Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – longevity and survival for your business

Search engine marketing consists of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – organic search – and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising – paid advertising.

SEO has nothing to do with paid adverts or “sponsored links”. SEO is all about ranking your website among the organic search results rather than paying to appear in the sponsored adverts.

The first point that needs to be made is that SEO is not an exact science and that results will not be realised overnight. SEO is about investing in time and effort, rather than money, to achieve the best results. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! do not make known the algorithms they use to calculate the order of search results. Instead, we employ a process of hard work, experience and knowledge sharing in the internet community to understand what works and what doesn’t work in an attempt to reverse-engineer the search engine algorithm.

If this is not making much sense yet, please read on. It’ll all become a lot clearer.

There are three primary steps to future proofing your SEO and ultimately future proofing your business:

Technical

This step involves the fundamental concepts that need to be implemented to improve the longevity of your website. For example, you need to be looking at your content and the keywords that it contains. Think about the search terms your customers will be using to find your products and services – your content needs to talk about this. Often, one product or service will have relative products and services that you can cross sell. Provide links in your content to these other pages on your site to improve internal linking.

To structure your site in a format that search engines and humans can read you’ll need to implement semantic HTML. Without getting technical, semantic HTML focuses on the content structure that you should expect but seldom get. For example, content titles, headings, paragraphs, clean URL’s and so on.

Once the technical side of your website has been implemented there will be little to go back to in future. A little investment in getting this stage right – the bones of your site – will provide a longer life for your website.

Content

Often, in a swamped market place, the same information can be found across multiple sites, on the websites of your competitors. When creating your content you need to consider uniqueness, information that can only be found on your website. A great way to do this is to use your own data and experiences and share it with your customers. If your content is interesting, provide users with the facility to share the content. This is a great way to cast your net wider and attract more qualified visitors.

To make your website attractive to customers it needs to provide them with real value. When they visit your site they’re looking for a solution. That solution could be a gift, an answer to a pub quiz, software or services that reduce their overheads. Make sure your content is easily read and understood, not monotonous and full of terms that normal customers will not understand and be put off by. When a person visits your site, that’s your opportunity to welcome them, provide them with the answers they’re seeking and convert them from a visitor into a customer.

Marketing

We’ve all heard of Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg, forums and blogs but are you using them to the benefit of your business. These social networking and bookmarking sites can all be used to your advantage, to build a community around your business, your content, and attract customers and back-links – links back into your website.

Email marketing is another medium that, if done well, can provide massive paybacks. There are a number of companies who see huge spikes in traffic and conversions after sending a well formatted email to their customer base.

Of course, to understand how well your website is performing and to understand the areas in which it needs to be improved requires statistics. Google Analytics is a free service that can be implemented into your site to provide accurate, in-depth analysis of your traffic and how people are using, or not using, your website.

Search engine optimisation is a great way to spend your money wisely if you’re planning for long term sustainability rather than quick returns. Paid advertising is becoming more expensive as more businesses look for quick results and this will impact on their ROI. Investing in a longer term strategy with SEO will help you realise a far better ROI.

Search engines provide your customers with a route to your online business. However, they also provide this same service to your competitors. What you need to do is understand your products and services, understand what your customers are looking for and implement this as an SEO strategy.

SEO can seem a daunting task, particularly if you’re new to this. Mancala are a friendly bunch and we love discussing internet marketing. If you’ve a question about this or would like to know how it can be implemented for your business, give us a call. We’d love to help you prepare your business for long term survival and long lasting profitability.

Call or email us today on 0191 241 6726 or emailus@mancala.co.uk