Digital upskilling

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of influencing organic search results to display your business listing as high as possible in the unpaid (organic) search results for relevant search terms.

If you want a fast track to page one of Google, then consider search advertising but if you’re keen to have Google and other search engines recognise your website as the most authoritative website for whatever a user is searching for then you’ll need to invest time in SEO. The ‘time’ part is important to remember as the efforts you invest in SEO today potentially won’t be reflected by search engines for weeks, if not months.

Whilst the world of SEO can become incredibly complex very fast, there are three key components that you should be aware of to have long term visibility in organic search results.

Technical foundations

• Your website needs to be able to be ‘crawled’ by search engines efficiently and quickly. Search engines crawl millions of pages every hour and re-evaluate their authority on certain content, and subsequently where they should be positioned in SERPS (search engine result pages).
• Website navigation (if you find it hard to navigate your website, so will a search engine)
• URL structure: Does the page on your site talking about pressure washing driveways have a URL such as service.com/page-3 or is it service.com/pressure-washing-driveways
• Your CMS (content management system) If you use an off-the-shelf solution such as WordPress or Shopify, then you will have options to edit variables that can impact SEO in the back end. If you use a highly customised solution then this may be more difficult.

Content

• You want to have your content talking about things that people may be searching. Whilst your content should be as natural as possible and written for a human audience, it is recommended that you weave in keywords your audience is searching where relevant.
• Heading structure of page content: Have you clearly defined in the back end what is a H1, H2 and H3?
• Internal Linking: Is there a page on your website that could link to another?
• Consistent content production: Is your website constantly being refreshed with new content? You don’t need to change your main pages if they are accurate of your service offering/product, however a blog or news section that keeps your website ‘active’ in the eyes of search engines isn’t a bad idea.

Links

• Search engines view websites that other high quality websites link to as a source of authority. This contributes significantly to high ranking positions on Google.
• Not all links are created equal. For example if you run a shoe store and have a local business directory linking to you, this would not be the same as nike.com linking to your website.
• Ask yourself why would someone link to your website? Do you have a good resource that can help people? Do you have a widget or tool that no one else does?

Check out our short video on SEO.