Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as you are probably aware, is the process of increasing visitors to your website by ensuring your site is ranked highly by search engines such as Google, ideally appearing on the first page when searching for your industry, business name, product or service.
It’s a hotly debated topic and has been the subject of scammers offering quick-fix solutions to put you on page one. The elusive page one goal and art in achieving this has earnt SEO something of a ‘witchcraft’ reputation.
As with any industry some dodgy practices in the history of SEO and aforementioned scams have left many businesses out of pocket and even blacklisted by Google.
Knowing the basics of SEO and where to begin will help you and your business avoid hiring the wrong people and having to clean up the mess or start afresh!
The question I’m answering today is a simple but important one: Is SEO important for my Business and if so, is all I need to do write regular blogs?
Blogs are fantastic, but before diving headfirst into tactics, first ask yourself who your audience is and how they behave.
Not every business needs to be on Google, just as not every business needs a website.
A lot of people have approached me saying “Kevin, I need Google Adwords” or “Kevin, I need to rank organically on Google,” and my first question to them is always “Why?” If you can’t confidently answer this question, we need to back it up a step.
As you’ll have heard me say before, the very first step in any marketing activity or campaign is to know who your customer is. This doesn’t mean ‘I sell candles, my customer is women,’ this means ‘I sell candles, my customer is Sydney women 25-40 in a dual-income household in excess of 130K, who enjoy a luxury lifestyle, and regularly consume homewares magazines etc etc. until you’ve painted a picture of someone clearer than you could your best friend.
If you’re selling a particular product or service and it is likely your customers will be searching online for this, ‘e.g. ‘Where can I purchase Vanilla scented candles on Sydney’s Northern Beaches,’ then SEO will definitely be a key consideration for you business. However, if using the above example, most of your customers are impulse-buying candles in-store, sold on the delicious smell while your Shopify store remains stagnant, a different approach will be needed. Similarly if your business is run entirely on word-of-mouth referrals, you may not even need a website.
Firstly answer how your customers will be finding you to ascertain whether you should be ranking organically on Google.
The second part of the question was “if I do need to rank on Google, is all I need to do write regular Blogs?”
It’s important to understand that there are two sides to SEO:
- Technical: This covers the foundation and set-up of your website to tick all of the right boxes for Google. Here is a great resource for understanding the nuts and bolts of SEO.
- Content: The creative side on the other hand, covers the content on your website which is vital to your organic ranking. Blogging is one part of that. If you’re starting a business blog on who you are and what you do, start by asking your customer what questions they have and what problems they need solved. Content is King!
If you’re investing money to improve your SEO, I believe one of the best ways to do this is by building quality, informative and creative content that solves your customer’s problems. Once you have produced this content, you need to have a strategy in place to make sure it is reaching your target audience.
There should be a plan and purpose behind each piece of content you produce, whether it is a blog post, an infographic, a video or other and they should all be working together cohesively to tell a story, engage and entertain your audience.
By creating valuable content, you’ll be more likely to attract the right audience to your website, with people who value what you have to say and are more likely to take an interest, enquire and ultimately, convert.
Taking your audience on a journey with regular engaging content helps with your SEO, as Google is essentially looking for trust.
Google analyses search behaviours to determine where your website should rank compared to other similar sites, taking into consideration how relevant, trustworthy and authentic your website is to your customer.
If someone arrives at your website and can’t find what they’re looking for, then Google may assess the short time spent on your site as an experience that wasn’t of value to the customer, and therefore doesn’t have the same level of credibility as, say, the next source this person finds.
I hope that covers off what is important to rank organically on Google, how SEO works and whether or not it should be a consideration for your business.
As always, if you have any questions you’d like me to address, get in touch.
Stay dangerous,
Kevin Spiteri