No matter what type of business you’re running, whether it’s a virtual shop, a blog, or even a brick-and-mortar location, attracting customers is critical. A huge part of that is ensuring that our websites are being noticed by as many people as possible. How can we achieve that, though?
One method is to utilize something known as SEO, or search engine optimisation. Further details on it can be found on this page, but we’ll be explaining it in further detail as well. The key things to note before we begin are that SEO is a huge part of successful marketing and advertising campaigns, and that it isn’t nearly as complicated as it might seem.
What is SEO?
As we explained, SEO stands for search engine optimisation. However, delving a bit deeper than that, it’s a method of changing web code and content to ensure it shows up higher in search results. Typically, this involves incorporating specific keywords and phrases into our web content.
There are a lot of ways to achieve this, of course, but identifying the “correct” or “best” keywords and code variations is where the challenge is. Luckily, it’s not something we have to do alone.
How Does SEO Work?
Depending on what content you put out, as well as who your target audience is, your strategy for optimisation will likely look different. If you don’t know what those differences are, though, don’t worry. You can get external assistance from all sorts of services that specialize in these things.
One of the first things you’ll want to do if you haven’t yetis to sort out that “target audience” bit. Who are you looking to appeal to? What customers would you like to attract more of? These are all questions to ask as you think of the target audience.
From there, it’s pretty simple. Guides like this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6055554/, offer some additional context. However, the main thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to put yourself in the mind of the customer for a while.
Think about what things would be searched for in relation to your business. What problems can your products or your services solve? This is a good launching point for what keywords you can incorporate into your content, especially if you otherwise weren’t sure how to get started.
Why Does SEO Matter?
You may still be wondering why this is such a big deal. Maybe you’ve been doing just fine without it so far. Here’s the thing: competitors will most likely start to incorporate these strategies into their websites and marketing campaigns. This means that to keep up, you’ll want to do the same.
When we look at statistics and compare sites that use search engine optimisation techniques versus those that don’t, it’s clear-cut: the ones that do use these strategies get much more traffic. More traffic equals more clicks equals more sales down the line. It’s also a way to generate leads, even if you aren’t making immediate sales each time.
Organisations like Grant McArthur SEO demonstrate this if you were looking for some examples. Here in Glasgow, it’s quite important to start using these types of strategies as soon as possible so that we aren’t lagging behind or losing business to competitors across the United Kingdom. In that sense, it’s worth checking out ways to ease the process.
Further Details
Now, when it comes to navigating search engines, it can be somewhat difficult from the perspective of a business. Some basic things that we should all know include the fact that each site is “ranked” on these engines and are rated based on content and keyword usage. At first, a lot of folks assume that it’s not an equitable form of generating results, but it’s actually harder to exploit modern SEO techniques, meaning it’s much fairer.
Most importantly, using SEO allows us to save some money on advertisement campaigns. This is true even if we hire an external service to assist with optimisation techniques – it’s still far less pricey than big ads would be. You can see why it’s become such a big deal as of late, right?
For one final note, keep in mind that the content of your website should ideally be high quality for these sorts of optimisation strategies to work. This is something that external services can help you with too, of course, so don’t feel like it’s too stressful.
Often, this is referred to as SEO writing, which is another can of worms (at least, to an extent). We won’t dwell any further for now, but if you’re already considering working with an SEO company, it’s something you can ask about. Overall, having the knowledge to implement these strategies can be quite valuable on its own.
