SEO is the way to Go?

There is little point in denying the real strength of what a thoughtful, insightful, and accomplished search engine optimisation strategy can do for a business. The real debate is in understanding what SEO really means and why many will never genuinely appreciate its unbelievable marketing power.

Let us jump into it – SEO is a Google first phenomenon that defines how a business is seen and heard in the digital search space. Today's consumers rely on search engines to help them find everything from restaurant recommendations to B2B software providers.

This means that regardless of what your business offers, your target audience is likely searching for products or services like yours on search engines like Google. If you want to attract them to your site, you need search engine optimisation.

In today's competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day, looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems.

SEO is imperative if you want to achieve the following:

• The majority of search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site or customers to your online store, 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.
• 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 site by searching Google are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
• SEO is essential for the smooth running of a big website. Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly. Their direct benefit is an increase in search engine traffic, and their indirect interest is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
• SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimised site is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

Can you ignore an SEO marketing strategy any longer?

To help understand what a business needs to do when it comes to SEO, I have put together a 10-step plan that is designed to simplify the concept and lead change that you need to follow. Of course, these steps are my thoughts, but can be adapted to suit your own business needs:

1.      Produce a Technical Backlog

Understand and complete a full technical audit of your website, including HTTP status, Robot txt, Site Speed and XML sitemap

2.      Benchmarking Against Competitors

Find, research and perform a keyword gap analysis to spot key opportunities in your rival's marketing activities

3.      Beware of SEO Common Pitfalls

Be mindful of Google Core updates, complicated iframes, keyword cannibalism and crawling and indexing directives

4.      Site Structure and Internal Linking

Crawling your website using a preferred 3rd party SEO tool to understand link equity and page ranking

5.      Creating a Content Strategy

Understand your audience and visitor intent with cleaner meta-tagging and implementing Google Discover templates

6.      Technical On-Page Optimisation

Checking your canonicals, JAVASCRIPT, DOM and Image & Video SEO capabilities

7.      Local SEO

Identifying local searches and creating Google My Business Profile for local audience profiling

8.      International SEO

Understand the Content, Language and Translation applications needed if product or services is outside of local SEO reach

9.      SEO for eCommerce

Understanding that your SEO strategy for eCommerce and online shopping is more complicated than you think...

10.  Backlink Strategy

Define your backlink business strategy and beware Google Algorithms changes - Backlinks increase your Domain Score

Naturally, it is all very well giving you a list of what to look 0ut for – but implementing and reporting your success is the real key to understating how an effective SEO strategy can work. So, what do you need to look for when measuring your efforts?

I have outlined seven basic reporting platforms that any business can check to see if SEO efforts have improved business performance in the digital space. These are:

Keyword Rankings

Everyone's favourite SEO metric — keyword rankings.  The keywords you rank for will tell you whether you are targeting the right keywords or whether your site is growing

Backlink Quantity and Quality

There are over 200 different factors that contribute to your rankings. It is near impossible to track all of them. But if you focus on improving the quality and quantity of your backlinks, Google will show you some serious love 

Organic Traffic

By monitoring your organic traffic levels over time, you will get a great picture of how effective your SEO strategy is. With the growth in organic search rankings having a direct tie to your SEO efforts, it is one of the most accurate metrics you can get. 

Time Spent on Page

Having a high time spent on the page means that you satisfy user intent. A searcher has a specific intention when they type a keyword into Google; then if they land on your page, and spend a lot of time there, your site satisfies this intent. 

Bounce Rate

They came, they puked, they left.  Having a high bounce rate means that users land on your site and immediately hit the back button. Bounce rate is another metric that you will want to evaluate on a page by page basis. This will tell you if you have any weak pieces of content or pages that are destroying your overall bounce rate. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Measuring your CTR will show you how good your listings are at generating clicks to your site. This is down to the skill of your content team to make sure the message is clear and drives the intention for users to click.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a term and metric coined by Moz that tells you how authoritative your domain is. The more authority your domain has, the easier it will be to rank, and the more trustworthy you are in the eyes of Google. 

SEO is a beast. Are you ready to tame it?