We hear “SEO” all the time from website developers, marketing agencies and industry leaders – but, what really is “SEO” and how can you use it to your advantage? Here, we answer all of your SEO questions and explain how you can take advantage of this marketing strategy for your business.
What is SEO?
Hiding in the background, spread across your landing page, product description and blogs… SEO works its magic to attract new and existing customers.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the optimisation of your website’s content, link popularity and overall configuration to increase the visibility of your products and pages on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. use bots to crawl the content on websites, collect the data and use the information for search engine results. You will see this first-hand everytime you ‘Google’ a question yourself.
For example, if you type into your search engine, “cheesy pizza” you’ll receive recipes, videos and restaurant recommendations from various websites. In this case, search engines have collected keywords and phrases on web pages to produce search results that are relevant and useful to “cheesy pizza.” Those websites that have made it to page 1 (organically) have no doubt dedicated a great deal of time working on their SEO.
As a business, you want to pop up on page 1 (ideally, position 1 too) when a customer searches your company’s offerings. This drives more customers to your website, increases your business’s visibility and ultimately, generates more sales. And, the way to do this is through SEO.
How does SEO work?
SEO is a process of consistently improving the content on your website. This sounds simple enough however, there’s many (MANY) aspects you need to keep a close eye on to ensure your content is performing well. Plus, not only do you need to keep updated with your content, you must stay consistent. Constantly tweaking, refreshing and optimising your content is the ticket to an impressive online presence for businesses big and small.
It can be overwhelming at first trying to figure out where to begin, but not to worry, follow the below SEO checklist and you’ll begin to see results in no time.
SEO checklist:
First off, we have to give it to Google when it comes to boosting a website’s SEO. The free tools Google offers to assist businesses is beyond impressive (and, this isn’t even sponsored! Although, we wouldn’t be opposed to it…) We recommend you browse the Google tools available as they can help you with just about any- and everything! You’ll find some of our regular go-tos listed in our checklist below.
Here, we’ve put together our top 5 list of SEO tips that you need to know when you’ve launched your website.
1. Google My Business
Before you even open your business’ doors, you want to make sure you’ve listed your business on GMB. GMB is essential for all businesses, allowing your business to be discovered on Google Maps (how people find you online!) Additionally, GMB promotes local search results, encouraging customers in your local area to find your premises considering the relevance, distance and prominence of your products and/or services. To find out more information on Google My Business browse their resources and tutorials.
2. Google Search Console
Once you have your website up and running on Google, you can use Google Search Console to monitor and improve your site’s presence in SERPs. This will provide you essential information that will direct your SEO efforts. From seeing how popular your site is on Google, what search enquiries your business lists for and many more other features. Additionally, once you’ve launched your website you’ll need to submit a sitemap to Google, which essentially allows Google to read your website and crawl your pages.
3. Install a SEO plugin
We recommend installing Rank Math (*contact our team for installation) to your WordPress website. Rank Math is a game changer for optimising your website with its Google keyword rank tracking, contextual help and offering an all in one SEO package. A key SEO step to ensure you follow when launching your website is to make sure all of your pages are indexable, to ensure your website pages are discoverable. This can be instantly done through Rank Math, which will make sure each blog, product and post you publish will be automatically indexed.
4. Optimise meta tags and descriptions
Now that your website is listed on Google and discoverable by customers, you want to boost its online presence with SEO’d meta tags and descriptions. Meta tags are the snippets displayed on SERPS, summarising the page’s content. It’s crucial that you use keyword research to determine what keywords to optimise for when writing your meta tags and descriptions to increase your business’ visibility on Google. How well you utilise your keywords in the copy will determine whether your products and services list before competitors.
5. Local Business Citations
Add juice to your website by increasing local citations. Business citations are publications of your website on other platforms. Be warned, increasing links to your website can be negatively impactful if the citations are irrelevant to your business, lack authority or hold inaccurate data. Ensure the business citations you obtain will have a positive impact by checking their legitimacy, accuracy of information and domain authority.
Following these 5 steps will greatly impact your website’s ranking. It might seem overwhelming at first however, if you give SEO the dedicated attention and time it requires, soon you’ll be an SEO expert.
Does SEO actually work?
YES.
SEO is 100% essential to your business’ success. In fact, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, with 53.3% of those searches resulting in a click on an organic search link. If you want customers to click on your website, you need SEO.
Many business owners can quickly get disheartened by the impact of SEO as they don’t see impressive results instantly. But, we assure you that your hard work will pay off in the long run. SEO is cumulative and the longer you optimise your website, the greater it will become.
Cloud Cartel SEO services
Our team here at Cloud Cartel offer premium SEO services to Perth and surrounds. If you’re looking to build your website from scratch or optimise a current platform – we can help you.
Call us nerds, but we love digging into a website, dedicating ourselves to packing it full of SEO and watching it grow… and grow. It’s incredibly satisfying for us, and especially for you.
If you would like to know more about our SEO services contact our team today!
