Even if you receive most of your website traffic and sales from paid advertising, there is no rational reason why you should ignore free traffic from search engines. To take advantage of this free traffic however, you need to come up to speed on search engine optimisation (SEO).
Here is a short primer on SEO for business owners, so you can start taking advantage of free traffic on your website.
Why is SEO important to my business?
SEO is a strategy where you optimise your website for search engines. This can be Google, Yahoo or Bing, for example, but since the biggest search engine is Google, this is usually where you’ll want to focus your time and efforts.
When someone types a search term into Google (such as “plumbers in Brisbane”), it goes off to find the websites that are the most relevant. Google ranks these websites on the search engine results pages in order of relevance, along with how recent the information is, how popular the website is, site loading speed, and countless other factors. SEO is the best way to make your website’s pages appear higher in the results.
What exactly is SEO?
SEO is comprised of a number of strategies all meant to optimise your web pages for search engines. This includes “on-page” and “off-page” SEO, both of which Google looks at when it decides whether or not your website is legitimate and relevant to the search terms entered.
On-page SEO refers to the different elements of your web pages that affect your rankings in the serps, such as speed, ease of use, accessibility, standards-compliant coding, and more. Off-page SEO focuses on promoting the content of your website throughout the internet, such as by adding your site to business listings, review sites, forums, blogs, and so on.
SEO is a very detailed and time-consuming process, so it’s not something the average business owner would want to handle directly. An SEO specialist is well and truly the way to go, unless you have abundant amounts of free time.
How do I get started?
The best place to start is with your on-page SEO and making sure that your content is optimised for both search engines and for your visitors. So this includes doing some keyword research, then sprinkling these keywords throughout your website content, adding informative videos, writing a blog, and including interesting images as well.
There is so much more to SEO, so if you want to increase your chance of being found on page 1 of Google, call us for a chat at GO Creative on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.
