SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. In short, it's a service that improves your website visibility and trust online. The better the visibility of your pages in search results, for relevant keywords to your industry and business, the more traffic you will receive to your website, attracting either new or repeat customers.
Search engines, like Google, use bots (also known as spiders) to crawl website pages on the internet, storing the data they find and putting them into an index. Search engines have their own algorithms which take into account lots of different ranking factors or signals. This helps to determine the order in which pages should appear within search results, when different search terms are entered. In essence, websites rank higher when they can demonstrate trustworthiness and display content which is relevant to key search terms. The website pages which give users the clearest answer to their question, or provide them with the information most relevant to their search, will rank the highest. Optimising your website and content, showing a good understanding of the different areas of SEO, can help your pages to rank higher in search results.
There are a range of principles to be aware of around how different pages on your website will be deemed SEO-friendly. For example, the quality of your on-site content, meta data, crawlability and mobile-friendliness are just a few important factors in your site architecture.
So, why should you care about what SEO does for your brand?
Do you want the short answer or the long answer?
Well, to put it in its most basic terms, good SEO produces measurable results for your website and business, which can get more people to notice you and increase your customer base, ultimately improving your brand’s reputation.
You can find more detail about how this works in the following sections. But here are some of the ways your brand can see an uplift from SEO:
Google and other search engines consider multiple factors when ranking content, involving various SEO aspects. The two core types are:
Your high ranking results from effective on-page and off-page SEO.
Keywords: are words and phrases that users enter into search engines. They form the foundation of SEO.
Keyword Research: involves identifying the keywords that users input into search engines.
How to Choose Worthwhile Keywords:
Finding the right keywords is crucial for effective SEO and attracting the right audience. The process includes two macro steps:
1. Generate Keyword Ideas: Use keyword research tools for information on keywords.
2. Validate Keywords: Ensure your efforts focus on terms that can drive traffic and conversions.
2. Validate Keywords: Ensure your efforts focus on terms that can drive traffic and conversions.
By following these steps, you can optimize your website for improved visibility and engagement. Whether you seek brand awareness, online visibility, leads, sales, or loyal prospects, SEO provides the solution.
While social media is commonly used as part of content marketing, its influence on SEO performance is often debated, with no clear-cut answer. Although pages on social platforms can be crawled by search engines, there’s no way of knowing whether these pages contribute to your organic rankings.
However, bringing social media into your SEO activity can certainly help your performance indirectly. Building social engagement through high-quality content is all part of good brand building online - once you have a positive relationship with these audiences, it boosts your chances of those users clicking through to visit your site. This can result in an increased domain authority, more backlinks and other positive metrics which can end up influencing your organic rankings.
You should always use social media to amplify the content you create. It won’t get seen just by sitting there, so just as you would optimise the content for search and outreach it to external sites for backlinks, you should place it on your social platforms to increase the chances of users landing on your site. You can tempt social users to click through to your onsite content by including short, appealing snippets on social posts which leave them wanting more.
When it comes to video, Google holds this type of content in high regard. It will crawl any videos you host on YouTube to include in organic search results, so that your social content can end up ranking – make sure it’s well optimised for SEO within the meta data boxes. You should include links to your site within your video page too - remember that YouTube is a huge search engine of its own, with billions of viewers, so don’t waste that opportunity.
SEO and PPC are like night and day. So when you ask what is seo? Which part of SEO are you talking about? SEO is based on strictly ‘free’ activity, which has the ultimate aim of performing well in organic search results and attracting traffic naturally (which is why it’s known as ‘organic’). You have to ensure that anything you do follows the rules of what search engines will look at positively (even when these aren’t exactly clear, as with Google’s infamously mysterious algorithm updates), and results won’t occur overnight – in fact, they could take up to a few months to materialise. The benefit is that once you’ve figured out your strategy and attracted organic traffic by ranking for your target keywords, your ranking pages won’t require constant attention to maintain this traffic. It can also prove to be cheaper in the long-term, as keywords are never bought, instead being ranked for through the efforts of an often modestly-sized team, which may form only part of their overall activity.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is all about appearing in the ads at the top of the search results, by paying for clicks to your site. It is fast-acting - as soon as you start a campaign in your chosen platform, which doesn’t take long at all, you will see results much more quickly than you would with SEO. This quick turnaround allows you to rapidly figure out what does and doesn’t work best for you in attracting results. You can also target very specific demographics with your PPC posts, so that they only attract highly relevant traffic to your site. However, depending on your industry, PPC can become pretty expensive. The more competitive your industry, the more expensive the keywords will be to bid on. They also become less effective over time, as the effect of your ads start to wear off on people when they become bored with seeing them. This is the opposite of SEO (when it’s done well), where you attract loyal and valuable traffic by repeatedly serving them with engaging content over time and earning their trust.
There are various pros and cons to each discipline, but most successful businesses don’t have to choose between SEO and PPC – they incorporate both into their marketing strategies. Why not reap the benefits of them both?
In our eyes, every SEO campaign needs a strategy, starting with your biggest priority being executed before anything else. You can't do everything at once, because Google will see this as spam. So that's why a carefully-planned SEO strategy is very important, to create a hierarchy of tasks to prioritise accordingly.
Whether you're a startup or an established brand, SEO should be part of your marketing budget. Be consistent in your efforts and, crucially, make sure you trust your SEO agency. Pick an agency with proven results and somebody who can communicate what they are going to do in simple terms. Communication is key because if you don't understand technical SEO, it's the agency’s job to help you understand.
We always advise that you hire the SEO experts to do this work BUT if you're going to give SEO a go yourself, on your own brand. Then we advise working with an agency who understands this process, therefore you can have the help and guidance from an agency to steer you in the right direction. Being open and honest is the best thing for your brand, rather than giving it a go yourself and making more harm than good in terms of SEO. We'd also advise you deal with somebody who speaks your language, as communication is vitally important - so if you speak english, hire an english speaking SEO expert.
If you're still reading this article and you'd like to discuss a super SEO project then feel free to get in touch to speak to our agency director, Miracle's today.
Hiya, I'm Miracles. Director of Plexiweb Studio, My vision has always been to look after the clients we work with
