The importance of SEO in building a successful brand
What is SEO and why do we need it?
SEO or search engine optimisation has been around since the birth of internet search engines like Google and Ask Jeeves, who remembers that?
These search engines use bots called ‘spiders’ which comb the internet looking for specific keywords, phrases and different types of links in order to use this information to rank websites in order of relevance to an individual’s search criteria.
Over the years, it has become more and more complicated to get your website to rank highly, not only due to the shear amount of content now online, but also due to the search engines constantly changing and updating the way they list and rank sites.
SEO is crucial in helping websites achieve ‘the holy grail’ of finding their way to the top of the search lists by identifying new ranking factors and updating content to satisfy the constantly changing algorithms that search engines use.
The main motivation of having a website is to get traffic and to promote your brand and its associated services or products. It’s not just about generating any traffic, but traffic that is relevant to your business. If a site has no traffic, it isn’t going to generate any sales or enquiries.
Gone are the days where you could just throw together a website, change a few bits of text to describe a page’s content, also known as ‘metas’, then away you go. Obtaining backlinks to your website from other sites is more difficult than ever. Not only is the content important but ensuring the code used to build your website is clean and your schema (the language search engines use to read and understand the content on your site) is correct is vital too. The structure of your website and therefore the internal link hierarchy needs to be working as this all helps you to push the correct keywords and so much more.
At the end of the day, we need to look at the way we ourselves search online or more importantly, put ourselves in the position / role of our ideal customer. It is the role of Google to provide the most relevant information when we search and its algorithms are pretty sharp otherwise it wouldn’t be by far the most popular search engine out there. If we couldn’t find the results we wanted, we would look elsewhere. Imagine searching for information on an event and getting incorrect dates, times or locations.
So how do we approach getting your brand to the top?
We need to give Google exactly what it wants! Ensuring we put the right fuel in the engine so to speak! Everyone knows if you put the wrong fuel in, it just won’t work. Plus the engine needs to be regularly and properly maintained to perform at its best and that is where we come in.
Search engines require clean coded websites with relevant information with all the factors as perfect as possible. This is the importance of us creating the most relevant SEO.
This all starts with a good keyword analysis, why target keywords that don’t have traffic and waste time and money? A good keyword analysis is the key to bringing in visitors and not just the big hitter keywords, variations and long tail keywords need to be considered. The keywords need to be relevant, not just popular. We always tell people that focused traffic is always the best type, for example conversions need to be tracked and monitored to decide just how good your traffic is; a keyword that has 50 searches and 30 conversions is far superior than a keyword that has a thousand searches and 1 conversion so everything is relative. This can only be achieved by analysing the results on a regular basis which makes it easier to discover some gems that other companies aren’t targeting.
What about your site after the keyword analysis?
There are 2 sides to SEO: content and technical. The content side involves being honest and writing the best possible copy. It should be relevant and talk about your product, review it, create a video on how it works and focus on why it’s so good. Then, you should ask for reviews from customers and the list goes on and on.
The technical side involves making sure your site structure is correct such as your URLs being clean and easy to read. This means they contain only text that makes sense when a person reads it, not full of symbols and numbers. It is important to create a perfect internal linking structure and make sure all your meta tags comply to Google’s latest policies.
What about all the links in your site? Are they nofollow or are you just supporting the social networks with your hard work? Is your site fast enough, are you minifying all your scripts. There are literally so many tasks that need to be completed to make your site clean in the eyes of the Google spiders. Any issues can be brought to light and fixed with regular monthly maintenance and audits.
Your local SEO needs to be in place too, therefore optimising your location on Google maps is really important for people looking for you in your area.
SEO is a full-time job. If you are doing it yourself, it can be very overwhelming and time consuming and you may not have the technical skills to complete the tasks involved. This is why you need to look at the option of hiring an SEO company that is both honest and reputable.
SEO is something that we love, understand and we can maximise, in order to give you the best possible footing online, targeting the correct audience and generate the enquiries you need. Ultimately, it is important to recognise that SEO is an essential tool in growing your brand online!
Rank Engine are a successful digital agency, supplying expert solutions in SEO, social media marketing and website development, helping brands to grow and fulfil their online goals.
