Search engine optimisation | Where to start?

As a digital professional, I know how important search engine optimisation (SEO) is to improve UX, increase traffic to your site and ultimately elevate your business. But one question I always get is; where do we start, or how can we get started?

SEO isn't at the forefront of many marketing campaigns; it's usually an afterthought that can be a detrimental mistake as it's a very powerful tool.

It's also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with potential customers, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. So, here's everything you need to know about SEO and why it's vital to succeed in today's digital world.

What is SEO, and what's the importance?

SEO is used to optimise your website to achieve higher rankings in search engine's organic results.

It's the process to follow to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic.

SEO has two main goals:

1. Help you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent.
2. Help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.

Following good SEO practices and a solid strategy, it's a great way to increase the quality of your website by making it user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.

Some of the most important SEO tasks:

• Us SEO to identify what users are searching for that is related to your products and services
• Creating content that will make users engage, come back to your site and convert
• Providing the right signals to search engine crawlers and algorithms through various SEO techniques

Why is SEO important?

Search engines like Google serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their queries or for solutions to their problems.

• The majority of search engine users (more than 70%) are more likely to click on one of the top five suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
• SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
• Be a credible source - users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website's trust.
• SEO is good for the social promotion of your website. People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
• SEO is important for the smooth running of a big website. Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is an increase in?organic traffic?and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
• Stay ahead of the competition - If two websites are selling the same thing or have a similar audience, the search engine optimised website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

Why should your business and you care about SEO?

The traffic from search can be extremely powerful for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of?very specific, high-intent traffic.

Your audience is searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond that, your potential customers are searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with these users and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

The crucial elements of SEO marketing

Technical SEO: With technical SEO, you can ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any issues.

On-site SEO: Rules to apply to your site and content to make it search engine friendly.

Off-site SEO: Ways to promote your website or blog so that it can rank higher in search results.

Now that you know about SEO, what next?

The best way to learn how SEO works is to practice SEO. Besides learning the different concepts and theories, the only way to find out if you've learned works is to apply the various SEO techniques on a website and monitor your rankings.

Resources to learn more about SEO

• How search engines work ?– before starting with SEO, it is essential to understand how search engines work. Your goal with SEO is to influence search engines to 'trust' your website, and knowing how they rank websites, will help you make better decisions.
• How to become an SEO Expert ?– a guide with a list of resources to stay informed about new developments in the SEO world.
• SEO Checklist ?– A handy checklist to ensure you have optimised all elements.
• SEO guide from Hubspot - download the free starter pack to get started
• Everything you need to know about SEO in 2022 - learn SEO basics with a beginner's guide that's easy to follow

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