Picture this, it may sound familiar…
You’ve had a website built, and you’re happy with the outcome, it looks great and everything is fully functional, however there’s one thing missing, traffic, basically you’ve seen more traffic in the middle of the Sahara! That actually is one of our sayings here at I.T. Smart, what’s the point in building a beautiful fully operational shop in the middle of the desert, in other words a beautiful website that no one can find.
Your website should be on the high street, where people can find you when searching your products or services – the high street being Page 1 of SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), in other words page one of Google.
And in a nutshell that’s exactly what optimising your website does, puts you on page one of Google* when your services or products are being searched for.
*Or other search engines – find out why I intentionally write Google
So if your aim is to gain more customers and sales, increase your audience and get your message out there, then yes, SEO should be your top priority and is completely worthwhile.
But let’s not leave it there, lets dig a little deeper and find out more about SEO…
What is SEO?
In plain English… Search Engine Optimisation is what you need to do on and off your website in order to drive free traffic to your website when people search for your products, services or theme.
Why doesn't my website just show up when people are searching my products?
No one has controls over what and what is not shown on the Search Engine Results pages, like Coca-Cola nobody knows the secret recipe or to be precise the search engine’s algorithm.
However, Google has kindly written a white paper on how your website should be built and labelled so if you haven’t got that right, you will almost certainly not be considered when someone searches for your services or products.
I say “almost certainly” as there are other SEO methods apart from on-page SEO which would help, but these are a bit more out of your control and depend on other websites and people mentioning your brand and linking to your website.
SEO is a tangled twine of marketing processes which is performed on and off your website.
Why tangled? Well some processes overlap other processes including blog posts, social media posts, links to your website and from your website, the threads are endless.
Data is so important...
With all the hours you are putting in, looking at where your traffic is coming from is extremely important, well you wouldn’t paint a bedroom blindfolded, you’d be taking a step back to see what you’ve missed or what needs going over again.
So checking to see what keywords are working through various platforms and going onto Google and searching the keywords you want to rank for is vital.
You then know which products or services needs to more attention.
Which search engines would I be looking to rank on?
The UK's search engine market share in 2022
92% – Google
3.33% – Bing
1.34 – Yahoo
0.97% – YANDEX
0.84% – Baidu
0.71% – DuckDuckGo
It’s not even close!
Google has over 90% of all UK searches. So hence (currently) when setting up your webpages you should be following Google’s white paper guidelines to the letter.
Google wasn’t the first search engine, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo were the big search companies back in the early days of internet, they were just not very good. Google came along and blew them all out of the ground because it was simple to use and worked extremely well and to this day, still does.
If you would like to know more about our SEO services, we offer:
