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Now you have probably been asleep for the past few years if you haven't heard of SEO but hearing about something and knowing what it means are two different things! So just What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique that enables websites to be found when people type in certain keywords and phrases into the search box on a browser. Say, for instance that you searched recently for restaurants in North London, those sites that came up on page one would most likely have had some SEO work to get them to the top positions and will continue to need SEO to help them to retain these rankings. An SEO company works to get their clients on to the top pages for the keywords that people will use to search for their products or services.
Search engines are not human - they are text driven. They cannot be impressed by cool logos and impressive graphics they can only handle text - which is why the content on a website will always be the most important element. They will need to crawl, index and process this text before they can deliver search results - effectively what you see on page when you search for something.
The SEO process will involve the creation of backlinks - these are links pointing from elsewhere on the web to your domain. The higher the variety of domains these are pointing from the better. As time goes by in an SEO campaign the number of backlinks and referral URLs should increase steadily and it is this increasing number of backlinks that tells the search engines your site is popular and encourages them to rank your site more highly in the search engine results pages.
Top 10 Reasons for SEO
1) If you don’t invest in SEO there is no point having a website. Nobody will be able to find the site unless it is indexed and ranking well for the keywords and phrases that relate to the products and services you are offering. 85% of people use the internet to search for the products and services they need and so it presents a huge potential market that any business cannot afford to ignore.
2) SEO can help you to reach your sales targets. By improving your online presence you can attract more visitors to your website and if the website is good enough and your product or service is competitive then there is no reason why you can’t convert a healthy percentage of these visitors.
3) SEO helps you to interact more effectively with your customers. By using social media to keep customers up to date on the latest news from within the business together with product launches and anything else they might find useful, businesses can interact with their client base and potential customers to gain a better understanding of what they are looking for.
4) SEO can help to build up brand awareness. Optimising your website and being active on social channels can help to increase awareness about your brand. As well as ranking for your company or brand name you can make people realise your business exists by appearing for lots of different search keywords and sending out regular posts and status updates on blogs and social networks.
5) SEO can give you valuable insight. By using statistics generated through analytics tools it is possible to see where traffic is coming from, what keywords are being used to find your site and what pages visitors are looking at. This data can then be manipulated to improve marketing campaigns and if necessary shift the marketing focus from one product or area to another.
6) SEO is a small price to pay. Compared to more traditional marketing methods such as advertising in a magazine, promoting a new product on a billboard or running a television advertisement, SEO represents a minimal cost and yet can return fantastic results to get websites ranking for not just local searches but UK wide and internationally if the product or service is to be sold overseas.
7) SEO presents a much more viable option when compared to paid search listings. Many businesses simply do not have the budget to spend several pounds per click to get people to visit their website and in any case it has been proven that around 90% of people click on natural listing compared to only 10% on paid listings.
8) SEO can help you stay ahead of the competition. Unless you work in a very specific market niche you will find that you have close competitors who also offer the same products or service as your business. If they are optimizing their site for search and you aren’t you could quite simply get left behind.
9) SEO can add value to your business and in particular your online business. If you sell products or services online then the value of the traffic your site receives will in effect be an asset to your business.
10) With SEO the sky’s the limit – there is no limit the amount of traffic you can receive when implementing organic SEO. Unlike pay per click where the amount of visitors you can receive will be limited by your budget, with organic SEO there is no upper limit and over time you will see a positive return on investment.
