As a marketing agency, our job can sometimes be challenging to describe. Do we post pictures to Facebook or like our clients’ Tweets? The role of “marketer” has advanced massively even in the last 10 years, with entire teams being dedicated to it. One aspect of marketing that has seeped its way into roles such as content creator, web development and even content writing is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Today, we’re going to discuss SEO for beginners in a way that anyone can understand!
What is SEO?
The easiest way to understand what SEO is is by breaking its words down. Search Engine Optimisation is the act of optimising your content for search engines. It’s as simple as that! Search engines are sites where you can enter search queries. The most significant search engines are Google, then Bing and then Yandex. YouTube is technically the second-largest search engine, with 122 million active users daily! SEO aims to get your website, blog post, or video to rank on a search engine. Your ranking refers to your position in the search results for a given query. We often measure this by how far down the page you appear, or the number of pages it takes until your content pops up.
How does SEO work?
Now that you understand what SEO is, let’s discuss how optimising your site for search engines can boost its visibility. Imagine that you have started a brand new website today. It’s completely fresh and has been let out into the wilderness of the internet. How long do you think it will take for your business to rank on Google without SEO? The reality is, it could take weeks! When you type anything into Google, bots called Crawlers search the internet for the pages that will best suit your query. If your brand-new website is bare bones and isn’t optimised for Google, then it won’t rank your page very highly, as chances are, there will be older, better websites there with more authority. Authority is how the crawlers assess how good a site is. Here are a few things the crawlers look for:
- Relevant links
- Title and Heading tags
- Meta descriptions
- Content
- User experience (website speed, text size, UI, mobile-friendlyness)
There are many more variables that the Google crawlers look into, but these are the essential things that you can optimise for your site today.
Where Can I Use SEO?
The most common reason people get into SEO is to optimise their business or organisation’s website, so that it gets more traffic from web searches. However, it isn’t just clicks on a website that can improve your authority online. Making sure blog posts have been correctly optimised for search is essential, as blogs are a great way to use SEO techniques such as tagging, keywords and links. Similar techniques can be used for YouTube, the second-largest search engine in the world. YouTube is supported by sites such as VidIQ that give you live rankings for how well your video has been optimised for things such as title, descriptions and video tags.
Who can do SEO?
In truth, anyone can perform the basics of SEO, as shown by the recent boom in SEO by small businesses. However, to get the most out of optimising your site, you’ll want to hire professionals. A digital marketing agency or web designer can analyse where your site is falling short and make the necessary amendments to get your ranking on Google. Now, just because it may have seemed quick to optimise a site, it doesn’t mean it’s quick to see results! We usually work in 3 month intervals, as that is normally the amount of time you can see any measuable change due to SEO, or any form of marketing. The content needs to be out there long enough for people to see your website, building up authority for web crawlers to even begin seeing your site as an option for search queries.
Get in Touch
There are many more involved aspects to SEO that we haven’t covered here that take it to a professional level of understanding. This guide is here to answer to basics of SEO. If you’re looking to improve your visibility online then get in touch with us. We’ve built sites and seen great success in our web clients, seeing more clicks and more enquiries via our SEO work. Get in touch if you want to chat about how we can help you promote your business online.