Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – move up the search rankings
You may have heard much about search engine optimisation (SEO) but perhaps aren’t quite sure what it involves or how to implement it. Search engine optimisation is all about getting the best ranking on search engines’ results pages, ie when someone is searching for the product you sell or the service you supply, your company shows up on the search results. It’s also about attracting relevant visitors to your website – and converting them when they arrive at your site.
Why Google Page 1 really matters
Over nine out of ten searchers don’t look past the first page of Google so therefore being shown on the first page is really important. However, there are currently only ten organic results shown on each page and therefore competition is intense. Google’s aim is to deliver relevant search results to each user; these can’t be fiddled but they can be influenced.
Mr Google, find me a plumber in Preston …
Imagine Mr Google sitting at a desk looking at what to present to someone who has just typed Preston plumber into his search engine. He spots a couple of businesses who fit that category:
- Fred has just set up his plumbing business and has a two-page web site with containing a fuzzy picture of a bathroom suite and a contact me page.
- Reg has put together a web site including a map showing his premises, a history of his business, a full list of prices, easy ways to contact him (in and out of office hours). Reg’s customers have left nice comments about the great service he provides and there’s a link to him from an article in the local newspaper. Overall, a site that’s fast, nice-looking and has been search engine optimised .
Mr Google wants to show you his best recommendation and therefore will want to show to its users Reg’s site first. Right Direction Marketing is here to help make sure your site is more like Reg’s rather than Fred’s.
A few myth-busters about SEO
There is NO PAGE 1 GUARANTEE for Google: the only guarantee you can be sure of is if you’re not doing search engine optimisation, your competitors probably are and that’s why they appear above you on Google.
SEO is only FREE if you don’t value your time. Please don’t confuse search engine optimisation with paid-for advertising (PPC) – getting to the top of Google’s ads is easy if you want to pay for it!
The difference between Google Ads and organic results due to optimisation can be shown by the results page below. The paid-for adverts (now often handily tagged as “Ad”) appear in three or four positions at the top and upto ten positions on the right-hand side. Sites that have worked hard on optimisation (what’s called organic traffic) appear beneath the top ads. Yell seem to have got their act together for the keywords ‘plumbers in Lancashire’.
Looking for a plumber in Lancashire?
There is NO GOLDEN BULLET with SEO. As much as we’d like to be able to add some awfully clever coding or stick a hundred relevant keywords somewhere on your site to improve SEO, these don’t work … and in fact may cause more harm than good.
CONTENT IS KING. Google wants to show its users sites with interesting things to say, not ones that have ‘copied and pasted’ content from somewhere else. Creating new and exclusive content is a big time investment but will certainly be worth it.
So that’s the basics and of course there’s a bit more to it than that – but we don’t need to run before we can walk. Contact Right Direction Marketing today and let them take the stress out of this for you.
