Why do I need SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?
Did you know that 75% of Internet users never click beyond the first few pages of search results?
That means that if your website doesn’t appear on the first few pages of search results, 75% of people searching for your products or services will struggle to find you.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means optimizing your website to make it be one of the first results Google shows when people enter certain search words or phrases. SEO is no longer an option! In fact, it’s one of the most important business investments you can make. That’s because organic search traffic is a proven driver of business growth.
Google consider over 400 ‘signals’ which determine where your site will appear on search page results. Google does not disclose what these signals are, their exact formula is a secret. Good SEO companies rely on the skills and experience of their engineers to determine what those signals are, the weight they carry and how they can be best used to yield higher rankings, ranking your website site ahead of your competition.
This is not to be confused with PPC.
What’s the difference between SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click)?
SEO refers to ‘organic’ search traffic, while PPC (Pay-Per-Click) refers to ‘paid’ search results.
When one perfoms a Google search you get result pages which contain both organic SEO results and PPC paid results. Google’s algorythms determine what gets served and in what order. Almost all the revenue Google make is from PPC. It is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to be noticed online without paying Google for the privilege.
You pay Google to put your ads based on what keywords people are searching for. The only competition you have is determined by how much someone else is prepared to pay for the placements of those ads. It’s a simple formula and it works like an auction. If you want to appear on the first Page of Google’s results, you simply need to outbid what your competitors are prepared to pay to get preference.
This may sound like a great deal, but the fact is that 82% of clicks are on organic links, while just 18% are on the Pay-Per-Click results. The cost of keywords is anywhere between $1 and $20+ per click and the winners are usually companies with the highest marketing budgets.
This is why, in most cases, we recommend SEO over PPC.
If SEO isn’t PPC, then what is SEO?
SEO is all of the things your web engineer will do to your website to help it rank higher on the page in search engines like Google and Bing. It starts by doing exhaustive keyword research and competition analysis to come up with a list of search terms for your content. Using these keywords, we optimize the back-end code of your site, write tags, descriptions and headlines for your content, create new pages incorporating your search terms, optimize your existing content for search terms etc. We then use this list as input to a 400+ point checklist to come up with a tactical plan.
This tactical plan outlines activities that need to be performed, on a recurring basis, to help your site climb in search rankings. Your site will be seen by more people and subsequently, drive more sales leads.
Can you just “SEO” a site once and be done?
Not if you want it to continue to rank well for your search terms. You may see an initial spike when you first make a major investment in SEO, but it won’t last unless you have an ongoing, tactical plan and content creation strategy in place. Every month you should be adding fresh content to your site because Google rewards websites which continually post new and engaging content such as blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, videos and info-graphics.
Ranking higher in search engines is one of the most critical ways to increase website traffic and increase exposure of your products and services to people who are searching for what you have to offer.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can put the web to work for you with SEO, check out our SEO services page.
