How to Approach SEO


Business Analysis for SEO

Do not blindly jump into SEO because everybody says it is the thing to do. Firstly take a look at your business and decide what you are trying to achieve. So as an example look closely at why you are embarking on search engine optimisation. For example, is it to develop you brand? Is it to drive traffic to your site for eCommerce sales? or is it to drive traffic for affiliate marketing or other web marketing initiatives? Now once you have a clear idea of your objectives you can start to plan your SEO strategy. Undoubtedly the SEO campaign will be focussed on optimising for certain keywords or phrases that will drive quality traffic to your site. So look closely at those keywords and phrases and be as precise as you can so you get the traffic you are looking for and do not be afraid of selecting long tail search terms. For example if you are wedding photographers do not look to optimise for photography as this term will be incredibly hard and consequently expensive to optimise for, and secondly will not bring quality traffic to your site. It will just bring a lot of people that are interested in photography as opposed to those who are interested in purchasing your wedding photography services!! It is far better to select 10 search terms with 2 or more words that more precisely attract the right customers. So pick wedding photographers and not wedding photography as it is the service you are offering not advise on how to best perform the service. Now once you have selected your search terms run a search engine test on them to find out how many searched there are a month and also how competitive these search terms are to optimise for. It is then a combination of these 2 factors that will enable you to develop the best keyword strategy for your SEO.


Implementing SEO

After you have your perfect set of search terms that you need to drive your SEO strategy you then need to make it happen. If you need a fast start then google adwords will certainly give you that and you can start driving traffic to your site for those search terms the same day. There is a downside which is the cost which could typically be between 20 pence and £1 per click. But if you use adwords wisely and optimise your choice of keywords, visibility during the day and bids then you can make your campaign far more effective. What we generally propose is to kick off with adwords and then as the natural search optimisation kicks in then take these terms out of adwords to reduce operational costs. The actual SEO to optimise for organic search results will then be a combination of on-site and off-site optimisation. The on-site work is all about organising the best layout of original content and then bringing the highest visibility to this through content analysis, title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions and a host of other principles. This will revamp the website to be one which is highly respected and consequently highly ranked by google and the other search engines. However this is not enough because the search engines insist on popularity and primarily measure this by the links you have to yor site from other sites. But it is certainly not just the number of links it is all about the authority of those links which is measured by a combination of the ranking of the linking sites and also the relevance of the content on those linking sites. Now there are a number of ways to approach this but do it progressively and naturally so the search engines can review the sites with their robots and then if the SEO is done well they will increase the ranking and the visibility of the optimised keywords in the search results.

So the principles of SEO are quite straightforward but the delivery can be a rocky path so if you want some advise please get in touch