What is SEO and how does it benefit me?

Good SEO is a tool to help your business get seen by the right people

2 years ago | by Charlie Cooper

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – and that is just a fancy way to say improving your site for search engines, such as Google.

Put simply, Google likes to give the end-user the best, high-quality results for their query. This means that high-quality sites rank better in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

There are a few different factors that determine how Google ranks your site. Let’s take a quick look at some of the key parts.

Speed

The biggest part of SEO is the speed of your site. Google will rarely serve a slow site on the first page of search results, which according to Moz is where 70-90% of clicks come from.

A fast site is the most important part of SEO on your website.

Why? Because a slow website causes high bounce rates. Bounce rates are users entering your site and leaving straight away. Google sees this happening and it makes your website look bad!

Introducing PageSpeed Insights, a tool from Google which scores pages out of 100. It will help you to get to the bottom of why pages might be performing badly.

If your website runs slow, let’s have a chat about it – we’re happy to take a look at your site for free, and quote you once we get to the source of the issue.

Content

So what else does google want to serve to users? Good content. Your pages need to have content that is original, not copied and pasted from somewhere else.

Ensure your text doesn’t repeat itself. No one wants to read the same thing over and over! Rest assured Google will know if your content isn’t unique and well written.

Bonus tip: Correct structuring with HTML tags such as h1 and h2 go a long way in telling Google what your page is about so that it can serve it to the right queries.

Metadata

Metadata is a way of giving Google structured data that it can interpret directly, use to understand what your website is, how you want it displayed, and what exactly your pages aim to do.

Let’s look at an example. A product page. How do search engines know you’re selling a product, the price of it, and all the details?

The best way to handle basic metadata is to use a WordPress Plugin called Yoast, which has a simple user interface and converts to code for you.

Backlinks

Let’s imagine 2 competing companies both have really good content and fast, slick websites, with all the metadata Google will ever want. Who does google choose?

This is where backlinks come in. Backlinks are other websites linking to yours and they’re a way of Google knowing which site is most spoken about.

Essentially, if other websites mention yours, Google will know that your website is authentic, and your rankings will improve.

Overview

These are just a few ways you can improve the SEO for your website. There are plenty more tips but these are, in my experience, the most powerful.

If you’d like us to take a look at your website, you can get in touch here.