How important is a good SEO strategy for your online business?

There is no short answer to this as it depends on how your business currently generates turnover, i.e what other forms of marketing you are doing. If you are lucky your business might rely solely on word of mouth, you have no competition or you are doing other forms of effective advertising.

It’s obvious that not every website needs to rank organically for competitive search terms. Blogs, hobbyists, data, news and many other such sites have no need to rank organically as they are not businesses in the obvious sense. But for small to medium sized businesses (SMB’s) having a website might only be a business card online, again due to the reasons above. But for most, it’s there to help their business and so SEO or some form of online marketing is crucial.

There is also a very misguided perception that you will simply be found by Google simply by having a site! Once upon a time that was true, but as soon as search terms and habits became set, and there were more than 9 other competitors then that obviously stopped. Some site owners think that because you type their company name in and they appear that that is what users will type and they will get business when this is obviously not the case.

The fundamental principles of SEO are the same for everyone, whilst the strategy is not. Results are always achievable, it’s a question of managing expectations to budget and being honest and transparent throughout the whole process. You can see your rankings and traffic rise, and then when you are on page 1 you will see your turnover rise and your business and profits start to grow.

Understanding what SEO is and knowing what it can do for you

We have talked already about misunderstanding what SEO is, but also many business owners have never seen what it can do for them as they have never ranked strongly and gained any business from it. If your site has never ranked and you are not doing any other online marketing then your site is only a resource for the people who you are taking there manually or are already your customers. For many, this is not even worth the expense of hosting, updates, domain name registration and all the time and worry that goes with it. You simply don’t see the amount of business going to your competition, even if they are not as good as you.

For others who have ranked strongly they know the value of being there. An important point to make again is that we are not talking about regular clients you already have, but new customers actively searching for your products and services. It’s new business that increases your profits and helps you grow. And if you keep your customers happy then those new clients will refer you to others. The increase can be quite dramatic and beneficial. Also, these new clients and sales are ones that didn’t go to your competition.

Strongly ranking for multiple key terms that are relevant to what you do is like being open for business 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Organic traffic has no traffic limits, no costs, no time windows and pure trust factor for users as Google and other search engines reputation is at stake to give users only relevant results. Bear in mind that Google is competing with Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc, so it’s in their interest also to keep you as a user.

Once you have experienced this almost invisible form of generating clients and turnover you start to understand the value of your site and what it can do. Suddenly the difference between positions on page 1 becomes crucial, as do many of the other finer points of a strategy (like landing pages, competitors, conversion rate etc).

Can I Help My Own Websites SEO?

Now we know the main basic factors that make up two of the three factors that search engines use to rank you. We will go into the different aspects of these two areas in later posts, but first lets see if there is anything you can do to help. One of many questions will be “can I do anything myself?”. Well, the answer is obviously a resounding “yes”. There are many things you can do that aren’t technical and will definitely help, but first lets look at what won’t!

Common DIY SEO mistakes

Work as a team with your SEO company:

So if you are working alongside a professional SEO company remember that the key tactic here is to be part of a team. It’s not the amount you do that will help. It’s what you do. Talk to each other and let them guide you in what you are doing. Do not work independently, after all, you are paying them for their knowledge so carrying on “solo” is obviously a mistake. Being part of a team is bound to lead to better results.

Letting friends help with SEO or Web Design:

Other common mistakes are letting a “friend” who is “good with technical” stuff work on your site (or offsite). Another previously mentioned mistake is that of doing something which is considered good too many times (like blog commenting or social posts). Instead of doing these at a moderate rate and making them unique, instead you copy and paste the same thing over and over telling Google that you are trying to manipulate it. This is one of the main reasons why Google and others sit and wait on what they see to make sure it is considered worthy of helping your site (white hat) and adding to your sites authority as opposed to suddenly it being repeated endlessly and being considered spammy (black hat).

Copying someone else SEO as it worked for them:

This is probably the easiest mistake to make for the uninitiated. Just copying what someone else is doing may obviously seem like a good idea, but unless you know everything that they are doing you will only be copying part of a strategy (which is no strategy at all). It will all come down to the details rather than just hearing the basics of what they did. Every site, history, competition and area of business are unique and so the strategy for your site should be equally as unique. Whilst the fundamental principles and rules of SEO are the same for everyone, the application of these is not.

Buying large amounts of links:

Links work right? They are one of the strongest ranking factors right? What can go wrong? Well, whilst this is all true, unfortunately so is the opposite. This is the most punishable and constantly changing factor in your rankings also. We will look at links in detail in a later post, but for now just don’t buy random links. Ever. Ok?

What you can do to actually help your SEO

There are some very simple but important things that you can do that will boost your domains authority. The main one being Google’s recent favourite of content. “Content is King” we heard Google say for the past few years (as it relentlessly punished links). Adding unique, relevant and engaging content to your site is key. After all, who knows more about your business than you? You might know how to optimise this content and some of it might compete, but it’s still adding rather than taking away.

The next most helpful factor is if you are good at social media which sends “social signals” to search engines (like tiny beacons saying that you are active and important rather than static and possibly out of business) then you can take sole charge of this area, letting your SEO team concentrate on the factors that contribute most highly towards your rankings.

We’ll look at the details of how content, links and the other major factors work soon which will help increase your ability to help your own SEO.

Good and Bad SEO Strategies (Black Hat and White Hat)

So know we know all the factors that search engines use to determine your sites rankings across all the different key phrases and individual key words. This overall worth that search engines weigh up is known up as “authority”, or what has now become more commonly known as “Domain Authority” thanks to large online SEO resources like MOZ. Again, to be clear, MOZ’s DA (domain authority) is not used by Google and they have stated that they do not factor in MOZ’s DA as part of their algorithm, after all, when you think about it, Google have their own DA: It’s called their ranking algorithm! Lets also take a quick look at an explanation of MOZ’s DA:

This is taken from Google’s SERP and the key word here is highlighted in grey: “predicts”. MOZ is simply taking an educated guess at a sites ability to rank. These guesses have now spread to whether your site is penalised, an individual pages authority as well as traffic for an individual key term.

The truth is that all these are a useful guide at best. Exceptions to the rule can be found everywhere so it’s important to not take these guides too seriously, especially as Google does not factor them in as they are already hidden inside its very secret algorithm which MOZ and equivalents are simply trying to reverse engineer to sell their services to SEO consultants and SEO companies etc. The point is that traffic is so valuable that everyone is trying to guess what works and what doesn’t, hence why there are a lot of different techniques both good and bad.

Black Hat and White Hat SEO Strategies

But how does Google etc tell the difference between good and bad content and links? You might think that all of it would be good, but like almost anything in life it can be manipulated and fraudulent. Why? Because there is something to gain: traffic. The whole point of being online for most businesses or individuals is to gain traffic. SEO has become a much maligned industry, and rightly so. Not only are people confused as to what it is (as we saw in the start of our last post) but they also don’t know how it works, let alone are aware that bad practices exist that can harm your site. A lot of so called “SEO companies” have spammed their way to results only for their clients to later get punished. Google over time learns all manipulative strategies and then removes their beneficial elements from your domains authority. It is constant battling manipulation and moving the goal posts accordingly.

There are two different kinds of SEO practice, black hat (manipulative and cheating) and white hat (organic and natural). As in real life, cheating sometimes works, but Google is very clever, and your manipulative past can catch up with at any time just like law in real life. So there is obviously only one practice thats of any real use long term. So how do I know or tell the difference as a business? Well, trust and transparency on the part of your SEO company is one, if you are doing this yourself then the other is common sense. If it looks bad or low quality then it probably is.

A confusing thing is that doing something good once, is beneficial. But doing it over and over again is not. It’s not an easy task, but if you use common sense and aren’t trying to deceive Google and do things naturally you will be building some authority to your site over time.

So there are things that you can do to help and maximise your efforts in a co ordinated way with your SEO company or consultant. We’ll look at those next time.

What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

To put it simply, this is how Google, Yahoo, Bing and all search engines weighs up your website to place in it’s results (Search Engine Results Page or SERP). These results are clicked upon by users searching and provide free organic traffic to your website.

Its also worth noting at this point what SEO isn’t, as now commonly it’s a misunderstood and all encompassing an acronym. SEO isn’t paid marketing like AdWords (Google), Banner Ads like AdSense (Google) and Social Media Marketing like Facebook Ads etc. Most platforms have some kind of PPC (pay per click) arrangement that can be purchased. Whilst these may give you traffic and get you on “page 1”, the above mentioned can be called SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMM (Social Media Marketing). They are not true SEO natural organic SEO where the amount of traffic you gain is infinite and free (minus your costs of getting there).

So what are the elements involved that search engines use to decide rankings?

The elements involved in this process can be broadly split into 3 easily understandable areas which are relevancy, popularity and age. Let’s understand these individually.

What is Relevancy?

This can again simply be defined as your sites content. This is split into 2 areas: textual content and onsite optimisation. Your text and tags will all be read by search engine bots that crawl the web non stop building up their index. This is the visual text content that users will read on your pages. Your sites optimisation is the bits of text and meta tags (titles and labels) that aren’t so visible that search engines read first and use to understand very quickly what the subject of each page is.

What is Popularity?

These are basically links or back links. These are a much maligned and misunderstood area of SEO as they are easily the most abused. A link that comes from another website that points towards yours is like a vote of confidence for search engines. Sites will have many many links over time and they also appear as well as disappear. There are various different categories of link and also varying qualities. It’s important to understand too that quantity does not beat quality.

What is Age?

This sounds obvious and in a way it is. The age of your site basically equals trust. Think about it like this, if a shop down the road has been there for 10 years selling cakes you will probably deem them trustworthy and to have a good reputation as they are still in business. Google and search engines do the same. However, if the shop has been rebranded several times and under new management then that trust is dissipated, the same as it would be in real life. It’s also true for your links, with the older the link the more trustworthy it is and hence the more powerful it is considered by search engines.

Age differs hugely from relevancy and popularity in one major way; it cannot be manipulated. The age of your site cannot be faked whereas the other 2 factors can be worked on by a professional SEO company.

Once these factors have been seen by bots, examined for quality, they can then be added to the existing index. Most search engines will sit on this data for a time before calculating how it affects your rankings and results for different key phrases and search queries that generate traffic to your site.

So how do major search engines measure and weigh up all these factors exactly, and how do we know what works and what doesn’t. Let’s explore that in our next post.