(Or the dummies guide to SEO)

Do you want to know how to reach MORE customers through your website?

Do you want the tools to understand how well your website is performing?

Follow this easy to read guide to familiarise yourself with the basic principles of how SEO works and what YOU can do with a little knowledge.

We’ll even point you to tools you can access freely online!!

Basically, getting people to your website is meaningless unless you understand how to convert the traffic to a sales funnel. A little understanding of how to optimise traffic through SEO, online tools, social media, blog posts etc can go a long way.

So, first some basics to understand.

You can drive traffic to your website in two ways.

One, you can use free tools such as search engine optimisation (SEO), write blogs, social media posts. Or you can use paid ads which work but at a cost financially.  Once you start to pay for ads you then you need to understand conversion rates and how much each sale is costing by tracking the clicks (pay per click-PPC).

Right, from the beginning then what is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is a digital marketing strategy, it uses search engines (like Google) to find your website.  By understand how SEO works, you can use a range of tricks to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.

There are three main parts of SEO to familiarise yourself with for an effective organic (non paid) search strategy.  These are:

• technical SEO
• on-page SEO
• off-page SEO

Let’s briefly go through each one, how they can help your marketing strategy and breakdown what you can do today.

Why do you need to know ‘the technical stuff?’

Because we all use search engines to find what we’re looking for.  So if you want to provide an answer-be it to a service, a product or information then every website owner needs search engine optimisation.  Fact.

Essentially:

SEO drives Google to consider your website a quality source which will then rank it higher for your search results.

So, you don’t need to master the details of algorithms used but you should know the key elements.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO (as the name suggests) is all about the technical side and a very basic understanding will potentially mean the difference between a high ranking website and one which fails to rank.

Google’s job is to provide the best possible experience for its users in the shortest possible time by using many varied factors.  Factors like how fast a page loads, if the search engine understands your site and what it represents.  The technical side is vital if you want to reap higher ranking rewards. It wants to send people to the right place, everytime.

But we are impatient so your site has to be FAST, easy to use and secure.

I promised you some tools so here goes for the technical side.

GTmetrix is one of the tools used to get detailed reports on website performance. It’s a free website speed and performance testing tool.

Screaming frog is a site audit tool which audits for common SEO issues.  It’s free to download and crawl 500 URLs (Uniform Resource Locator commonly known as a web address).

On-page SEO

The first step is to carefully choose the keywords that will create content that give the answers to Google searches.

This is all about the content on your webpages.  Good content will help search engines understand your website and recognise it as a source others will want to find.  So, focus on:

• Finding the best keywords to target on a page
• Use these keywords to create valuable content

Because quality content is king so choose wisely!

For further support checkout these websites!!

Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that generates new keyword and content ideas and lets you to look at the approaches that others are using thus allowing you to stay ahead of the competition.

Google analytics tracks website traffic and gives you a wealth of data about how your website’s performing-it helps you to understand where the traffic is coming from and how it’s converting into sales.  It even shows you which channels on your site are working the hardest.

Finally … there’s

Off-page SEO

This connects to anything that’s happening outside your website which will impact your search engine rankings eg any other websites/posts that link in to yours-maybe through blogs or social media.  This essentially creates backlinks which link from a page on one website to another thus creating confidence in a website. So quality backlinks will gain your website authority. Perfect!

And for yet more available help:

Google My Business (GMB) creates a free local online listing for your business and because it’s provided by Google it offers visibility!

Ahrefs.com

This site includes alerts which will keep you notified of new & lost backlinks.

So take advantage of these online tools and check out these sites because understanding SEO will transform your business.

For further friendly help, guidance or advice get in touch with us at info@norfolk.agency.