What is SEO?

What is SEO? Our most common questions

We get so many clients coming to us needing help getting their website to perform better in searches so they’re seen by more people. However, a few of those clients also want instant results which is never going to be the case unless you pay for it. Each business is different and it is important to consider if you can wait for the long-term results of your SEO work to kick in or if you need to look into paid advertising in the interim to get the leads/sales.

So why is SEO so important? Well, let’s start at the beginning and break down some of the most frequently asked questions that we hear.

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is basically the actions taken to improve your website for the end-users resulting in higher quality and quantity of traffic coming from search engines. When we look at your website traffic we look to see where all traffic is coming from as all of it is important, but you might hear the term ‘organic traffic’ used and this is the traffic coming from search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing, it is where people have searched a keyword you use on your website to describe your product or service and clicked on your websites link (a link which you have not paid for). SEO is really important to get right because the more information you can give to search engines the more they will show you in searches when people are searching for what you offer.

How long will it take for my website to show on searches?
If you want to be at the top of searches as fast as possible then we always suggest looking at Google Ads, because good SEO can take anywhere from 3 to 12 months to start seeing results in your industry. Think of the tortoise and the hare story – you want to get to the top now now now? Then you have to pay for it. BUT if you continually work on optimising your website then search engines like Google will reward you with first page status for FREE! And once you’re there (unless you do something really wrong OR stop trying) that’s where you should stay.

Things to do to stay first page relevant are: keep your content updated, keep an eye on your bounce rate and adjust pages to keep as low as possible, make sure your website pages are all mobile responsive, correctly use all necessary keywords, A/B test your meta descriptions, have internal links through the website and lastly, always invest in SEO.

What factors affect my search results?
The industry you’re in will have a huge impact on how long it takes to see results. If you have a niche product or service that does not have much keyword competition then your results are likely to be quicker. Other businesses (your competitors) have a major factor in your rankings which is due to the more competing web pages you’re up against, the longer it will take to climb to the top of the search results. If you have a fairly new website your also competing against websites that have been around for a long time and have been working on their SEO and marketing for years. Just remember; this is the same for ALL websites, not just yours. Search engines want businesses to continually make effort with their websites and to be as relevant as possible to their customers.

Please do NOT Google yourself!

Should I be doing other marketing as well as SEO?
The short answer is yes. However, each business needs to work within the budget that has been allowed for marketing. The old saying still stands true, ‘to make money you need to spend money’, and your target audience doesn’t know about you until you advertise to them. You need to find a solution that best fits your business and your budget, so whether you have a person in your business or you need to outsource the work to someone else, you need to talk about the ways they are going to incorporate getting not only your websites SEO worked on but what channels to advertisee on because doing both is a win-win.