Why SEO and why now?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about making your website as visible as possible in organic (unpaid) online searches. The higher a wide variety of your web pages appear in Google in response to searches, the more your SEO is working.

Let’s qualify this further though.

Great SEO is about making your website as visible as possible in organic searches?to people who have a genuine need for your business.

Get your?ideal customers?– i.e., the people who will most love your business and you most love working with – to click from a search result to your website and your SEO is working even harder.

There are less than 10 spots on page one of a Google search and?75% of people never look beyond page one, which is why visibility is so important.

Your ideal customers may not know that your company exists right now. Most people do a Google search with a question or need in mind, but they may not know what solutions are available to them. Yet.

By focusing on SEO, you can show that your business provides what they need.

What is SEO?

Google “What is SEO” and you’ll see more than 750 million search results. It’s not surprising that businesses often put a pin in SEO as something to think about in the future. The advice out there is wide-ranging, often overly complicated and frequently outdated.

Let’s start with this – SEO is simply about making your website as customer friendly as possible and easy for search engines to understand too.

It starts with knowing who your ideal customers are and what matters to them. Think about the things they might search for and why they might be searching, then plan how you can give them the information, products or services that they need.

Once you have that starting point, you can dig into SEO more deeply. Here’s some information to get you started:

Organic SEO covers three broad areas:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO
3. Technical SEO

(All of the links above will take you to guides explaining more about each area.)

Above all though, SEO is about creating content that is written to be genuinely helpful to your ideal customers and then thinking about the search terms people might use to find it. And the good news? When you know your clients well, you’ll end up using the keywords and phrases they use by default!

Attracting backlinks to your content helps too – each time a third-party links to your content, it’s like a vote of confidence in what you offer,?and?it brings more people to your website.

The best way to attract backlinks is to create helpful information targeted to a well-defined audience.

Why SEO?

There are so many benefits to prioritising SEO.

If your website is more visible in searches made by your ideal customers and you have appealing titles and descriptions to entice them to click through, you’ll bring more?relevant?visitors to your website. Give those visitors a great user experience (UX) once they reach your site and they are likely to turn into customers, boosting your sales and profits.

Having web pages that rank well for multiple searches will increase the authority that Google views your domain and pages as having. This helps your business to be seen as established and trustworthy, an expert in your field.

The more you’re seen as an expert, the more likely you are to be asked to feature in the press, in expert round-up articles, as a guest blogger or podcast guest, speaker at a conference and so on – all opportunities to raise your business’s profile and reach a wider audience comprising ideal customers.

These are just a few examples!

Above all, good SEO will help you to reach the people who will truly benefit from what you have to offer, enabling you to make a difference to more lives.?

Why focus on SEO now?

If not now, when?

After the challenges of recent years (and the continuing?cost of living crisis), your business deserves to be seen and to thrive. It’s all well and good investing in a beautiful website or writing blog posts, for example, but SEO is the added ingredient that helps them to be seen by the right people, i.e., your ideal customers.

SEO will also help your business to stand out from its competitors and, in the case of a local business, bring people through the door.

Small changes, such as writing a?magnetic title tag?or meta description for each web page, linking related content together on your site or answering a frequently asked question in a blog post, can make a surprisingly big difference to where your website ranks in searches.

SEO services suited to your business

Some business owners like to get hands-on when it comes to SEO. Others want to hand everything over to a trusted SEO expert. A lot of people want a service that sits somewhere in between.

At SEO+, we offer a range of?SEO services?so we can help you get the support that suits you and your business (we also offer various?courses?too, including our popular?SEO Accelerator done-with-you course). If you’ve decided it’s time to seize the day but want a chat about your SEO needs because you’re not sure of the best fit, you can?book a call with Hazel here

This article was first published on?SEO+