SEO is a term thrown around quite often these days… but what exactly is it? How does it work? And why should you care?
In a day and age where the majority of online experiences begin with a simple “Google search”, it has become increasingly important to set good SEO practices as a crucial component of any digital marketing strategy. Ranking high on SERPs not only increases your company’s visibility but has the capability to help you build credibility and trust with your target audience.
In a competitive online landscape, effective SEO can be the difference between being discovered by potential customers or getting lost in the noise.
Some SEO terms to help you get started
1. Keywords:
Imagine you’ve just moved to a different city. You don’t know your way around very well yet, and your partner has asked you to choose a nice restaurant for your next dinner date. You might turn to your search engine of choice and type something like: “sushi restaurants in Manchester.” These are your keywords. They are terms and phrases people type into their search engines when looking for information online.
Effective keyword research involves finding the right terms that your target audience may be searching for and integrating them naturally into your content. By using relevant keywords, you are helping search engines understand what your content is about, and who you may be targeting, increasing the chances of your website ranking higher for those terms.
2. Backlinks:
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own. If you’ve ever applied for a job, you know how important a good reference can be in supporting an application. Backlinks are essentially that. They are like a reference letter from another website to yours, supplying a vote of credibility. Backlinks are a critical factor in how search engines determine the authority and relevance of your website.
Having high-quality backlinks, from sites with a recognisable reputation, signals the search engine that your content is valuable and trustworthy.
3. On-page SEO
On-page SEO, or on-site SEO, is your website housekeeping, involving the optimisation of individual pages to rank higher and improve traffic relevance. You would do this through optimising content, keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, headers, internal links and URLs, images, and more.
This is all about enhancing the user experience. Search engines use on-page SEO elements to check whether the page matches a given user’s intent, before suggesting it to them. This essentially means that creating valuable content relevant to the target user intent is a crucial factor in your website’s success.
4. Off-page SEO
While on-page SEO looks after the interior of your website, off-page SEO, as you may guess from the name, is the attempt to boost your SERPs rankings through actions taken outside of the website. High-quality backlinks are an essential aspect of successful off-page SEO, in addition to social media marketing, influencer outreach, reviews, and other promotional strategies.
The goal is to build your website’s reputation, making it trustworthy and authoritative with search engines and their users.
5. Technical SEO
This is, at a basic level, the accessibility of the structure of your website. Technical SEO covers the site’s speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawling, and ensures the website is free of errors.
Search engines grab content from your webpages and use the links on them to reach other pages within your site, facilitating its subsequent indexing. This is what is called crawling. Crawling helps with discoverability, and helps search engines to find your content updates, ensuring no outdated information is available in search results.
6. Local SEO
Local SEO aims to optimise your online presence to attract traffic, leads, and brand awareness form relevant local searches. This involves website and content optimisation for local keywords, managing online reviews, and maintaining accurate business listing on directories such as Google My Business.
If your business operates on a regional level, you should pay particular attention to local SEO, since it can help you with the promotion of products and services to local customers searching for them online.
How do I measure my SEO success?
Measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts gives you crucial insights on what practices work, and what may need adjusting. Here are some metrics that can help guide you:
Organic Traffic: The number of visitors who come to your site through unpaid search results.
Keyword Rankings: Your website’s position in search results for targeted keywords.
Backlinks: The number and quality of inbound links to your site.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, and various SEO software such as SEMrush, can help you monitor these metrics, empowering you in making data-driven decisions for the improvement of your strategy.
SEO is a dynamic and essential component of digital marketing, requiring a strategic approach. By understanding and implementing effective SEO practices, you can drive more organic traffic, build credibility, generate leads and achieve your KPIs.
Ready to boost your website’s search engine rankings? As a PR and Digital Marketing specialist agency, Proactive PR helps brands maximise their online presence. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we support businesses with reaching their desired audience, book a meeting with our Marketing Director Jade Hush, or email Jade directly at jade.hush@proactive-pr.com.
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