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Search Engine Optimisation
Anyone who has had a business in the last decade would have heard those words, or at least the acronym.
SEO is the process of using content to drive traffic naturally from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to your website.
What does it mean to get traffic from a search engine?
There are two forms of traffic you can get from a search engine. Organic or paid.
Paid is when you have ad’s displayed on the search result pages and when clicked sends people to the page you want them to see.
Organic traffic is when your website page is shown in the search results for a keyword and a user clicks that link back to your page.
Paid traffic accounts for around 2.6% of the clicks on a search results page with organic getting the majority. Though new research is showing that paid ads, especially on mobile are growing significantly.
Basic SEO related Terms
Before we move on lets start with some definitions.
Above the Fold: Refers to content shown in the visible browser window
Analytics: Software/code that allows you to track position, visits, keywords and conversions
Back-Links: links coming back to your from other websites
Content: Refers to the images, words and graphics on your website page. Content is what visitors from search engines are looking for when they click the link in the search results
Conversion: means converting a visitor into a consumer. This can mean simply signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product depending on the aim.
Description: Refers to the description of a page in Search Results
Keyword: Is the word or phrase typed into a search box to call up results. With the increasing use of voice activated search longer more natural phrases and sentences are being used.
Off-Page: refers to techniques used to get visitors away from your website.
On-Page: refers to work done on your actual website/page. I.E. content writing, load times
Organic position: refers to the natural position of your website in results I.E. not paid
Page Load Time: refers to the time for a page to load
Quality: Refers to both the content on your page and the quality of traffic coming to your site.
Quantity: The amount of visitors coming your website
SERP: Search Engine Results Pages – These are the pages on which your website is shown
Why SEO is Important
Why is it important? To get people to see your content and perform an action.
That is the goal. To get people to see what you have to offer, products, services, or that funny cat video.
But it is more than that. You need to get people who are interested in what you have, to see it. So they know your product/service/cat video exists and they have an opportunity to purchase/hire/watch it.
Why do people visiting your page need to be interested in what you are showing?
Conversions.
The more interested in the content of your page the more likely you are to have them purchase that product or subscribe to your service.
Here’s a simple example.
Imagine that you have this amazingly funny cat video you want to share with the world.
You set the page up, create a nice looking title and intro write a great piece about how you were inspired to set this page up by something funny your dog did one day. And the last thing you do is embed the video into the page.
Now Google does it’s thing indexes your page, analyses it, and puts it up in its search results.
And you get someone (lots of some ones) coming to your page and leave without actually playing the video or signing up for notifications on new videos you put up.
Why? Using analytics tools you can see lots are people are coming from search results but leaving fairly quickly after getting to your page.
Generally when someone comes to your website you have between 3-7 seconds in which to capture their attention. Page load times are important. The quicker the page loads the less likely someone is to hit the back key and leave.
But relevant content descriptions are also very important. In this case when you wrote content for your video page you talked about how your dog inspired you, not about the actual cat in the video.
So when Google looked at your page they looked at the words and saw dog, video, funny and used that for the description and decided that’s most likely what your page was about. When someone typed in say “funny dog video” your site showed.
When they got to it though there was a video of a cat and they left.
Again simple example but this is why SEO is important. It makes sure the content, information and products you have on your website are relevant to what people are searching for.
The more specific you are, the more information you provided that corresponds to the keywords people are using to find you the more likely you are to get the right people people to your website and to make a conversion. That is, make a sale, or have a prospect call you or have them sign up for a newsletter.
If you need help getting your SEO strategy right contact me here.
Further Research
https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed
https://moz.com/blog/does-organic-ctr-impact-seo-rankings-new-data
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