What is SEO and How Does it Work?
‘What is SEO?’, I hear you ask. SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is a strategy to improve the visibility of a website. It looks at all aspects of a site to help align it with user intent.
If you run or manage a business, one of the essential components is communicating with your chosen audience. The best way to do that in this digital age is by explaining what you do on a website that can be found by the people you want to target. This sounds easy, but the problem is that many businesses are doing exactly the same thing. So how do you stand out from the rest? The answer is to provide content that resolves issues your potential clients have in a language they understand and use to search for you.
What is SEO and Organic Traffic
What SEO does is target organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic refers to users coming to your website that have not come from paid ads or direct traffic (users coming to your website by typing in the web address). Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines use automated bots that crawl your site to assess it using complex algorithms and rank it accordingly. Changing the text, headlines, meta description and a variety of other things can help with SEO and make a website more visible.
Understanding Your Ideal Client
The most important thing to do is to understand what your ideal client is searching for and to provide answers to their questions and problems. Knowing what they are putting into a Google, Bing or Yahoo search can help you write your website to correspond to those queries. This is one of the central elements that Google looks for: how the website relates to user intent.
Investigate Your Competitors
Another aspect of SEO is knowing what your competitors are doing. Running a competitor analysis will give you a wealth of information that you can use to inform your marketing strategy. It will also give you a competitive edge. Analysing your competitors will help you find out many things, including:
- What works for them
- Where they are getting their backlinks
- What keyword strategy they are using
- How active and effective they are on social media
- Where your business or sales pages rank against them
This can save you a vast amount of time and money in trying things that have already been found to be ineffective and focusing on strategies that are working well. As time goes on, you can see how you are faring in relation to them and see what’s working.
Creating a Keyword Strategy
How you see your business and its focus might be very different to how your potential clients see you. It might also be different to what they want from you. Thinking of your business as a customer or client will yield different results and will align your content to what they are searching for. Creating a keyword strategy helps to understand what people are putting into a search engine so you can write content for your website that your customers will want to consume.
About Now Ltd is an SEO and web design agency with a difference. Cutting-edge analytics and valuable data are used to understand your competitors. This will give you a powerful advantage in getting your business in front of the right people. If you need a website or more information on boosting your online visibility and getting your website working, click on the link below and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
