If you can not be found on the first page of a Google search, your business is not part of this digital world. Your competitors, who are found on Google, will get the online business AND 62% of all purchases of products and services that are made offline are influenced by what is seen online (Jupiter Research). So … ranking on the first page of Google is critical!
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
When you search on Google or Bing, ads make up a significant portion of many search engine results pages. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
Think of a search engine as a website you visit to type a question into a box like “hotel near me” and Google or whatever search engine you are using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.
But what’s behind those magical lists of links?
Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers build an index which is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine’s algorithm, with different levels of importance, like domain level links, page level links, page level features and keywords, backlinks from other sites, social metrics, and much, much more to form the SE (search engine) of SEO.
The O part of SEO—optimisation—is where my team write all of that content and put it on your sites so that search engines will be able to understand what they’re seeing, and the users who arrive via search will like what they see. Optimisation can take many forms and include title tags, meta descriptions and internal links.
One of the most important steps in any SEO campaign is choosing what searches you want to rank for. Let’s say that your business is a hotel. If you are ranked number 1 in Australia for “hotel”, you are likely to get a lot of traffic to your website, but how many of those visitors would actually want to go to a hotel in your area. If they are in Perth, there is no point in having a high rank if your hotel is in the Sunshine Coast at Queensland!
So, keyword identification is very important and I work carefully to identify the right keywords for your venue, the traffic and revenue potential for those keywords. I then develop a targeting strategy, so if someone is searching for your target phrases, they end up on your site.
It is tempting to think your web developer has your technical SEO covered but this is rarely the case. Most developers know the basics of SEO, and they’re generally only too happy to get some guidance. I provide comprehensive technical SEO guidelines and will also work with your developer to ensure you get the best possible performance from your website. If you don’t have a developer, that is no problem. I can engage experts to perform the updates required to get your site in perfect SEO shape.
Search engines consider many things when determining their search results, the number of ‘quality’ links to your site is still the single most important factor. So strategic link building is an essential part of any successful SEO campaign. The first thing that I do is perform a risk assessment on your existing links, to ensure that you’re not already violating Googles Best Practice Guidelines and being unknowingly penalised.
Then I benchmark your site’s current performance, so you know exactly what impact my work has. After that, I set about making your content so good that people will want to blog about it, and share it with their friends and colleagues! This is exactly what Google likes to see!
I steadily builds rankings, traffic, engagement and profits.
It is important to note that SEO isn’t a one-off activity and it isn’t ‘set and forget’.
It takes many months to achieve your objectives, and often this will mean adjusting our course as we go. And even when we’ve achieved your goals, there’s still work to do. From time to time, I’ll uncover something new about your market, or Google will change its search algorithm. These changes are opportunities, not inconveniences. I’ll recognise them quickly and act immediately. Your competitors may not.