Successful SEO requires a combination of high quality content; inbound links and mentions from other high quality websites; being chosen more frequently than your competitors in search results; and keeping the searcher on your website and away from returning to Google or Bing to find a better result.
Over the next few months, we plan to write a series of articles on organic/natural SEO which will enable online marketers to better understand and improve the rankings of websites and products. The focus will be initially on Google, but the importance of Bing is increasing with 12.5% of searches globally.
Organic SEO is a long term strategy to capture market share for highly sought after, extremely relevant, behavioural targeted search terms. The key is to be focused, realistic and patient – achieving ranking success takes time.
Click on the picture below for a video overview of how Google Search works.
Successful SEO firstly requires a strategy to enable your website to succeed. If you do not have a strategy, then your SEO efforts will unfocussed and uncoordinated resulting in your website or product under performing in the rankings.
Key questions online marketers must answer:
If your website is failing to achieve desired rankings success, then ask yourself:
- What is my SEO strategy?
- Who in the organisation is responsible for SEO?
- Does my website offer a similar or better experience than my competitors?
- Do I have clear call-to-action buttons to encourage interaction?
- Do I offer something useful free for visitors to download - video or PDF?
- Do my pages offer unique information, images or video?
- Is my website listed and linked everywhere my competitors are?
- Is my business found in all the business and trusted web directories?
- Do I offer a blog or other social media tools to enable visitors to interact?
- Are my keywords driving traffic to my website?
- Do my keywords cover new products or services added to the website?
- Do I monitor, measure and document SEO ranking progress?
- Is my website technically optimised for SEO?
High quality content not only attracts high quality visitors, but also the number of other high quality websites linking to yours. Both are vital in achieving high rankings. In effect:
Relevancy + Popularity = Higher Ranking
The more time spent optimising and improving website content coupled with gaining links that high quality content attracts over time, the higher your website will move up the Google search results page. Attempts to unfairly fast track the process may/will result in your website being penalised.
Key words are essential and effectively require you to get into the head of your customer. What words are they likely to type in when looking for your products? The problem is that your competitors are thinking in the same way. There are a number of free analysis tools which can help you considerably.
As internet users become more sophisticated, so the number of search words entered in search queries is increasing. It is now normal for searchers to enter queries of 5, 6 or more words. Your key words and phrases should reflect this change in behaviour.
As new products and services are added, the keywords need to be updated to reflect the changes to your website. It also helps if you are creative, for example, mis-spelt words as your key words. Key words are a topic in itself and we will write more next time.
Plenty to think about. We will talk more next month about practical ways to improve your website rankings. If you would like more information then click on the link to contact us
