Understanding SEO and how to get a good return on investment

SEO is simply a practice of increasing the quantity and the quality of visitors to your website from search engines like Google. Understanding how it works is often shrouded in myth and mystery. With an influx of ‘SEO fixers’ from around the world offering to achieve unrealistic outcomes, it’s not surprising how businesses are getting confused with this very powerful and effective marketing activity. This article provides a clear step by step guide to SEO, and how it can benefit your business.

STEP 1: Keyword research for SEO

Businesses like yours know just how important marketing is for attracting new customers, boosting your online visibility, and standing out from the competition. All successful marketing starts with planning and this is where we start with SEO.

One of the most important planning steps for SEO is researching keywords or search words and phrases, which your potential customers are likely to search for on search engines. We identify the demand of these keywords relevant to the products or services which they could buy from you. We’re looking for a combination of keywords in high demand and low demand, which collectively send high quantities and better quality of visitors to your website. Often referred to as ‘short-tail keywords’ and ‘long-tail keywords’ we identify the most appropriate for a potential SEO campaign and add them to your keyword basket.

From the basket, you can now choose a final group of keywords to determine the campaign’s ‘demand total’ and suitable to the size of your marketing budget. `

STEP 2: On-page SEO

We then start on-page SEO which is all about making critical improvements to your website. These improvements are all related to your chosen keywords and involve adding them to your website where Google and other search engines are expecting to see them. Adding keywords into page titles, headings, sub headings, lead paragraphs and image descriptions are essential for on-page SEO, but this is only part of the story. Behind each page, meta data is scanned by search engines to understand the relevance of your content to someone’s search query. We optimise this data including the meta title and meta description which are used by Google to display your website in search results.

All these on-page SEO improvements will soon be scanned by Google and other search engines, and this creates a solid foundation for the next stages of an SEO campaign.

STEP 3: Monitoring and Analysis

Understanding how an SEO campaign is performing and making improvements based on real-time insight is essential. To achieve this your website is linked to our SEO Portal where our tools will monitor and analyse the performance of your keywords. For additional insight we also link the SEO Portal to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Monitoring and analysis is ongoing throughout an entire SEO campaign.

STEP 4: Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is now the main focus of your SEO campaign. It involves growing lots of backlinks featuring your keywords from other websites to your website. The goal is to grow more and more backlinks from trusted and credible websites within your industry sector. Google recognises these backlinks as a mark of credibility, and our objective is to keep building backlinks so that credibility and trust is transferred to your website.

We measure and score this rising credibility using the industry recognised TrustFlow metric. A higher TrustFlow score means Google will trust your website more, positively impacting your website’s ranking and visibility, and ultimately sending more visitors to you.

With a solid foundation from on-page SEO and continuously improving credibility with greater numbers of backlinks to your website, you will start to see the real benefit of SEO. If your business needs greater visibility on search engines, an effective SEO campaign builds momentum, and given time your website will become more visible on Google, and your keywords will start to out-rank your competitors.

STEP 5: SEO Reporting

The SEO Portal is where you have access to all real-time data about your campaign. While our tools continue to analyse progress, you can see keyword performance including ranking positions and their increased visibility on Google. You can also download pdf performance reports at any time, and receive overview reports from our experts.

Now it’s time to take the first step.

Contact our SEO experts on 0121 726 3861 to discuss an SEO campaign for your business.