Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of tailoring a website so that it gains as much traffic as possible from search engines. In other words, SEO will help your website be listed higher up in search engine results, thereby generating more exposure and visitors to your site.
How SEO Works
Search engines such as Google use crawlers to search the web, they will index and essentially audit your website. It then uses a page ranking system to determine in what order your site will appear in the list of results when a user’s search query has words or terms relevant to your website.
For example, if you’re a mechanic working in Suffolk and you have a website – you would want your website to appear in the first few results when a user searched using the terms “mechanic in Suffolk”, and a well optimised website can help you to achieve this.
SEO Factors
There are a number of factors that will affect SEO, such as website visitors and relevant content. This section will explain some of most important ones in more detail.
- Quality Content
- It is important to create original and relevant content that really is of value to visitors – in order that they may stay on your site and view other pages, and possibly revisit again in the future. Regular blog posts are an effective way of staying relevant.
- The ‘bounce rate’ of a site measures how many visitors will leave your site after only viewing one page. The lower the bounce rate of a site, the higher it will perform in search engine page rankings. It is therefore essential that you make a good first impression on the page the user lands on.
- Page and URL Structure
- Well-structured pages with headings, paragraphs will rank better than poorly structured content. Using descriptive words (and hyphens for spaces) in a page’s title helps search engines to include you in relevant search results based on the search terms entered.
- In addition, the URL (the address seen in the top of the browser) including the domain name improve a website’s SEO. For example, a Suffolk-based mechanics blog post on oil changes would ideally be something like: “suffolk-mechanics.com/blog/oil-changes” as opposed to something like: “suffolkmechanics.com/blog/post20200622”
- Mobile Friendly Website
- With more people accessing websites on mobiles than desktop, having a mobile friendly and optimised website is key. Google do factor this in when determining the ranking of pages.
- Links & Social Media Presence
- Having a good amount of high quality websites linking to yours can improve the SEO. In addition, having an active presence on social media and linking to your website will help.
- Secure and Fast Website
- When determining the SEO ranking of a page, Google factor in whether your website is secure (has an SSL certificate) and how fast it is. So it’s important that your site has been optimised and has high quality hosting.
Types of SEO
Often SEO is split into ‘on-site SEO’ and ‘off-site SEO’. ‘on-site’ covers factors on your website itself, such as the content, page & URL structure, mobile friendliness, security and speed. ‘off-site’ concerns factors which are not on your website – such as links from other websites and social media presence. It’s important to focus on both ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’.
Why Is SEO important?
SEO is important, since if done well it can help to drive a good number of visitors to your website, who may make enquiries or purchase your products. Of key importance is that this traffic is free – aside from the effort in optimising the website, traffic which subsequently arrives does not cost.
Paid Advertising
If your website has poor SEO, or you wish to generate additional traffic, paid advertising is another option. There’s a host of different advertising that can be used for promoting a website, from Google search result ads, to Facebook ads. With paid advertising, it is possible to do targeted advertising. This can help to ‘filter’ the type of traffic that can be brought to your website.
F2B Websites and Care Plans
When building your website, we optimise the website for SEO. We recognise that your website is not just ‘finished’ when it goes live – we offer a range SEO and care plans. In addition, we offer bespoke SEO services for more complex requirements.
