The Fundamentals of an Effective SEO Strategy.

Did you know that 53% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes over 3 seconds to load? Do you understand the detrimental implications this could have for a potential sales conversion? Page speed is just one of many important factors to consider when implementing an SEO strategy.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. SEO is the practice of ranking your website in Google to get as much quality and targeted traffic and visibility as possible. It involves making specific changes to your website design and content which in return will make your site more attractive to a search engine.

Why is SEO an essential part of your marketing strategy?

Your existing customers have experience of how fantastic your business and service is, but what about your prospects or the untapped market out there who have no idea who you are? You know how great your service or product is, so you want to shout about this from the rooftops to as many people as possible. With X amount of people using Google every day, implementing SEO into your overarching marketing strategy to get your website high up in Google’s rankings is a no brainer.

By optimising your website correctly, you can increase your website traffic. By managing your experience to suit the end user, you can increase your website conversion rate. By creating relevant blog content, you can keep these web visitors returning.

SEO has no limits, and can initially seem like a bit of a beast to conquer, so our expert team has highlighted some key points and simplified some important factors you should be considering to improve your website’s optimisation.

Page Speed

Page speed is an important ranking factor for both SEO and paid search (PPC - pay per click). Using a tool such as PageSpeed Insights, a simple Google tool, will help you to understand your website’s page speed on various devices. A poor page speed can lead to a high bounce rate and could be detrimental to your sales conversions.

It is important to measure, optimise and improve the speed of your web pages on mobile devices in particular. 70% of searches on Google are now made from mobile devices. If your website is slow to load, you could instantly damage the user experience and encounter high bounce rates. And where will those web visitors go? To the next search result. AKA your competitor.

Google Search Console

Do you know the difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics? Have you heard of these at all?

Our guess is that most people have heard of Google Analytics. It’s a fantastic tool to track the traffic and user journeys across your website. You can view your top ranking pages, how many visitors have been on your site within a certain timeframe, and where these visitors came from.

Google Search Console, however, digs deeper into the SEO insights by providing data on the search terms your visitors have used to land on your website. What if you’re ranking well for a search term you didn’t even know about, but all your efforts are going into a completely irrelevant keyphrase? By analysing your website data in Google Search Console you can efficiently form the basis of your strategy and start spending time on the phrases that really matter. Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console can work in conjunction with each other and form a pretty powerful and insightful tool for your website’s data.

Content

Content is key! Google loves GOOD content. Is your writing style and content structure being maximised to its potential? Are you regularly posting relevant blogs or news announcements? Are you populating your meta descriptions and title tags with your targeted key phrases?

Copywriting is something our in-house marketers love the most. With so much going on within the company, blog writing is a great way to get out your key thoughts and messaging to your audience. Blogs and news articles can be linked to through social posts, email marketing as well as potentially hosted on other sites (if the content is seen to be strong!) By writing engaging and informative content, you strike the interest of your audience to visit your website and read your compelling content. Once they’ve finished reading, perhaps they’ll take a look around your website and end up on your product or services pages. If the content you’ve written on these pages is equally compelling and of interest, then you may have just bagged yourself a lead.

Top this off with impeccable page load speed and great call to actions, you may even bag a conversion.

What comes next?

The SEO journey is limitless. It is a vital component to any marketing strategy, but does take hard work, time and expertise to perfect. If it’s a factor you feel needs improving in your strategy, but don’t have the in-house capacity to focus on this, we can work with you as an extension of your team to outsource SEO and content management.

Speak with a member of our team today to get further information on how we can help you maximise your website's potential. We will work with you to help you understand how your web visitors got to your site, and what exactly it is on your site that makes an impact to the end user.