There are over 100 Billion searches made on Google alone each month, so the importance of optimising your website for search engines is crucial.
Incorporating Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) into your website helps to increase the chance of making each page on your website an entry point for customers. The majority of users on search engines are most likely to click on one of the top suggestions of results pages, also known as Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is because these are the pages that the user believes are the most trustworthy and relevant sources of information, as Google has shown them to best relate to whatever keyword or phrase has been typed into the search engine.
“the first page of Google captures up to 92% of search traffic clicks” – Moz
Making sure that your website appears in these top results is critical as it is more likely that out of the 100 billion searches a month, it is going to be your website that gets clicked on.Therefore, you must ensure that you maintain monthly SEO tasks so that you can use this to your advantage.
Social Promotion
SEO goes hand in hand with social promotion. When you think about the content marketing process, you need to ensure that the article is well written and optimised for search engines by containing the relevant keywords/phrases. As the next step, you would ensure that the content is promoted across your brand’s social channels in the hope that more users can find the content and click back through to your website.
When it comes to users socially promoting your content, you have to consider how people found your content in the first place. This could either be through one of your own social channels, or it could be via a search engine. Therefore you want to try to ensure that you are ranking high on the search engines for your article’s focus keywords, so you can build up that trust and authority by allowing users to find your content easily, and then be encouraged to share it socially.
Social Channels and Rankings on Search Engines
Links that are published in posts on social media sites will help to drive more traffic from people who are following your social media accounts. These people may also choose to use the content on other channels (for example, referencing the content on a blog site), which would benefit the SEO by generating an organic link back to the website.
Links on websites that you display on your social media platforms will help search engines like Google decide what websites are producing popular content and therefore, figure out what keyword phrases they should be ranked for.
Hootsuite conducted their own experiment to see if social media activity affected the SERPs and found there was
“strong correlation between social activity and rankings”
– Source
This means that the more times a link is shared on a social media platform, the better the website will rank.
Google, however states that it does not incorporate the number of times that a link has been published on social media platforms as a ranking factor. However, social media profiles do rank well in search engines and often appear among the top search results.
If social media accounts come up as one of the top results, people will naturally click on them to find out a bit more about the company. Therefore it is good to keep a strong social presence as this can help build credibility with those viewing your social channels.
Social media platforms also work as their own search engines, as people use them to search for certain businesses, people and general searches like ‘marketing’ or ‘digital’. Users can find your business through social media platforms so it is good to make sure that you have up to date content that is relevant to your audience.
User Experience and Usability
Another reason SEO is important is that it helps improve user experience (UX) and the usability of your site. Google rewards sites that give users a good experience by placing the site at a higher ranking in search engines. So by making your site user-friendly and easy to access it will keep users engaged, and also will in time allow your site to be rewarded by Google.
Quality Over Quantity
Google favours quality over quantity when it comes to your website content. This means that the more focused your website is on producing quality content for your audience, the better the chance it will rank higher in the SERPs.
Cost Effective
SEO can be a very simple and cost-effective form of marketing to implement on your website. The majority of the time, it can cost nothing more than your time to take advantage of certain techniques that can drive traffic to your website.
When someone clicks through to your website following a search, there is a good chance that they are already interested in your product or service. This means that all you need to do now is use your website’s content to convince the user to convert – whether that is through making a purchase, submitting a contact form or calling to make an inquiry.
Get Ahead of the Competition
Good SEO techniques can help to get your website ahead of the competition. Not everyone will be taking advantage of SEO, so your website should aim to optimise its content better than the competition. If your website has been optimised well for search engines and a competitors site is not, then the site with good SEO is more likely to have more targeted traffic going to the site which increases the likelihood of more sales.
It can take a while for you to get a good SEO strategy in place, but it should be something that is continually developed and built upon. If you want to get more traffic, and ideally more conversions through your website, then working on an SEO strategy is a good place to start.
