SEO FAQs March 2020

Put simply, SEO is a process that forms part of a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimising a website to make it more visible in search engine results pages (i.e. in Google search results) with the goal of driving organic traffic to the website. Organic traffic is driven to a website from clicks on these search results.

Organic traffic is natural in the sense that it is earned rather than paid for, but to be successful, you still need to invest a lot of time and resource in SEO. Search engines have got better at identifying the intent of search queries which makes choosing the right keywords to drive traffic even more important. Because organic traffic is not paid for, once an SEO strategy takes effect and visibility increases, a website will see growth in this channel. More visibility = more traffic = more potential customers = more potential revenue. But it’s not just about getting ANY traffic to a website. If it’s not good quality traffic, there is no value in it. So don’t ever pay anyone who claims that they can deliver thousands of visitors to your website overnight!

SEO takes time because there is no longer an easy way to game the system. Search engine algorithms have become more and more advanced with an emphasis on delivering users the most relevant, and highest quality results based on their search query. Whereas when SEO began all it took was stuffing a webpage with your chosen keyword and pointing as many links as possible to it to see fast results, things have changed – drastically. And deploying tactics like this in 2019 are likely to be doing far more harm than good in the long term.

On-page SEO relates to any action taken on the website itself to improve performance. This includes: Using optimised content that contains target keywords (including meta, headers, images)Making sure that the site is accessible (can be crawled and indexed by search engines) and can be easily navigated by usersUsing internal links (in menus, body copy, and breadcrumbs to aid navigation)Ensuring that a website loads quicklyKeeping crawl errors to a minimumHaving a site that is optimised for mobileNot having duplicate (same content on more than one page), or thin content (low word count), or making sure these pages cannot be accessed and indexed by search enginesUsing clean, descriptive, static URLs with a structure that follows the same structure as the site.

People often ask ‘how do I rank higher on Google?’ or ‘what affects SEO rankings?’ But only Google algorithms know exactly what factors determine how well a page ranks (how visible it is and what determines its position) in search results – in fact, there are reportedly over 200 ranking factors!

Without the right keywords, you’ll really struggle to drive valuable traffic to a website! However, choosing the right keywords can be difficult, especially if your business operates in a competitive niche. This is why keyword research is so important. Any SEO agency worth its salt will use multiple tools to identify target keywords, assess how competitive they are, and make suggestions of which pages target keywords should appear on.

There are a few basic rules that you should follow when writing SEO friendly copy – but optimisation should never be done at the expense of user experience.

Again, algorithms will determine what has caused a spike in traffic before assessing whether this is a signal that your site has something users are finding to be valuable. Did an authoritative site share a piece of content you created which resulted in a bump in referral traffic? Or was it a load of bots or spammers that have been paid to Google your business over and over and over again and click the result to artificially inflate the traffic to your site? Exactly how much traffic affects rankings will never really be proven, but there are a few case studies out there that suggest there is perhaps some correlation.

To sum it up, SEO is difficult because search engines are always changing and updating. It could be anything from Google changing the way it looks at a certain type of link, including a new major update to their algorithm, or even recognizing something new as a ranking factor.

Essentially, SEO reports are used to inform clients, colleagues or stakeholders on how a website is performing in search engine results.