There’s a lot of talk about SEO but what are the important things about this discipline that business and website owners need to know? We discuss; 4 Things Business Owners Should Know About SEO Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the dynamic process of enhancing websites to achieve their full potential in search engine results pages (SERPs), driving greater visibility, traffic, and success for businesses. We say both art and science because whilst SEO is primarily a data-led process, involving algorithms and mathematics, research, data analysis, and technical optimisation, it is also an artform. Our digital marketing agency’s SEO experts are extremely creative, producing high-quality content that is engaging, relevant, and original; We need to be able to attract as well as retain your website’s visitors and users. Also, we need to look at user behaviour, “get into their heads”, understand and match their search intent to their expectations. At the same time, it is our agency’s responsibility to merge these approaches into something that ultimately works well for your business. SEO is no mean feat. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at a handful of things that business owners should know about SEO. 1. Web Design and SEO Go Hand-in-Hand We’ve spoken about this before and we’ll say it again because it is so important – website design and SEO can be but really should not be mutually exclusive. Web design and SEO are the absolute perfect bedfellows. Look at it this way… Have you ever had someone design your business the most beautiful looking website? You’ve shown it to your team, all your staff and management love the new web design, and you go live only to realise after a few months that… there’s no traffic, no engagement, and no conversions! Not only is that a huge disappointment but it doesn’t make any business sense. You paid good money to a creative agency to design something beautiful but that’s as far as it goes. Now what happens when you ask your friendly neighbourhood digital marketing agency to look at the same website? They’ll probably agree that your new site does indeed look very beautiful, but… Does your website load quickly? Are the image file sizes too large? Is the design and layout too complex for modern web browsers and mobile devices? Does it even look good on mobile? You did check all that didn’t you? We haven’t even mentioned the user experience or the content, let alone the performance in search, but that’s why your company must use an agency that is both highly experienced in website design and SEO experts too. By having a team of specialist web design and SEO professionals on your project, you’ll get both a great-looking functional website that attracts visitors and drives calls and conversions. That’s Clever Marketing. 2. Traffic Increases are Good, but Relevance is Better How often have you seen boasts about traffic volumes? Your SEO people say they will “skyrocket” the number of visitors, or “supercharge” your results? These are all typical sales tactics to make businesses think that SEO is “the magic bullet” that will unlock your website’s full potential. It’s true, SEO can get excellent results, but like all things, should not be touted as some sort of miracle. SEO is a serious discipline that takes years of experience to master and requires patience to see the business benefits. Promising huge traffic increases can be both misleading and irresponsible. “Better content is outweighing more content” – Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz Better still, working with an agency that is honest with you about what can be achieved is the best thing for your business. It’s easy to show increasing traffic for irrelevant keywords that provide no benefit to your business other than just sheer numbers. The hard but rewarding work comes with dealing in highly competitive terms that require monumental amounts of brainpower and effort to drive up the ranks and beat your bigger competitors. These are the terms that are highly relevant to your business, the ones that are at the core of your commercial existence – these are the things that you do best and when you embed your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness into your content, your webpages, and your wider website, then you will get the relevant rank, clicks, readers, leads, and sales. Ultimately, what your business needs is quality over quantity, every time, and that’s what a good SEO company like Clever Marketing does best. We have case studies where we’ve achieved 300% traffic growth, but the best examples are where your website has more relevant visits because those are the people who are more likely to convert. 3. SEO is an Ongoing Process Ever heard anyone say that they’ll “just put SEO on your website”? SEO isn’t an object or an item. It is not a plugin or an hour’s work. SEO is not “fire and forget”, you don’t just do it once and then never again. SEO is an ongoing process. When our team first looks at your website design, we “do SEO” from the very beginning. We look at every aspect of your site from: Good SEO involves setting up all the crucial tools that help us do optimisation better, including the usual Google Analytics, but also Tag Manager, Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and all the hidden tags that help you build audiences on LinkedIn and Facebook. Our SEO experts look at your business, your assets, where you are and what you do. They create a long-term SEO strategy and then embark upon tactical changes to start your journey to success in search. “SEO is a journey, not a destination.” – Danny Sullivan, Google Search Liaison SEO involves initial keyword research and ongoing analysis. We conduct on-page SEO, technical SEO, local SEO, optimise content and ecommerce sites. And when we’ve worked on your website for a month, we analyse the data again, continue to monitor your traffic, your rankings, clicks and conversions. Then we
