A quick myth debunked – “Will SEO get my website to the top of Google?”.
That’s just not the point.
True story. We once had a client boasting/complaining that he had come from an agency where he had just spent £10,000 to get the term “printed latex balloons” to the top of Google.
You could hear the tumbleweed rolling.
So, we went off and checked (we have the tools to check) and counted the number of people who had searched for “printed latex balloons” in the previous month.
It was quite a round number.
The point is, given enough time and money, you could probably get anything to the top of Google.
But if you start in the wrong place, you’ll more than likely climb the wrong mountain. And, after all that effort and expense (and frostbite), you’ll probably find no customers up there to greet you.
So Just What is SEO?
Put simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is using marketing and technical practices to maximise profitable website traffic.
It is definitely not a quick fix or suitable for a short term solution. SEO is a medium to long term strategy which takes time. The rewards of which are rankings in the natural search results of Google where all the clicks are free so you don’t require having a budget in place to remain visible to the Search Engine Results Page.
By working on the tags, titles and other parts of a web page which send signals to Google (and other search engines). SEO makes the optimised content more prominent. It makes your site more rankable by search engines when it is laid out in the right way.
Site speed will make a significant difference to how well your site will rank on Google.
Don’t be printed latex balloon man. It’s also a good idea to have an SEO professional to conduct keyword research. This will ascertain whether there is any search volume behind the choice keywords that you have in mind. SEO companies have online tools which allow such analysis. We can report to you on how many times that keyword is searched in a given timeframe. You can also get a Difficulty Score – how difficult it will be to rank for the keywords.
With those two metrics you can look for ‘low hanging fruit’. That is terms which relate to your business which are attracting plenty of search volume but for which your competitors are not yet providing matches.
SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC)
SEO can also compliment other activities within Digital Marketing such as Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising.
If a PPC landing page is fully optimised using SEO tactics, this can lead to an enhanced Quality Score. This score is a factor Google uses when calculating click costs. The more appropriate the ad is for a page, the lower the click cost. A higher quality score means lower click cost. The Quality Score is doing to heavy lifting, so avert only appears on the most relevant search pages.
So when creating a page for your website, it’s a great idea to optimise it for search engines so it ranks in the natural search. Then, if you want to have instant gratification and to land traffic on that page faster, the smart move is to land PPC ads onto the page to drive further traffic and garner quicker results.
Please do get in touch if you want to know more about SEO, PPC or any aspect of Digital Marketing.