SEO, What is it? And what should I do about it?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, what is and why should you care? 

To be technical, Search Engine Optimisation is a series of processes and techniques designed to improve your website's visibility and position on Google and other search engines organically. Keep that last part in mind as we will be touching on that later in the article. 

So, now that you know what SEO stands for, does it really help you understand what it is? And more importantly, why you should care about it? No? I figured. So let me give you a scenario. 

‘You have a website, it looks pretty, works well and you have all your products listed ready to be purchased and shipped out, but no one is buying them, because no one is coming to your website, or even knows you have a website.’

This is a very common scenario, whether it be products you want to sell, services you have to offer, or even just thoughts and ideas you want to share with the world, if people can’t find you then you have no hope of attracting sales, views or leads. 

Google’s not a mind reader, although it may sometimes feel like it is, if you don’t tell it who you are, what your business does and what you have to offer then they can’t list you on any relevant search results pages so potential clients or customers won’t find you.

So how do we fix this? That’s where SEO practices come into play. 

‍

So, What’s the aim of SEO

There are certain ways Google likes information structured on web pages to be able to tell what the website is about and who they should be sending your way. So optimising your content to make it easy for Google goes a long way in pushing you closer to the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

The aim of good SEO is to get you ranking as high as possible in the organic (see I told you we would touch on this again) search results and as Google leads the market when it comes to search, with over 90% of all searches being done through Google, I will focus mostly on them.

Organic search results are the results that show up underneath the paid ads on Google’s search results page and research has shown that approximately 70% of clicks go to these organic results compared to paid Google AdWords. This means that investing some time, and money into proper SEO can directly affect the amount of traffic to your website, resulting in an increase in sales or more, higher quality leads. 

If implemented correctly, SEO can be simple and pretty straightforward to do right, but if you really want to make the most of Google and do everything in your power to rank at the top of the search results, hiring an SEO professional is well worth the investment… cough, cough Me 😀.

So, now that you understand a little bit more about what SEO is and why you should care, what can you do to ensure you show up on Google?
And what can you do to rank as high as possible?
Well, that’s a trade secret… 😊, Nah not really, I will go through some key practices you can adopt when structuring your website in my next article. So keep an eye out for it.