We’ve all received those sales emails, seen the adverts and heard the stories…

“Drive traffic to your website”, “pay only when you get results”, “invest in cheap SEO today” blah, blah, blah.

We can almost guarantee; a large percentage of you who’re reading this will recall receiving at least one of these cheap, spammy outreach messages in the last month or so. The truth is, many of you disregard this poor attempt of outreach simply because you don’t fully understand what SEO is or how it can improve your business and online presence.

It’s understandable really, SEO is a fairly new industry (certainly among independent businesses) and is complicated at the best of times: it’s the results which makes this marketing channel so effective.

The good news is that the SEO marketing practice is becoming readily available and increasingly consumed by independent businesses. Because it works.

SEO in A Nutshell

SEO, more formally known as Search Engine Optimisation, is (in simple terms) a practice which determines where your website appears in Google search engine results.

There are various aspects to SEO which contribute to the end result of your rankings: in this article, we’re dusting over the practice in the hope you gain a good insight into some of the technicalities of SEO and how it can benefit your business or organisation.

More and more marketing professionals and businesses are turning to SEO practices as it’s a lucrative marketing channel working in increasing brand awareness, offering an optimal return on investment (in the form of elevated conversion rates) and gives brands large and small that competitive edge. After all; the higher the ranking the more professional a company looks to its consumers.

Making Your Website Appear in Google

Making your website appear in Google is the be-all and end-all of SEO.

It’s why we do it, it’s why people rely on it, it’s integral to business growth and helps us get the most out of our online market place. It’s complicated, it can be a lengthy process for certain industries but the end result is precisely what makes the industry so competitive.

Phase 1 #Domain Authority

Improving your search engine rankings relies on many factors, the most crucial being what we call domain authority.

By ensuring your site possesses a wealth of unique, insightful, useful content eventually translates into other websites linking to the content placed on your website.

This is what makes google believe your site is useful, trusted and legitimate.  The more quality links you have pointing to your site contributes to how much google trusts your page. This results in your domains authority seeing continual growth.

Improving a domains authority works almost like a voting system on the Google search engine: it takes research, perseverance and strategy.

Our Just Internet site, for example currently has a domain authority of 37 which means it’s one of the more trusted websites by google.

 

Other websites such as Facebook has a domain authority of 100. This score is again, is based on how many people trust the site enough to link it to their websites.

How does a good domain authority improve rankings?

This aspect of SEO simply tells Google that your website or pages are trusted which is one of the contributing factors to achieving higher rankings.

Phase 2 #Content

Content is another powerful method in SEO as it helps determine what keywords your page ranks for. Ensuring your site has good content with a high word count works in a websites favour.

It sounds simple on the face of it; but adhering to the content rules in search engine optimisation while selling a product or service requires a fine balance which is essential to your overall page rankings.

There are many factors we must work with to ensure we surpass competitors which include avoiding duplicate content, avoiding what we call over optimisation, ensuring we have a range of title sizes and ensuring content reads naturally for crawling and user benefits. These are just few of the many features of good SEO content which will aid in one website achieving higher rankings than another.

The Overall Goal:

SEO, completed with good, ethical practice can be life changing: certainly for small business owners. Countless testimonials read how it’s improved companies bottom lines, its generated leads, it’s even saved some businesses from going under during the economic crisis.

The overall goal of SEO is to drive traffic to a website, brand a company or organisation and elevate conversions.

Think you could improve your SEO presence? Contact us today for no obligation information and advice on 01942 498 385.