SEO What? How paying a little attention can get you a long way

Are you an SEO agnostic?

Until recently I know I was.

I mean, I believed in it at some level, but I was not sure why, or how to go about proving it’s worth.

As a business owner, I know only too well how easy it can be to dive down a tech rabbit hole, only to surface and find the investment was simply not worth it – probably because the tech was not needed, not relevant, or misunderstood.

After training up and investing time and resource in SEO, I can confirm, I am now a convert.

So, what is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Put simply, I discovered on a recent training course for our Meantime Academy programme, it is the process of improving the volume or quality of people visiting a website from search engines via natural or unpaid search results.

The search engine “crawls” through your website to pick up keywords, index them, and match them against keywords that people are searching for; the better your SEO, the higher up you will come on the search listing, the more likely it is that your prospect/existing customer/next staff member will spot you and visit your website.

Important then, to put some serious thought into what your keywords will be. When your next prospect/existing customer/new staff member searches for the words that best describe you, who comes up? And where are you in that list? What content/keywords do the companies who have fared better include on their website?

When people arrive at your website, what do you want them to do next? Does your content easily take them down that path?

So, you have your keywords, now what?

According to our teacher Andrew Smith, the first step is to ask yourself some questions

• How much additional organic traffic do you want? (The answer is never as much as possible, by the way)
• What evidence do you have that the audiences you are targeting are searching for the terms believed to be important?
• And that they are relevant to the research and purchase/decision journey?
• How much resource will be required to achieve your objectives?

If you can answer all of the above, you are ready to go.

It’s about content and ensuring that when the search engine crawls your site, it finds those keywords.

Start by looking at your content and amend or create new content to put those keywords repeatedly in the limelight.

Then look at whether the content is enough or whether you need to invest in some proper techie help to get you what are called backlinks from other websites (don’t panic – leave it to a techie).

Then also look at your website itself – the search engine will prefer a fast-loading website and one which is easy to read, for example.

SEO is not rocket science, it takes a little thought and a little will go a long way.

My SEO road to Damascus is already bearing fruit – we are creeping up the rankings and have seen a spike in social media following already.

Time you got started.

With thanks to the PRCA for the training.