As the importance of a company website continues to grow the importance of SEO is essential to ensure the right traffic is landing on the right pages for your website. SEO is vital for user experience, and SEO experts work closely with website designers and developers to ensure the website has the maximum visibility for people searching for your service or product.

What is SEO?

SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic through any search engine. SEO allows your brand to gain higher exposure through organic (non-paid) search engine results.

Traffic to your website is split into different categories.
All websites track traffic from different sources. These different sources are labelled under: Organic, Paid, Social, Direct and Referral.

Organic: Organic traffic is the primary channel that inbound marketing strives to increase. This traffic is defined as visitors coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing.

Paid: Paid traffic comes from advertising on different platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook and other social media platforms.

Referral: Referral traffic is when a visitor comes to your website from a link on a website that is not yours. For example, say a company is a parts manufacturer and is recommended on a main car brand website as an official partner.

Direct: Consider anyone typing in your website link directly into a browser and arriving on your website. It means the visitor knows you and does not need to search for your brand or website to find you.

Social: Social traffic is all traffic from any social media platform that is not an ad. Say you have a Twitter account and post an update about your latest sales. The link delivers traffic to your website and is categorised as social traffic.

Why your website needs SEO

SEO focuses on improving your ‘organic’ rankings, but there is a great deal of work that can improve your website’s visibility. Unfortunately, it won’t just happen on its own.

For instance, you can utilise content marketing, such as articles or blog posts, to earn relevant links from external sites to show search engines you are respected in your field.

SEO is a term we often hear without much explanation, so what exactly are we talking about when it comes to SEO and your website? There are three types of SEO: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO & off-page SEO.

On-page SEO: On-page SEO relates to the content on your website.

  • Keyword research: Finding the best keywords to target on a page of content
  • Content creation: Publishing high-quality content focused on target keywords
  • Keyword optimisation: Using the target keyword in all the right places and using good meta tag SEO.

Technical SEO: relates to non-content elements of your website.
It includes strategies to improve a site’s backend structure and foundation. Technical SEO improves a site’s readability (which makes it easy for search engines to crawl and understand the site)

The types of SEO included in this category relate to:

  • Site speed
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Indexing
  • Crawlability
  • Site architecture
  • Structured data
  • Security

Off-Site SEO: Off-page SEO techniques help strengthen your website’s
influence and relationship with other websites. It includes strategies to build a website’s reputation and authority. These factors help search engines see that a website is an ideal search result from a reputable, reliable, trusted source.

• Most off-site SEO relates to high–quality backlinks. A large volume of links pointing to your site from relevant, authoritative sites shows search engines that your site is valuable and established. You can gain these trust signals through a variety of link building and guest posting tactics.

• Strong SEO means a better user experience. Although user experience is vital to everything a web designer does, SEO allows this UX (User Experience) to be taken one step further. Websites are crawled by search engines looking for issues that may have a negative impact on your websites user experience. All search engine algorithms are getting smarter, and we are seeing the use and potential of AI (Artificial Intelligence) starting to improve search all the time. Google’s algorithms have learned how to interpret poor user experience on mobile and desktop devices. A positive user experience is not only good for your visitors; it is essential for your rankings in search engines.

• More clicks and conversions. In most cases, you will generate more relevant traffic from a highly placed organic listing than from a highly placed paid ad. Research shows that 70% to 80% of users focus exclusively on organic results and ignore paid listings. What’s more, some 28% of those searches convert, resulting in a purchase.

• SEO is sustainable. Organic search is one of the only online marketing channels that can continue to be beneficial over time when set up and maintained correctly. If you produce a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can grow over time, whereas any online advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

• Helps Google find and understand your content. Above all, by optimising your website content through SEO methods, you’ll be assisting major search engines, such as Google, understand your site better. While search engines are getting smarter, they still need our help. Optimising your site will help deliver more precise signals to search engines so that your content can be appropriately indexed and displayed within search results.

A process you can trust

1. Kick-off meeting
Before and during a crucial kick-off meeting, we gather all essential information to optimise your new site to attract the right traffic, i.e., the right customers. We believe increasing traffic for the sake of it is pointless, especially if users bounce immediately. (Bounce traffic means someone who comes to your site and leaves immediately without engaging with your site. This could be due to them expecting one topic and arriving on a page that is something different. It is why the right keywords are essential.

It’s vital to attract the right users who engage with your brand and ultimately convert. The more we understand about you and your brand, the more accurately we can optimise your site as a whole, representing your site in the best light in search engines.

2. Content audit
Once we have Google Analytics and Search Console access, we can assess which pages on your site are most important. This process includes looking at which pages have the strongest backlinks and are vital in driving traffic to your site. We can quickly determine priority pages that need to be maintained in your site’s wireframe through this exercise.

A wireframe is used to lay out content and functionality on a page that considers user needs and user journeys. Wireframes are used early in the development process to establish the basic structure before visual design and content are added. We will also thoroughly crawl your site to figure out which pages are detrimental to your SEO, and ensure these are not carried over and repeated on the new site. An SEO audit along with a content audit is one of the most important elements of your SEO campaign.

3. Design and web development considerations
As we said earlier, SEO will not work if it’s an afterthought. We think about SEO at every stage of the site build. Our SEO experts work with our designers and devs to ensure your new website is SEO-friendly in every way possible.

For instance, we make sure your site’s information architecture is user friendly, and your content contains meaningful anchor texts, which allows users and search engines to navigate through your content.

4. Keyword and competitor research
Before any SEO can happen, we must conduct proper research. Research is crucial for any SEO campaign to ensure that there is an understanding of the target market. It’s essential for our digital experts to fully understand how your prospective clients search for your offering and brand, to ensure the site and its content is optimised accordingly.

We look at how your competitors are achieving high rankings; our learnings from this will impact our overall strategy. We also look at what specific areas users want to know under the umbrella of your core products and services.

Although much of this information on your brand may be obvious to you as someone ‘inside’ the business, prospective customers may need clarification on specific areas of your offering. Having content which answers these queries well will allow you to rank for these terms.

5. Content optimisation
Once we have assessed which target keywords will provide you with the most relevant traffic, we work with you to optimise your new page content. We will also provide you with SEO-friendly meta tags which will help Google understand your key pages.

6. Redirect strategy
In any successful site migration, there needs to be a solid redirect strategy. This is where all your old content is matched to your new content, to ensure the old site’s authority is carried over to your new one, and so that Google understands that your new content has a new home.

7. Post-launch – SEO
If you decide to become our long-term partner, our developers will make sure no technical SEO update negatively impacts your website. Moreover, in our monthly reports, you’ll be able to see how much traffic and conversions you’re receiving from organic search.

For those clients who need ongoing SEO support, we’re always happy to create a bespoke SEO strategy, including content writing, link building and more, depending on your needs.

Conclusion

Ensuring your SEO is executed correctly from the beginning is essential for the success of your business. We collaborate closely with our clients to ensure that your website’s SEO is the most successful from day one throughout the website’s history.

The way you found and read this article is due to the tactics and care we take in creating SEO for every website. Why not contact us and let’s discuss your website and how we can help you grow your business this year.

We look forward to hearing from you.