No matter what type of business you run, you’ve likely become aware of the importance of ensuring your business website ranks highly in the search engines. After all, how many of us scroll past the first few pages of search results when we’re looking something up? Not many.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a vital set of practices aimed at improving the position of your website in the search engine results pages (SERPS). If you run a business with an online presence, it will be necessary. However, not all business owners know exactly how SEO works. Here, we delve into SEO practices, explaining some of the more complex and less understood nuances that impact how SEO works.

Why Is SEO Important?

The impact of good SEO practices on your website rankings cannot be overstated. The more people that see your website, the more chance you have of gaining new customers. However, you must understand that ranking is not all SEO is about. Your end goal should be to provide browsers with an experience that helps increase brand awareness and sales. Ranking is just a tiny part of the more holistic digital marketing umbrella. After all, there’s no point in ranking highly in the search engine listings if users don’t fully understand what it is you offer from your website content, or they can’t access the parts of your website that they want to see.

So, How Does SEO Work?

There are three basic things you should know about search engines and their rankings before getting to grips with how to start SEO work in practice, and they are essentially quite easy. How long it takes for your SEO to kick inHow long does it take for SEO to kick in? depends entirely on how well you implement them:

Where your traffic comes from – The first thing you should know is that almost all online traffic to your website will come from someone searching for something they want, and clicking on your website from a search engine’s page. While Google is one of the prominent search engines, there are others, such as Bing, that are also used by a vast number of people.

How search engines rank websites – In essence, search engines use dynamic algorithms and web crawlers that look for relevant results to a search engine user’s queries. These algorithms work on organic and paid listings.

How to help the search engines see your content – SEO practices include using keywords and optimising your content to provide genuinely helpful information and links to and from your pages help these crawlers find and rank your content on their SERPS.

Everything’s Changing

While knowing these basics of SEO is important, putting strategies into practice is a little more complex. One complexity you will likely have to deal with is the evolution of the algorithms the search engines use.

They are constantly changing, with the ultimate goal of providing users with the most helpful content for their search queries.

Any organisation that wants to improve their rankings will need to ensure their SEO strategies include:
Focusing on the user’s experience (UX) of their website.

Understanding what those using search queries relevant to you want from your website.

Using tactics that genuinely improve the quality of your site, and that do not try and manipulate the crawlers.

Keep up to date with search engine algorithm updates and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Diving Deeper – What Types Of SEO Are There?

Typically, SEO strategies can be broken down into on-page, off-page and technical SEO.

On-page SEO will analyse what each page of your website is about. Strategies for better on-page SEO focus on creating optimised content, including title tags and meta descriptions that help the crawlers understand your website. For on-page SEO, you will need to delve into identifying the keywords your audience is searching for, and then use those keywords as a guide to build the content on your site. This makes it relevant to your audience.

Off-page SEO involves anything that mentions your website that is not on your website. Essentially, this determines how authoritative your website content is. Typically, backlinks are used to achieve better off-page SEO. These are links from other websites back to your site. The higher the authority of the site that links to your own website, the more authoritative you will seem to be. One strategy may include providing content for another site’s website that will link back to you (Guest posts). Other links can come from online directories, for example.

Technical SEO typically focuses on improving your user’s experience on your site to ensure they stay on there for longer and can find what they need. This means your site’s speed should be considered, along with how the user can navigate your site. It also includes making your site accessible to users browsing on different devices. Plus, you’ll also need to optimise the website for the search bots attempting to crawl your site. The easier they can find and scan your content, the higher you will rank (so long as your content is optimised too).

Further Insight

As SEO is a continually evolving strategy, it’s essential to build a solid base of knowledge to work from. A basic education on SEO should leave any SEO beginner able to:

• Assess a target audience
• Identify what your target audience wants
• Find relevant keywords
• Use title tags, metadata and optimise content effectively for these keywords
• Optimise your site’s architecture
• Get backlinks for your site
• Improve site speed
• Use schema to help crawlers understand your site

How To Learn SEO

There are many online resources to teach you how SEO works. Remember, learning how SEO works will take time, so make sure you’ve got the basics down before moving to more complex topics.

However, if you’re a time-poor business owner, it may be worth using a specialist company to handle your SEO and check your website’s SEO, that can evolve quickly when algorithms change. This will give your site the best chance of rising in the SERPS and remaining in the best position for users to find your website. If you’d like to discuss how to improve your search rankings, achieve better brand awareness and drive sales, contact us, we’re here to help you.