Yes, your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimisation offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click.

When you run PPC ads, you'll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, it takes investment into skills and resources to rank a website on the SERPs.

If you're able to rank your website at the top of the search engines, you'll benefit from a stream of traffic that won't have click costs associated with it, and that won't stop when ads are turned off. Rank organically, and you'll enjoy 24/7 visibility.

But let's also remember that organic search is responsible for an average of 53% of total site traffic. If you're ignoring SEO, your competitors are enjoying this traffic. Most businesses cannot ignore the importance of SEO. No matter what type of company you are, whether you're a local business, sell online, or are a global enterprise, you need to be paying attention to your SEO strategy.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work?

Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and these allow the search engine's algorithms to rank websites based upon the relevancy and authority of their pages. To succeed at SEO, you need to ensure that your content is the most relevant result for a specific search query and that your website is seen as a trustworthy source.

If your website isn’t ranking on Google, there are a few reasons why that could be. But first, head to Google and run a site: search for your website. e.g., “site:ministryofdesign.com.au” If you see your site’s web pages listed, you know that your site is indexed. Reasons why your website isn’t ranking could be that: - Your site is new and hasn’t built up sufficient authority to rank for competitive search queries. You can’t launch a website and expect to rank for your target queries overnight; you need to demonstrate that you deserve to rank.

- Your content doesn’t match the searcher's intent or lacks in-depth analysis or quality compared to the pages that rank for the queries you’re looking at. You need to ensure that the pages you serve are at least as good as, ideally better than, what’s already ranking.

If you don’t see any of your website’s pages listed, this means that it has not been indexed. Reasons for this could include: Your website is blocking search engines from crawling it (usually in your robots.txt file) or is instructing them not to index it (generally using noindex tags). Resolve these blocks, and you should see your site indexed.

Your site has launched very recently (within a few days), and you have not submitted the site to Google or linked to it from anywhere, meaning it hasn’t yet been indexed. Set up Google Search Console and request indexing.

Your site has received a sitewide manual penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is rare and unlikely. However, you would need to have been using some seriously black-hat SEO tactics for this to happen.

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends.

Long gone are the days of launching a website, optimising your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can't launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority.

You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there.

A good answer is somewhere between six months and one year, but this is very much based on the level of resources you allocate to your strategy, the level of competition, and what others who compete for the same queries are doing.

It might only take a few months to rank for a local term (e.g., plumber in Sydney), whereas it could take years to rank a new website for, let's say, the term "laptops."

We understand that your website and business needs change. However we recommend a minimum 12 month investment into your SEO, and certainly no less than 6 months.

For sure! We offer an initial Website Health Check, where we do a full analysis of your website looking at how it’s been built, the tools used and report on any potential issues that need to be addressed. From there we can discuss your needs moving forward and recommend an action plan.