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Setting Yourself up For SEO Success
Over the last year, you might have heard a lot about SEO. Let’s face it, it’s a bit of a business buzzword. Most business owners have heard of it in one way or another, and most marketing agencies will offer services to help you improve it, or at least understand it a little better. You might have even met one of the true SEO gurus who really understand what SEO is, and the whole big, messy web of things it includes.
But it’s much more than just a buzzword. If you’ve not been using SEO to increase sales and profitability in your business, you’ve missed a trick, and you need to get yourself set up for SEO success in 2022. Here we will help you create an SEO strategy to help you achieve results online!
What is SEO Anyway?
If we go right back to basics, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This might not be that enlightening, but essentially it means the practice of tinkering and adjusting your website and other online profiles to generate more traffic – and better quality traffic – to your website through organic search results. There are many ways you could get users to your website, but SEO tends to focus on organic traffic coming through search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Yes, some people do still use Bing!
How Does SEO Work?
Though you may think of Google as the mysterious genie that can answer all of your questions, there’s a lot that goes into assembling that magical list of search results. Google is always sending out little software robots (they call them spiders) to scour the web and find all the pages that exist. They find new sites through links, and whenever they find a new page, they analyse and index it. They try to understand the content they find by looking at page titles, keywords, formatting, and structure, and give it a rank. When a relevant search query comes up for the content of that page, it will be displayed based on how relevant it is. Google uses around 200 ranking factors to decide where pages land in search results. That’s a lot to try and manage, but SEO helps you tick a lot of the boxes and get your pages landing much higher in the results.
Setting Yourself up Right
Good SEO starts with good groundwork – and that means having a strategy. There are a lot of different methods you could use here depending on personal preference, but we recommend going with something tried and true, especially if it’s your first foray into SEO. The method we like to use includes 5 stages, each of which has its own set of steps:
Research
- Define your goals
- Identify your keywords
- Assess your competition
- Create a strategy that will help you meet those goals
Audit
- Repair any crawlability problems on your site
- Resolve indexation issues
- Improve accessibility and speed
- Audit applicable elements
Optimise
- Resolve site-wide optimisation issues
- Create and optimise content
- Improve content elements
- Optimise for local components
Amplify
- Analyse backlink profiles
- Research further backlink opportunities
- Conduct outreach activities
- Manage all social profiles
Iterate
- Measure increases and decreases in traffic and ranking
- Reporting
- Revise strategy based on reports and rankings
Follow these steps, and you have a lot of your SEO strategy covered.
Where most people tend to go wrong is skipping the first few and going right to the ‘optimise’ step, mainly because it contains the more high-profile actions and they think that’s where the real action is. But while there is a lot of value there, they are still just one piece of a much bigger puzzle! Instead, focus on each step in turn, and make sure you don’t skip the research and audit stages, as these are the ones that will give you the most information and solid foundations to build on.
Don’t Neglect Your Content
Of all the tools you have to support your SEO success, your content is absolutely essential. Google absolutely loves new content, and with every new piece of content you upload you’re increasing your chances of ticking those SEO boxes and moving up the page rank. But putting any old content out there won’t do much either – you need a content strategy that goes alongside your SEO strategy, giving you the fuel you need for that success. This is something we’ve talked about a fair bit before, so click here to find out more about creating a content marketing strategy.
Do Your Keyword Research
One of the biggest elements of SEO success is doing good keyword research. Just throwing any old keywords into your website and Google Ads might get you some results, but it will always be minimal compared to those who have really done their homework. Keyword research might take you some time, but doing it means you will be able to create targeted content for your website and use your SEO tools to their full effect, giving you more success in the process. There are dozens of great tools you can use for keyword research, so have a play and find one that works for you.
Keeping up
If there is one thing that Google is known for, it’s making changes. They are well known for being at the cutting edge of technology, mainly because of the huge volumes of data they collect every single second of the day. Google uses all of this new data to tweak and change their algorithms, which in turn affects your SEO efforts. Google makes around 9 changes to its algorithms per day, but most of these are small tweaks you probably wouldn’t notice. They also roll out major algorithmic changes fairly regularly, and this is what you really need to pay attention to. The last major update came in October 2019 in the form of BERT, and more changes are on the horizon. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to keep an ear to the ground on what Google is doing, and be prepared to adjust your strategy to match it.
In today’s world, not having an online presence simply isn’t an option. But in a world where every single business has an online presence, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. At Lion Spirit Media, we provide a detailed and bespoke SEO service guaranteed to appeal to Google and get your voice heard. From roaring content writing to website audits, meta descriptions, keyword research, and optimised product descriptions, we can provide you with everything you need to make sure your business is the loudest and most visible online. For more information, click here, or get in touch to book your free consultation and get your foot in the Google door.
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