A website without a solid search engine optimisation strategy is like a billboard in the desert — even though it’s there, will anyone see it?
The truth is your website needs a bit of technical TLC to attract valuable visitors and ensure it ranks highly across search engines for the terms and phrases you want it to. If you’re not sure what SEO is or what goes into it, there’s no need to fret — we’ve put together this handy guide to help you out.
What is SEO?
Put simply, SEO is the practice of optimising your website to improve its quantity and quality of traffic through organic search engine results. The goal is to rank highly for terms and phrases relevant to your industry that people will be searching for, so they land on your website instead of your competitor’s. Let’s break that down:
Quality of traffic
Think of your website as a physical store. Even though people are walking through the door, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will purchase anything — maybe the name of the store piqued their interest but the products weren’t what they were looking for, or they simply thought the shop sold something else.
Your website is the same. If Google tells visitors you sell Apple products when you really sell apple pies, they will leave your website pretty quickly because they’re not interested — not to mention confused at the sight of baked goods when they wanted a computer! You want to attract engaged visitors who are genuinely looking for the products and services you offer.
Quantity of traffic
More quality traffic means a better chance of securing leads, which means more sales. While SEO covers all search engines, in practice, the majority of traffic comes from Google. According to Statista, as of June 2021, Google held the largest global market share by a mile at a whopping 87.76 per cent. This compares to Microsoft Bing at 5.56 per cent and Yahoo! at 2.71 per cent. A little more locally, Statista also found as of April 2021, 90.23 per cent of Australian searches were made via Google.
This means that now, more than ever, it’s absolutely critical that your website’s SEO strategy is in tip-top shape.
Organic results
If you search for a product on Google, chances are you’ve seen results with ‘Ad’ next to them, or even photos of the item you’re looking for. These are Google Ads, which you set up through Google — or Studio22! — and pay a fee for. As you’re investing money with Google, they will prioritise the delivery of these ads in their search results.
The other search results you see beneath these ads are organic. In this sense, it means these search results are free — this is SEO. Although you’re not paying Google to show your website, for it to rank well on search engines you will need a strong SEO strategy to get there. As SEO is a highly technical and complex practice, it’s something best left to professionals. Studio22’s team of SEO specialists have been in the industry for over 10 years and know their backlinks from their anchor text. Our business-first approach means we will devise a bespoke strategy perfectly suited to your industry, business goals, growth plans and budget.
How does it work?
SEO sounds like a mystical art form. In a way, it is — search engines like Google aren’t exactly forthcoming in announcing the secrets to their practices and algorithm, otherwise every website’s SEO strategy would be perfect.
Although there are a lot of unknowns, we do know how search engines work, and what they like and don’t like in a website. Every search engine features something called a crawler, which traverses hundreds of billions of web pages to collect all the content it possibly can and bring it back to search engine HQ to build an index. An algorithm then sorts through this index to try and match the information to your search query as best as it can.
These algorithms are extremely complex and are always being updated to improve search accuracy and relevancy — as well as keep SEO specialists on their toes! It’s estimated that Google changes its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times a year, which is somewhere between once and twice a day.
While a lot of these changes are relatively minor, occasionally Google will release a major update that significantly changes the SEO landscape. Studio22 keeps its finger on the technical pulse and tracks the updates that matter, so you can rest assured your website’s performance won’t falter.
Where do the optimisations come in?
We’ve looked at the ‘search’ and ‘engine’ of SEO, so now it’s time for the final step: ‘optimisation’. These are just some of the steps Studio22 utilises when crafting the perfect SEO strategy for your business.
Keyword research
First things first, we need to identify the terms your customers and prospects are searching for — these are keywords. Once we know what they are, we can work on ensuring your website ranks for them when someone searches for them on Google.
Content creation
Once we have our keywords, we get to the fun part: writing content! Google likes informative, longer content that’s totally unique. We will write this and ensure it includes the juicy, high-quality and relevant keywords you want to be ranking for.
On-page optimisation
There are a lot of technicalities when it comes to on-page optimisation, but the standard elements are incorporating title tags, writing meta descriptions, alt attributes and optimising your website’s URL structure. Once that’s taken care of, we go a step further and add schema markup, which helps Google understand your page’s content better.
Link building
Links are a crucial part of any SEO strategy. They can be links within your own website (internal linking) and links from other high-quality websites to yours (backlinking). Google and other search engines essentially consider links as “votes of confidence”, so they will perceive your website to be authoritative, trustworthy and important.
So, what now ?
Every business can benefit from a sophisticated SEO strategy that is unique to them and evolves at the same rate as Google. Studio22 will get to know your business, identify the best strategy to get your website to the top, and then implement a results-driven campaign. Our bespoke, business-first approach makes our SEO services pretty special. Get in touch with us today to find out more.