It all starts with keywords – they are the glue between people searching online and actually finding your website
Firstly and at the foundation, the find-ability of a website is connected to keywords – that is the word/s or phrases that people use to search for a service you have, a product you sell, or for a business like yours.
Identifying keywords that drive traffic and outcomes for your business is the starting point of search marketing.
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Keyword research should consider:
Keyword relevance (how suitable the keywords are for your website/your business/ your target market)
Volume/ quantity – how many searches occur using these keywords, preferably in your chosen location
Realism/ achievability/competitiveness – aim for keywords you have a chance of owning or ranking well in, not just the high volume keywords
Digital Junkies have the best Digital Marketing Team in Australia, seo services gold coast where the Keyword Research and Targeting the market are done by special technical staff.
You should aim for keywords that drive quality outcomes, not quantity or volume based outcomes. It is better to have a keyword that drives moderate traffic and high conversion (such as ‘making an enquiry’) than a keyword that drives twice the amount of traffic but poor conversion or few enquiries.
Testing different keywords and tracking the results to change focus or hone in on the best performing keywords is a fundamental part of the journey in tackling rankings – and things change over time, so the tracking process should be an ongoing activity to ensure the optimal selection of keywords over time.
So keywords are the glue between people searching online and finding your website/ your business, so the crux of SEO is about bringing the two things together.
There are two main categories about your website that influence search rankings.
Making sense of the hundreds of factors that Google and other search engines use to rank websites, consider the principles behind the search engines. To do this, they have a set of criteria that they use to judge a website’s quality. SEO is the process of proving a website is relevant and increasing the chances of a website ranking in the top of a given search result.
The key factors can be divided into two areas:
1) your website or on page/within site components: such as your content, your title / heading tags, your sitemap that is readable to search engines – stuff that is directly on your site.
2) the web or search engines view of your website/ off the page or site factors:such as traffic/ visitors, and external links directing people to your site.
The on page / your site components contribute roughly 25% to driving optimization whereas the off the page factors impact 75% of optimisation results.
However, the two components must work together – great external links to your site will be hindered by a poor on site experience!
The critical factors that drive how your site is optimized by search engines
- The website construct – how well it is put together such as H1 (heading) tags to make your website visible and readable by search engines. You no doubt have heard the term ‘an SEO friendly website’ which effectively means the web system allows the content to be labeled correctly for search engines to identify what it is saying. The main things that enable a site to be ‘SEO friendly’ are:
The addition of page titles, metadata/tags
Keywords noted in metadata fields
Meta descriptions = description of content on the webpage
Additionally, the user appeal of the website also impacts how well the site is graded, which may be indicated by the bounce rate of users visiting your site, the time they spend on your site, how many pages they visit and so on – typical indicators tracked in Google analytics.
- The website content -users, and consequently search engines like:
Fresh/regularly updated content – often through blogs or regular article publishing
Relevant content – targeted to what searchers are looking for and content that is suitable to the keywords people are entering
Unique content – for example content that makes your website better quality than another one
- External/ Inbound Links/ Backlinks – if reputable and popular sites link to yours, search engines see this as a mark of popularity and recognition for your site, and this has a large impact on your site ranking. What’s important includes:
Quality/authoritative & relevant sites linking to yours will drive higher rankings
Social media comes into play here as it enables/creates the potential and likelihood for relevant inbound links to your site (from other people/business blogs and from popular social sites like Facebook)
Don’t waste your time generating links such as online directories with poor visitation. Apparently, these directories as they don’t provide much value in the way of search engine results. Much better results can be gained by generating content that people want to share, rather than a static link on some website.
Understanding how to optimize your site is just half the challenge, taking action to successfully tackle these areas of search optimization is arguably even more challenging!
How can you take action to achieve great SEO outcomes for your site?
If you are like me as a small business owner, you will consider doing it yourself (DIY) because it seems more affordable. But is it? Do you have time to put into this activity, which would likely take 1-2 days per week, especially for the first few months?
So it would be better to hire an affordable SEO company. Digital Junkies, online marketing agency provides the best SEO services at best rates.