For some people, just mentioning SEO sends them into a worried sweat. For others, they are focusing on very specific technical things, image alt-tags and meta descriptions are mentioned a lot. But what I find is that many people are spending lots of time, not doing what is needed. So what I wanted to go through here was the basics of what you should be focusing on.
Is SEO for your business?
This question really has two parts
- Do you want your website to be found on Google when people search for the service you offer in the relevant area?
- Is this an important part of your marketing strategy?
If the answer is no to either of these, read no further, stop fussing with SEO and do something else. Something important for your marketing,
But if you do want to be found locally on the Google Search, and this is an important part of your marketing, then read on.
What to focus on?
- What words, phrases and competition do you want to be found for
- Website Content
- Website Visitor Numbers
- Web presence and consistency
You will notice that getting all green ticks on SEO assessments of each page of your website is not on this list. That’s great at some stage of your SEO, but for most people, this is just faffing around the edges when there is much more fundamental work that needs to be done.
What words and phrases do you want to be found for?
Without this foundation, the rest of your SEO has no direction. This is all about knowing what geographical area you want to be found in and what words and phrases you want to be found for. There is a blog here that goes through this in detail, showing how you can do this effectively. Without this, your SEO is directionless and won’t work. When you know what words and phrases you want to be found for where you then need to assess the competition. If you do a Google search in the right place for the right words, and most of the results are local businesses and there are not many ads, then you have a good shot of being found on the search. If the results are full of businesses paying for ads and the websites that appear are national brands, then think again. Either don’t focus on SEO or look for words, phrases or locations that are less competitive. We can do a Keyword assessment for you to see which keywords are best for you to focus on.
Website Content
The written content on your website is one of the most important parts of your website. Getting lots of pages and blogs full of written content is much more useful than having just a couple of pages that you have spent ages getting every part of the SEO perfect. You just need to get content written and put it on your website. This needs to be
- Engaging for your target audience
- Well laid out (use paragraphs, sub-headings, bullet-pointed lists, etc)
- Focused on your keywords (further details below)
- At least 500 words per page, ideally more, and up to about 2000 words per page
- Relevant for the services your business offers.
Most web pages at the top of the Google Search have at least 1000 words per page.
Choose one keyword or key phrase per page. Don’t try and target several keywords per page, and don’t try and target several pages on the same keywords. Try and make a page or blog based around the keyword/phrase you decide that page is aiming for. For example, as an accountant, one page might be about “personal tax return”.
Website visitor numbers
Google judges your site on its visitor numbers. If your site has lots of visitors, Google presumes this means it must be a useful site and will be more likely to send visitors to it. If you have few visitors, Google will do the reverse and not send many people to you. This means an important part of the SEO work on your website is to increase the number of visitors to your website. This is as important as content. If your website is beautifully set up for SEO, it still will not do well without visitors. Therefore, you need a plan for getting visitors to the site. This could be done using email marketing, social media or paying for Google Ads.
Web presence and consistency
Your business will have several locations across the web. These could include:
- Your website
- Social Media
- Business directories
- Google Business / Google Maps
- Press articles
Google will look at all of these as part of its assessment of your website. Because of this, it’s good to have a good number of these locations across the web. The locations need to be active, so it’s better to have two social media accounts you use regularly than six that you hardly ever post to.
You must be consistent across all of these channels. So ensure
- Your business name is consistent
- Your logo is consistent
- Your descriptions are similar (no need to be identical)
- You are talking about offering the same services or products
It is very easy to be inconsistent, as, over time, our business changes, and so it can be easy for some of these platforms to be left behind as your business changes. Consistency across these sites is an important part of your SEO.
Finally
Ensure that SEO is right for your business and its marketing plan. If it is, then ensure you know what keywords and phrases you are aiming for. Without this, your SEO is directionless and is unlikely to lead to much success. Then work on your content, visitor numbers and brand consistency across the web.
