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Above: Man tries to resuscitate donkey, which is easier than SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the fancy way of saying, ‘Where does my website rank in the Google search engine results pages, and how can I improve its position’.
We are all sick of getting spammed about SEO and behalf of SEO I would like to apologise for all the spam, but… there are real reasons to pay attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The best reason is that it is directly related to how much business you can acquire online. The next best reason is that it’s cheaper that just about any other form of marketing. Spend $5000 on radio advertising and when that ad campaign is gone, so is your $5k. Spend $5K on SEO and it’s the investment that keeps on giving. Once you near the top of the Google results, it’s relatively easy to stay there, leads, sales, and new clients will keep on coming.
What is the direct benefit of SEO?
It’s more leads and sales. Google shows us how many people each month search for a particular search term. For example, for the search terms related to ‘hairdressers’ for the Gold Coast, in Queensland, check out the table below.
Using the above example, if your website ranked in first place for the first three terms above you would get roughly 30% of the clicks from the total of those monthly searches coming through to your website. So that would be 880 + 720 + 720 = 2320 X 30% = 696 visitors to your site! That’s every month! 8352 potential clients a year, that’s a lot of haircuts!
What factors affect my websites rank?
Basically, no less than 200 things will affect the ranking of your web page. These vary from, the content on your page, the image tagging, the links from other sites, your social media presence and much more. All you/we can do is to pick off the biggest wins and attempt to fix/optimise those things. To make matters more complicated, Google will never actually tell us directly how their search engine algorithm works. It’s thanks to the links of companies like MOZ, who spend all day everyday researching and testing, that we are able to figure out how to improve the rank of your website. Check their search engine ranking factors below from this page https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors. Thanks MOZ.com for the below, check them out – great company.
You need to work with a full-time SEO person or a company to make any sense of the Search Engine optimisation. There is a lot you can do to help the rank of your own site, but you are better off taking advice from a professional than attempting to understand SEO. Trying to do this yourself makes about as much sense as the image at the start of this blog – a man trying to resuscitate a donkey! (Apparently, the donkey isn’t really dead – nice!)
How can I see where my website is ranking in Google?
Most SEO companies use some sort of rank tracking software that checks the rank of your website on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Below is an example of a website that Moxwai have Search Engine Optimised for terms relating to ‘surfboards’.
The primary keyword above is ‘surfboards NZ’ which receives 590 searches a month. Being in first place results in 177 website visitors a month. You can see the site is maintaining the rank, even though the work was done once, therefore it’s a residual return on your investment.
If you want to check the performance of your website yourself, then check this page out:
http://www.whatsmyserp.com/serpcheck.php
You enter your domain, your keywords and it tells you roughly where you rank. Remember to change the search engine option to your country eg: google.com.au for Aussie, or google.co.nz for New Zealand.
How to I get SEO help?
Contact your website designer first and ask them if they do SEO. If they don’t then they might be able to recommend someone. Also, check our SEO page for more info or give us a call for a chat.
Written by: Jeff Sutton
Self-confessed website-aholic and SEO guy.