An introduction to SEO for traditional marketors

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is important if you want to promote your brand online. With millions of people searching online for local businesses every single day, SEO is a vital way to remain competitive within your market as Google will bring up the most relevant results to the audience depending on their search criteria. SEO takes time to build up, but is a longstanding and effective method to ensure that your website is appearing at the top of Google, where most people are likely to click. If you’ve not ventured into using digital marketing before, here are some of the easy ways to improve your SEO:

Think from the perspective of your customers

Your approach to SEO should involve looking at it from the perspective of your customers. What are they looking for? What words might they use when trying to search for the products and/or services that you offer? Identifying these “keywords” is central to achieving great SEO and a strong presence in Google search results. You can help your site to appear higher when these keywords are searched for by incorporating them within your site. Around 3-5% of your website content should be comprised of keywords, but they should only be used in a context that makes sense, otherwise Google can actually penalise your rankings.

Write and share topical and fresh content

Aside from your main website pages, you can also utilise a blog (which should be within your website – very important!) to improve your SEO. Write regular blogs around industry topical issues or relevant subjects that your audience might be interested in. These should naturally flow to use the same keywords we have already mentioned, and also effectively tell Google that you have more authority. This helps to establish you as a stronger player within the market.

Have you heard about links?

One element of SEO that you might have heard about is link building. Initially when Google introduced link building as a criterion by which search results would rank, many companies went about building a huge number of “spam” links to irrelevant websites. However this is something that Google has cracked down on since it wants to determine which content is actually relevant to users. Therefore, link building is still a strong element to your strategy, but it must be from relevant and trustworthy sources. This is where social media comes in. If you use social media as part of your digital marketing strategy (which, by the way, you should definitely be doing if you’re not already!) then these platforms act as a great place to share links to your website pages and blogs, which Google will look upon favourably in terms of your SEO.

Getting started with SEO

There is, of course, much more to SEO than we have mentioned. SEO is continuously evolving as Google regularly updates their algorithms to identify search results that are more likely to be what users are looking for. This means that SEO is ongoing and you need to stay up to date to stay in a good position. To find out more about SEO, get in touch today and we can help to point you in the right direction.

Author: Steve Pailthorpe – Follow us on Google+