So you have a website for your business and you’re pretty happy with it. It has everything you think you want to say, a nice design and it’s got you out there on the internet where there are millions upon millions of potential customers who you are sure will want to hear about you and your products. But what next? How do you let all these people know your website exists?
You have probably heard of SEO before. As a business you probably have a spam folder full of cold emails from SEO companies like the Toronto SEO company and YEAH! Local trying to sell you their services, but what is SEO? And more importantly, do you really need it?
Search Engine Optimisation is, in basic terms, the maintenance a website needs to increase visitors to it. You’ll hear a lot of talk about ‘rankings’ related to SEO, and a lot of SEO companies will promise first page or top position results, targets you should be looking for in order to get more people visiting your website.
If you take this example of a page of search results for the search term ‘living room rugs’, we can see that the top result is overstock.com, with Ikea and John Lewis taking positions two and three.
Businesses selling living room rugs want to be on the first page for this search term for a number of reasons. First, because it is highly likely that customers wanting to buy a new rug for their living room will type ‘living room rugs’ into Google. Second, because the likelihood of users browsing through more than the first page of search results before finding what they want is slim. If you’re not on the first page, it’s not likely you’ll be seen.
So you know you need to be high in the search rankings to get the visitors coming to your website, but how do you get there? Well, SEO is the answer to that question:; however, it you to learn the SEO basics first.
Google and other search engines have a set of criteria they look for in websites in order to place them in their search rankings. The exact criteria which makes the difference between a website appearing on page 1 or page 10 are closely guarded search engine secrets, but there is a vast amount of knowledge we do have in order
to know how to get a website a high ranking.
Social media, building links to a site, regular and unique content, a clear and logical site structure – these are just a few things that can be done to any website in an SEO strategy to improve rankings, but it’s important to know what you’re doing. Just as doing SEO right can improve your rankings and increase traffic, doing bad SEO can have a seriously detrimental effect and can have you removed from Google in extreme cases.
Get some advice from a good search engine optimization company and invest in an audit for your website, but don’t forget about the importance behind the Best Solo Ads. A thorough SEO audit should look at all aspects of your website and result in a ‘to do’ list of things you can do to start driving up your web traffic, including everything from changing the structure of your website to adding high quality written content. This will be a great foundation for any good quality SEO strategy to increase the traffic of any website!
Marc is head writer for Quartermaster Creative, a small SEO company dedicated to delivering only the best quality SEO work. Where other SEO companies make impossible promises of instant results – using poor quality methods – Quartermaster use only the best SEO and writing to improve your website with sustained, long term success.
