What is SEO and why is it important for your business?
If you have a website and, let’s face it, if you’re in business you must, you should probably already have heard of search engine optimisation or SEO. But it’s pretty likely you’ve no idea what it means or why you should care.
So I’m about to tell you. No jargon and no sales pitch, just free advice to help you get seen online. Sound good? Read on…
First off, what even is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it’s the practice of improving a website (or app) to get higher rankings in search engines (a search engine is a generic term for Google, Bing etc).
Most of the work is on content - making it more relevant to people who might want to visit your website - but there are other elements which I’ll cover later.
But in essence, it’s all about these four things:
VISIBILITY: Making sure Google (or Bing, or whoever) can SEE you.
CONSISTENCY: Ensuring your entire site reflects what you’re truly about.
TRUST: Proving that your site (and your business) is legit.
USEFULNESS: Providing a genuinely useful resource on the internet.
I’m going to be honest and say, it’s not easy and it takes time. There’s no magic bullet here but there are some steps you can take right off the bat to give yourself a fighting chance.
I’ll look at each of those four elements in detail over four blogs - each step is a process and shouldn’t be rushed!
VISIBILITY
Do they see you? Your website may look fancy, but if your customers can’t see you, are you really there?
There’s some very simple steps you can take to make a start with getting seen and you don’t need a web developer to do this (so long as you have time available). After these initial steps it’s all about continuing the work. This article is part of my own optimisation strategy because I want to get seen in relation to SEO!
Decide what you want to be seen for
There’s a few things to consider here:
What’s my product or service?
Who’s going to buy it or use it?
Where will I find them?
What else do they like?
This could be really straightforward: if you sell designer sunglasses then that’s it isn’t it? Well…
Thinking about those four bullets above, the designer sunglasses are just one part of the picture. Think about the people who are most likely to buy. Are they really expensive? Mostly for women? Unisex? Are they environmentally friendly?
Where are those buyers likely to be found? Do they hang out on Pinterest? Could they be politically-aware and spend time raging on Twitter? Or do they shun social media altogether and just want an old-fashioned shop?
What else do they like? Pandas? Olive trees? Luxury yachts?
Get to know who they are and design your SEO strategy - and your website - to meet their needs as closely as you can. And this gets easier. By following the steps below you will learn much more about your ideal customers and therefore be able to serve up content that is most likely to work for them. And by doing that, Google will give you points for relevance and you will see your ranking begin to climb.
How to start getting seen in five easy steps:
Set up a free Google Analytics account and connect your website. If you have a Squarespace website, this is really easy to do. Watch my short video on how to do it (23 seconds). If not, please check the help files for the kind of website you have (eg Wordpress). Not only will this be helpful when you want to start understanding the traffic that comes to your site, it’s an important part of Google understanding you too. It also helps with the next step.
Connect your website to Google Search Console. This is a free tool that monitors traffic, flags up any issues on the site and is the central nervous system for Google’s understanding of your site. Bing has the same but if you do the actions for Google it will impact all search engines. By setting up Google Analytics first, you can use the tracking code (starts with a UA and you’ll find it in the admin ⚙ panel) to verify ownership which is by far the easiest and quickest way.
Once connected and verified, submit your sitemap. You can usually find it by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of your website url. Here’s mine: https://www.caxtoncomms.co.uk/sitemap.xml Doing this speeds up the process of Google ‘crawling’ your site. (They use computerised robots called ‘spiders’, hence the crawling…) A sitemap is just a plain text list of all the pages and other content (images etc) and their relative positions in your site structure.
Rest. Make some tea. Go for a walk. If you’re new to this, you’ll need a break at this point.
Next, add your business (or claim it if it’s already showing in Google) to Google My Business. Again, it’s entirely free and not difficult to set up. To verify ownership Google will send you a postcard in the mail (yes really) with a code. Once you input that code you are good to go. Add as much information as you can about the business: categories, photos, videos, services, opening hours, contact information and special features such as disabled access. This is such a valuable tool. Once you are motoring you can start to use this to generate and manage reviews on Google, location in maps, offers and events - there’s lots of added value.
Link to your site from all of your social media accounts and add links to your social media from your website. This also helps with Step 4: Trust and is important in helping Google understand your total online presence. The visibility step is all about making connections between everything about your business that is online and helping Google make sense of that.
Measuring visibility
So you’ve done all the steps above (if you haven’t, please do them and come back later) how do you have any idea of whether it’s working?
You can look at each tool separately but to be honest, that’s a ball-ache. While Search Console is fairly lightweight and to the point, Analytics is far from it. Getting into the nitty gritty of Analytics really is a job best left to the pros.
I use a search engine management platform called SEMrush* (SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing which means the proactive management of websites and other digital assets to increase organic traffic through optimisation). Here are some visuals to guide you to what you can measure and what it means.
Visibility measure
This is the SEMrush* overall visibility score for one of my clients. It shows that visibility is really volatile.
It’s measuring how often the site is seen on the internet based on keyword* rankings, clicks and other measures.
By using a tool like this, we can proactively manage visibility by seeing what changes when we take actions; when visibility goes up after we take action, we do more of the same.
This level of visibility is very good. Often when you begin, you might have a visibility score of less than 1%.
*I will cover keywords separately.
Keyword rankings go up and down all the time!
This shows how many keywords your site gets ranked in the top 3 on Google for the UK.
Keyword rankings
This is an example of the changes in keyword rankings for another client. It shows how they go up and down constantly. It is the use of keywords that defines how likely you are to get found for the things you want to.
So if you want to get found for ‘environmentally friendly sunglasses’ you’d better make sure that everything about your site is telling Google this is what you’re about (this is dipping into consistency) and ensuring you are keeping your customers in mind when deciding what keywords you want to rank for.
And it’s not just having the keywords that’s important, they need to have an effect on search results.
A keyword that is in the ‘top 3’ means when someone types in “environmentally friendly sunglasses” your site appears in the top three results - great work!
By the way, keywords are not just words, they’re really phrases like “environmentally friendly sunglasses for women”.
Because this is a lot, I’m going to break the blog down into four separate issues. Next will be CONSISTENCY where you’ll learn all about the content that will get you ranked for the right things. (Hint: it will also win you loyal customers.)
