SEO Services
Search Engine Optimisation is a range of tactics designed to promote a website’s pages on targeted search engine results pages (ie. Google, Bing, etc). Properly optimised website pages are commonly referred to as ‘Google friendly’. The aim of optimisation is to increase the number of visitors to a website based on matching targeted search queries to the website’s relevant pages. Search engines display two types of search results, free organic and paid advertising. SEO is primarily used to improve the rank of free organic search results.
Search engines use complicated algorithms to determine which organic links to website pages they display when a user types a query. There is always competition between various websites to get their site to appear on the first page of free search results (the closer to the number 1 result, the better).
So, where should your website pages appear in search results? People use keywords and keyphrases to find what they are looking for online (the search query). Targeting the right keywords/phrases means the pages of your website which are relevant to the query are found by more customers who are interested in your business.
SEO Tactics
How do you use your website to target people who are your potential customers? It’s one thing to create a website that looks great and offers a good user experience, it’s another to market it to the people looking for your products, service or shop.
Making a site and its pages ‘Google friendly’ is often a balance between what makes for a good user experience and what Google looks for on a page, which determines a page’s indexed position in search results. A ‘User friendly’ site should always be the priority. However, there is no point in building a totally ‘User friendly’ site, if nobody sees it.
The competition for search results position is based on relevance of a webpage to the search query. In other words, ‘which page best matches and answers the users enquiry’. Search engines can only use the information it gathers from a website when the site is regularly crawled by search engine ‘bots’, to determine relevance.
The aim of targeting is to dedicate the structure and content of a page to one or more commonly used keywords and keyphrases which are relevant to the page. Keyword research is all important to determine how users search for your type of business.
On-page SEO
On-page refers to every element contained in the page structure, including the page title and content hierarchy, meta content, the page content, in-bound and out-bound links, page load speed, image optimisation, etc.
What do search engines look for when they crawl your website’s pages? They look at the ‘theme’ of the page which could also be explained as ‘which search queries does this page answer?’.
When the content of a page is decided, it’s time to conduct keyword research to determine the search terms people use when looking for the the page content. The page structure is then based around the most popular keywords or keyphrases which match the page content.
Off-page SEO
There are a number of off-page SEO tactics which can be used to sustainably improve your website’s page rankings. Links from other websites can improve your pages’s influence on search engine rank. However, rules do apply.
Search engines favour what we know as ‘natural’ links and can penalise pages which have an inbound link profile with ‘paid for’ links.
Natural links are obtained from websites which identify as relevant to a page theme. These might include your suppliers dealer locator links, local and national directories and review sites. Links from Social Media sites add no SEO value as they can be too easily manipulated.
Let's talk about SEO
If you have a website which isn’t ranking where you think it should, let’s talk about what you can do to improve the way search engines view your site.