A website ranked on the first page of search engines in their areas of choice is vital to attract the most customers. Most people do not go past the first few pages when searching so it is important to rank as high as possible. The task of maximising the number of visitors to a webpage by getting a high-ranking placement on search engines is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short). Improving the SEO of a website is often seen as an organic way of advertising.
Why is SEO important?
Search Engine Optimisation is a cost-effective way of increasing traffic to your website. Most importantly good SEO can help your website to be found by potential customers. If your SEO isn’t as good as competitors you may find your page on the later pages of a search. This is bad for your company with most people not normally going past the first 3 pages of a search you restrict the number of people that will use your website.
How can you improve your SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation works on a formula of ‘Quality + Relevance + Context = Content Visibility’. If the quality, relevance & context to the search in question are all in good order the content will rank higher on search engines. All of these parts are as important as the rest as they all contribute to an SEO ranking equally.
Quality
The quality of the content on the webpage comes down to how well written it is. This includes the content being clear and free of grammatical errors. The content in question should be easy to read and not confuse readers. Spam ridden content will not reflect good on the SEO ranking so this type of content should be avoided.
Relevance
Relevance is based on what the webpage offers. If it fulfills a want or need, answers a question or solves a problem it will rank higher. Depending on what the context is compared to the points mentioned previous if it fulfills it’s purpose it will rank higher. If a question is searched and the webpage answers it, while competitors may not, then your webpage will rank higher and most likely get the most traffic.
Context
The context of the webpage mainly comes down to it being factual to the subject at hand as Google will look to punish those who spread false information. As well as it being factual they also check if it is on topic to the title of the page itself. Customers will seek out information relevant to what they want so if the information in question isn’t on topic competitors will rank higher.
There are still other issues to consider as well as just the three mentioned above. One of the main things would be to make sure that your website is responsive to appear on every screen size possible. Mobile searches will remove those websites that do not have webpages optimised for mobile. This is important as mobile searches are beginning to overtake desktop searches so you could lose a large portion of your customers due to your site not displaying as good as possible on mobile. As well as this it is important for content to be original and well written. While Google has stated on multiple occasions it does not punish websites for copying content, it instead looks to reward those websites with unique content as it aims to push new unique content to the top of search rankings.
Another very important part of SEO is to continuously monitor and look at how well your rankings are doing and can be improved.
If you have any questions about how to improve the SEO rank of your company go to the message bar on the bottom left of this page and we will be happy to give some more advice and tips.
