What is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation?
It’s three little letters, but it’s something that can cause much confusion amongst people, especially business owners. But when someone mention SEO, not everyone knows what it actually is or means.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a mixture of things such as keywords, good quality content on your website and having links pointing to your website from other websites.
But still, what is it? In simple terms, SEO allows people who search on Google to find your website easier. The idea is that a good SEO plan will make your website appear on Google searches when people search for something related to your business.
If you have a good SEO for your website, you’ll have people coming to your website that are interested in what you have to sell.
Google bases its search results on some called EAT which stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. If you think about it, it’s quite a simple philosophy. When we go onto Google to look for something, we want to look for a result from someone who has a bit of credibility who knows their stuff and that we can trust.
So when someone lands on one of the pages on your website, do you come across as an expert in your industry? Do you come across as someone with authority in your industry? Do you have anything on your website such as reviews, testimonials, accreditations from other authorities that will show you are trustworthy?
If not then you should consider making a few changes to your website so that you come across more easily that you are an expert in what you do.
Should I pay for Search Engine Optimisation ?
It’s a hard question to answer. From the view of someone who performs SEO for a living, yes you should. But the other side of that is that you don’t need to be an SEO professional to do the groundwork.
Every website should be submitted to Google and other search engines. This is something that you can do yourself but is only a very minor step in the overall process.
Submitting your website does not mean it will rank at the top of the results page when someone searches for something. There are other steps you can take yourself but if you want long term SEO results, an SEO professional can help you get these results.
SEO is an investment in your business and we do recommend making this investment as they will know what needs to be done to help and grow your business. It is important to remember that you want to hire someone who will also teach you along the way what needs to be done, otherwise it’s not a good investment.
With that said, do not invest in SEO if you do not have a quality service or product to offer. One of the main factors, as mentioned above is trustworthiness. Make sure you aren’t investing your hard-earned money into a product that nobody wants.
The flip side, if you have something that is valuable to your customers, you want to make sure your website is easy to navigate so that customers can find what they want easily. You also want to make sure that they can complete the goal that you want them to do.
This means that if you want them to make a purchase, collect their details or have them call you, this can be done without too much hassle.
Why would I use SEO?
SEO is important for every business and you need to know how it works. You can build a business using just social media and paid advertising, but if you want to be successful, SEO should be an important part of your online strategy as it’s the perfect way to drive customers to your website via search engines.
There are other strategies for advertising your business such as social media, paid ads on social media, newspaper advertising and even radio advertising is still popular. But these are fluctuating costs that usually always rise if you want to maintain results or grow.
Search engine optimisation is the lowest cost of marketing you can have over the long term and something that you can learn yourself over time when compared to driving people to your site with paid ads.
When you are thinking about buying something, most of the time you want to read the reviews of what it is you want to buy. You go to Google and begin searching and you start reading from what comes up. That’s SEO working as it should be.
Big companies rely on it and see it as an important part of their business, and so should you. Imagine spending hundreds on paid ads and hoping that someone comes across them and maybe purchases something. You pay for them to visit your site whether they make a purchase or not.
With SEO, you appear in Google results when people search for you. Each click onto your site costs nothing, and also helps you, as the more people that click onto the site, help improve your chances of being found again.
