What is SEO?

Put simply SEO (search engine optimisation) is the practise of improving visibility and driving traffic to your webpage/site on search engine result pages (SERPs), such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, through mainly organic searches.

When users search for a particular service they will search by a keyword, ie, plumbers, restaurants etc. If your SEO is good it will rank your website nearer the top of the list of searches, making it more likely that the user will click on your page.

Why is SEO important?

Love it or hate it, SEO is key to getting your company noticed online. The main objective to SEO is to drive quantity and quantity traffic to your website, in such a way it converts users into paying customers. 

There are three main objectives to SEO, quantity, quality and organic (organic = natural, not paid for). For many SMEs organic clicks are the main source of visitors.

Quality

You could have 1,000 visitors to your site, great! right? However, only 100 of them become customers, or you could have 500 quality visitors and 250 of those become customers. The quality of traffic to your website is paramount to the outcome of the action taken by the user, so a good balance of quality and quantity is necessary.

Driving the right customer to your website will result in a larger amount of users using your service.

Investing time in getting your SEO right will enhance the customer journey. Making it easy for customers to find what they are looking for and will attract the right user to your company.

Quantity

Increase the amount of the right users from search engine results pages (SERPS). Working alongside quality, it is important to get those customers to click – the more the better.

Getting the right customer to notice your service means you have to spend time getting your SEO right so that you are the first company customers click on.

Organic

Traffic driven by unpaid searches, whereby the company has not paid to have their page listed.

Customers have clicked on your website because your SEO is effective because of the adequate use of keywords in your content. The user has selected keywords/phrases in their search, eg “Estate agents in South London”. Using keywords/phrases in your website and its content will be ranked by SERPS and listed accordingly.

Keywords

Why they matter

Keywords tell search engines who you are and what you are about. Using keywords in the content on your website will enhance its appearance on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Keywords and key phrases

Its pretty self explanatory, keywords are single words such as “restaurants”, key phrases such as “Italian restaurants” or words that are relevant to your website. You can use a number of keywords, which in turn will become a key phrase.

Example: Keywords used in this blog may include, SEO, keywords, keyword phrases, driving traffic and so forth….

It is important to understand which keywords/phrases are most relevant to your business. There are certain keywords that are more popular than others and will increase your ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Doing your research into keywords can help identify which will be more effective and there are tools out there which can help choose. Such as  Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

More often than not your content management system, such as WordPress will give access to online tutorials and will analyse your SEO and keyword efficiency.

For further support with new business, lead generation and marketing please contact Research Runner on +44 (0)1279 260 031.