What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO improves the technical and user experience elements of a website to rank higher on search engines. At its core, SEO is built on two foundations; on-page and off-page optimisation. On-page optimisation involves a lot of technical development and optimisation including website usability, search engine crawlability, mobile-friendliness, page responsiveness, meta tags, h1 tags and the list goes on. Off-page optimisation involves content marketing and other means to grow a website's backlink profile, we will touch on this later. As SEOs, we incorporate an on-page and off-page strategy with the goal to turn a website into an exceptional user experience for your target audience. A website should never be optimised for a search engine because this can lead down the road of keyword stuffing or other SEO issues leading to drops in keyword rankings. When you optimise the user experience, content and imagery of a website with a website's target user in mind, search engines will reward you with increased visibility.
Why is SEO important?
SEO blends website development, marketing and user experience (UX) into one service. By combining these elements into your website, ensures the functionality, convertibility and usability of a website is upheld. By ensuring these three core elements are equally weighted, ensures not only is your website easy to use and converts users to clients but is able to be found online by customers when they are ready to buy. Generally, people look for products or services online if they are later on in the buying cycle which is why it is so important for you to be found during this stage. If customers can't find your website during this stage, they wonāt buy the products you sell or hire the services you provide, which leads us to some of the other advantages of incorporating SEO into your business marketing strategy.
Advantages of SEO
Traditionally, you might think of paid digital marketing platforms like Facebook or Linkedin Ads as the best way to acquire new customers for your website. While these platforms can offer a decent return on investment depending on your target audience and industry, once your money runs out, so does your advertisement. The benefit of SEO is that you invest in an SEO service, your website's authority, keyword portfolio and ability to reach new customers (should) continually grow organically. Post-SEO, your website's ability to outrank your competition is contingent on search engine algorithm updates or the effectiveness of your competitors SEO strategy. If you want to find out how SEO can specifically benefit your business, request your solution packageā¢.
What are keywords?
Keywords also play an important role to both users and search engines because they help show what your page is about. Keywords are the search terms we type into search engines to find products, services or information online. By including keywords in your meta tags or h1 for example, you can help users and search engines understand what your page is about. To use ourselves as an example; the main keyword we are targeting with this page is SEO Brisbane. This keyword is targeting potential clients who are searching for an SEO Service in Brisbane and is more likely to appeal to Brisbane businesses looking to hire a Brisbane SEO rather than an SEO Melbourne. For this reason, we have optimised this page of our website for website owners looking for an SEO in Brisbane.
What are backlinks?
Another main counterpart of SEO is content marketing, which will naturally build backlinks to your website, growing its keyword profile. Backlinks are the links you find on websites which direct the user to an external website for further reading, relevant information, or reference point. Most Backlinks are made primarily through content marketing and relationships built with other websites with the goal to add value to the page user.
In terms of backlinks, SEO aims to produce content that first (1) benefits the reader of content on an external website and to secondly, (2) drive this traffic back to your website through a backlink for the reader to find out more information about your business and its products.
Backlinks affect search engine rankings because these backlinks are crawled, and over time, if you have a quality backlink profile pointing towards your website, your website will be seen by Google as an authoritative source of information and ranks your website higher across more keywords. Backlinks arenāt restricted to only content marketing, backlinks can include business directories, social platforms/directories, blogging websites and document/video sharing platforms which are also great ways for new clients to find you and to promote your business.
How do you measure SEO success?
Search Engine Optimisation offers the best return on investment in terms of marketing or advertising which is a driving factor in why we pivoted towards specialising solely in SEO Services. In terms of measuring this return on investment, SEO has the benefit of being able to be completely tracked and analysed unlike other, offline forms of marketing. The analysis is made possible by analytic platforms like Google Analytics, which shows statistics including where your traffic is coming from (organic, paid, social or direct), what pages are visited and what % are converting into leads or sales. This is key to understanding the effect SEO has on website traffic and conversions.
