What is SEO and How Does it Work? A Beginners' guide to SEO. Searching engine optimisation can be a daunting subject. We're an SEO agency, based in London, and we're here to help you better understand the core theories of SEO.
What is SEO?
It's the practice of increasing traffic and conversions for a website, via organic search (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, etc). Historically this has been achieved through ranking at the top for certain target keywords. You may also hear keywords being referred to as queries or search terms.
For the sake of argument, we'll focus on SEO for Google.
The majority of you will use Google.
It's the most popular search engine in the world with over 3.5 billion searches a day. It's the popularity of Google's free search engine which allows them to charge a premium for advertisers. You've probably seen these pay per click ads in the search results.
Ads are big business for Google. As a result, they want to ensure that people keep using their search engine. How do they do this? By providing better search results than the competition. Users expect the most relevant and valuable information at the top....every time they search.
Search engine optimisation pays homage to this. All we are doing is making it as easy as possible for Google to understand that our website is the best possible result for our target search terms.
But how does SEO work? It works through a variety of factors, but there are 3 main areas of focus. To be clear, we're talking about White Hat SEO. It's based on relevance and value, rather than spammy SEO which looks to play the system.
#1: Technical SEO
As SEOs we need to bear in mind that Google is a robot. We need to ensure that our website has a really clear structure so that Google (or other search engines) can clearly identify which webpage to feature in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
We also need to take into account factors such as whether the website works on mobile devices and how quickly each webpage loads.
Diving deeper than just site structure and general technical items, each page will have opportunities to include 'onsite optimisation'. For example, is there are a title tag and meta description on the page. Are we using headings to properly layout content? Does the content provide the very best possible solution for the searcher? If you use a CMS like Wordpress, there are lots of useful plugins to help with this. We'd recommend Yoast SEO.
#2: Content Creation
Getting top rankings on Google isn't an overnight process. It's important that Google can understand how authoritative your website is on a particular subject.
This is where content creation comes in.
There are a number of reasons why creating high quality content on a regular basis is only going to help your SEO. Firstly, search engines need text to read in order to determine whether you are the best result for a query. Your content helps them see the value you offer to the searcher.
Secondly, it helps to keep a website relevant. If you're publishing great content regularly, it demonstrates that you are contemporary and up to date. In turn, this should provide a better user experience.
Thirdly, consumers are a discerning bunch. SEO is not just about rankings and traffic. You have to convert this traffic into customers to succeed as a business. Your content should be aligned with how a prospect might buy from you – this is also known as the buying funnel. If you do this, your content can be a great tool in helping to convert your traffic into paying customers.
#3: Link Building
Ahhh, link building. The most infamous of all SEO practices. If you're curious as to its infamy, just search for the 'Penguin Update'. In short, if another relevant and authoritative website links to your site, it is viewed as a good thing by search engines. You can gain these links through a number of practices, but avoid spammy links or paying for links.
The content you are producing should rank for 'long-tail' keywords and be found be people naturally. If it's really good they may well link to it. This is called link earning and can be really useful in scaling your link building practices.
Analytics & Reporting
Use free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to understand how people interact with your site and the type of traffic you attract. Making data driven decisions is critical in developing a high performance SEO campaign. There are also premium tools like SEMrush that you can use.
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