Intro to SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is the process by which we take a website and optimise it for the purposes of its discoverability, crawlability, indexation and finally and most importantly ranking. Search Engine Optimisation in 2022 is absolutely essential for your business or your website to stand any chance of gaining organic traffic in its given market. SEO is an ever-evolving process but fundamentally comes down to three core pillars:
- Technical SEO which is about how a site is structured and built from a development standpoint to be friendly to search engine crawlers such as Google or Bing
- Unique content is vital for your ranking potential if you don’t have any content Google don’t see any good reason to serve your content in there and X over and above your competitors
- Links coming to the site from other websites. Pagerank was the original USP of Google and in effect it operates as a voting system to dictate which pages are the best on the basis of how many links they receive from their peers, their competitors and other websites. PageRank is now not as important as it was originally in 2001 but it is still an absolutely vital part of your ability to be able to rank for any of your priority keywords.
Who Is SEO for?
SEO is an absolutely essential process for any business to undertake right at the beginning of its product development or website development process. Building SEO principles in right from the outset saves a lot of time in cleaning up incorrect implementation
Google prioritise the experience of the user over and above everything else. Google at it’s heart is a business that want to serve its customers and make a profit. Even though Google is free , as the saying goes
'If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold'
Where to start with SEO
The best place to start in SEO is to do some competitor analysis and market research. Keep in mind the 4ps
- product
- price
- place
- promotion
This is very very important in the initial phases of SEO. Understanding your own business as well as the competitive market allows you to make informed decisions before you build a website or write anything. Many businesses are not in the position to be able to start again, or are too far down the line for this approach. In that instance, market research is still very important but you need to work with the site that you have. Key areas to consider at the outset
- Is your site mobile-friendly? (check here)
- Can it easily be discovered by search engines and has it been? A great way to test this is to do a site: search and see how many results appear for your website
This will give you an indication as to whether your site is discoverable up or not from this point you can understand whether you have either a at discoverability issue or two to a content problem
If you have a content problem, it’s time to start writing…