet.

 

Off page SEO

What is off page SEO? Off page SEO is everything behind the scenes, so to speak, that indicates the popularity of your website, which is known as your domain authority. Here are two of the big factors and how to boost off page SEO.

Increase your internal linking – If Google doesn’t easily understand how your pages relate to each other, or the value of different pages, it’s likely to assume that a user wouldn’t either, and then rank you poorly.

So, make sure you have a quality internal linking strategy. For example, add links to related blog content before you publish your new blog post, and don’t forget to insert some links to your core service pages too.

Tackle external linking, or backlinks – The best way to think about backlinks is that every backlink (a link from another domain that goes to your website) is a ‘vote’ for your domain authority. So, if lots of websites are linking to you, they view you as worthy for their users, and over time your domain authority increases.

The exception is if the link has a ‘nofollow’ attribute on it. This attribute tells Google that they don’t trust the website they’re ranking to, so no link equity is passed. We’d recommend that you have a backlink strategy in place.

 

On page SEO

What is on page SEO? On page SEO refers to anything on your page that’s visible to your users, which is within your control to change in efforts to increase organic search.

Meta data

Meta data refers to your page (or meta) title and description, which is what users will see in the SERPs. It’s really important that this is written to be as engaging as possible to encourage a high click through rate. You’ll also want the meta data to include the primary keyword for that page too because the meta data is also one of the first parts of the page that Google looks at to decide where to rank you in the results.

Don’t forget that you want to meet a user’s expectation, so make sure the content in your meta data reflects the content on your page. If they don’t open the page to find what they were looking for, or what your meta data indicated they’d find, they are likely to bounce and exit.

Headings

On every page, it is best practice SEO to include only one H1 tag, and then H2, H3 and H4 tags, and so on, depending on the length of your content. Your H1 tag should tell the user and Google what the page is about, and be similar to the meta title.

So, avoid having multiple or duplicated H1 tags because this is considered blackhat SEO. Your headings should break up your on page content, making it scannable and quick to read.

On page content

As a rule of thumb, Google doesn’t like pages that have a low amount of content on them, because this is likely to be of poor value to the user. So make sure your page is of genuine use to your reader, with a clear, engaging call to action at the end to push your reader to take the next step in their customer journey.

This might include one of more of the following:

• Videos – link to your YouTube if you have one
• Images – don’t forget to add image attributes, we’ll go over this shortly
• Text – be it short or long form, like creative content
• Infographics – visual content

Images

An image alt is the tag that readers don’t see that’s attached to an image. Find it in the code by searching for “alt=”. It’s used as a way of labelling and describing the image. So, when Google crawls and reads the page, it understands the relevance of the image and why it’s on the page.

What is image optimisation?

Avoid having an image with a missing attribute. Instead, we’d recommend having an attribute that describes what the image is, and if possible including a keyword targeted for that page.

For example, a category page entitled ‘women’s hiking boots’ might have an image of a woman hiking on a trail with boots on. Let’s say the primary keyword for the page is ‘women’s hiking boots’, then your attribute could be ‘lady trekking wearing women’s hiking boots’.

Page speed

Site speed is how fast your domain is. Page speed is how quickly a given page on your site loads. So, what should your page speed be on a particular page? A good page speed should be no slower than 3 seconds, but the quicker the better for a top user experience.

In fact, Google’s research in 2018 shows us that 53% of mobile users left a site that takes longer than those three seconds to fully load. That’s a mobile only audience, so we’re not counting your desktop traffic, but that’s still over half of your potential traffic, which means potential customers. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure your page speed is pretty quick, otherwise it could be costing you customers.

How do you check your page speed?

You can manually check it yourself to get a feel for the performance on mobile and on desktop. Or, you can use one of the many page speed testing tools available, like GTMetrix, Page Speed Insights with Google, or Lighthouse, which is slightly more technical.

To make your website faster, start by reviewing the actions of those tools to find out what could be slowing your website, or page, down. It could be due to uncompressed images that are taking time to load on your page, which are fixable.

Rich snippets in SEO

What are rich snippets in SEO? There are different types of schema that you can target, such as organisations, product pages and recipes too. You can optimise a page to appear as a rich snippet in the search results, by using structured markup with schema.

For example, a normal snippet for the search “lava lite classic” would look like this:

A rich snippet that’s optimised to appear as a ‘product’ to Google, and your user, would look like the below.

It includes:

• Breadcrumbs – it’s the argos.co.uk>product part that helps your user understand your site better
• Product rating – as a form of social proof from previous buyers
• Product price – important comparison information

These all act as valuable indicators to Google and to your user.

Why should you optimise for rich snippets in SEO? They can increase your traffic by 30% and increase your click through rates by 600% by using rich snippets, according to Moz.

Quick answers

What are quick answers?

Quick answers are a type of listing that resolve the query that has been searched by the user. They were introduced in September 2014 as a type of featured snippet. They can increase your click through rate significantly, with one case of a 516% increase mentioned by Search Engine Land.

We worked with a client’s page entitled ‘Eco friendly carpets’. We optimised for one of their target keywords ‘environmentally friendly carpet tiles’ and saw a quick answer result, like this:

Here’s how to optimise to appear as a quick answer

1. Pick a relevant, engaging topic that your target audience is interested in
2. Create content that directly answers the user’s search query
3. Include the right keywords in your on page copy to make sure you’re optimised around that search term

It’s also important to make sure that the page you’re optimising for, is easily accessible on your sitemap, so Google can find the page and the answer quickly. Don’t forget to use Schema to mark up your code to Google either.

Creative content

One of the best things you can do for your website to rank effectively is to publish high quality creative content that is of genuine value for your user. Build up a hub of authoritative information for them to refer back to and easily find on your site. Your brand and your website will over time become the trusted source to go to.

But we’d advise not to write blogs for the sake of writing blogs. This is where you will need to do competitor, topic and keyword research to find out what exactly your potential customers are searching for on Google.

Then you identify gaps and target those users by creating different types of content that are optimised with the right keywords that are being searched.

Different types of content includes:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Infographics

We’d recommend creating a content plan that aligns with your SEO strategy. So, in the long run, all of your content including creative seasonal articles and on page copy that’s optimised for the right keywords, increases your organic traffic and conversions.

How to check your SEO strategy works

And that’s a dip in the water of the basics of SEO. It’s very much a long term, data-led plan of optimisation. But, remember that in digital marketing, things can change day by day sometimes. Algorithms can change, a particular trend or search volume for a particular keyword can take a dive, but it’s always best to assess your data. Jump into Google Analytics to see what’s changed since you’ve made a particular change.

Is there any of the following?

• increase in number of conversions
• increase in conversion rate
• decrease in bounce rate
• increase in number of users

For example, one of our SEO clients saw a 666.67% increase in goal completions, which we can see from Google Analytics.

If you have, congratulations! Your SEO strategy is successfully working.

If not, don’t worry. There will be things you can re-evaluate to see a return of investment. Our SEO team can help if you’re unsure where to start, so feel free to get in touch.

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