With all that’s going on in the world today, businesses have a plethora of options when it comes down to choosing the right SEO agency. That can sometimes make it difficult to choose which one is the right one. From keyword research, and spying on competition, to backlinks, traffic insights, and optimisation suggestions. The list goes on and on.
In digital marketing, SEO is the key to a thriving, and lasting business.
Let me break it down for you.
SEO Basics
When one starts a business, whether online or offline, they need customers. In order to get customers, they need traffic. In order to get traffic, they need to be found. When online, and looking to get traffic, Google and Yahoo are the major search engines.
Most people use Google, but there are still some who use the Yahoo search engine. That is where SEO comes into play. Sounds simple, right? Well, not so much, and I will tell you why.
A lot of times when a company, or website is just starting out, or they aren’t currently ranked far up enough in the search engines, they will use paid ads until they can get ranked naturally, and organically.
It can take time to get ranked in the search engines, especially if you have a company or business that has a lot of competition.
Anyhow, when a company runs paid ads on Google, (or PPC) it can sometimes even help with their SEO. Ultimately, the goal is to rank naturally and organically in the search engines, so that you don’t have to pay for keywords (PPC) or (SEM) to be on the first page, or even the first few listings. This is where SEO comes into play.
There are a lot of working parts, and there are a lot of things that are involved with SEO. Just to name a few of the things it entails are: backlinks (or link building), keywords, meta tags, structure, word count, quality of content, on-page SEO, off page SEO, site speed, security, and SSL. Then you have all of the “DO NOT DO” rules that apply.
For example, keyword stuffing, spammy links, duplicate content, using “sandboxed” domains, are just some of the things you shouldn’t do when it comes to your SEO tactics.
Every now and again, Google comes out with a new update, and addition to their set of rules, such as the “Panda” update. For some businesses and agencies that were used to a certain way of doing SEO, now have to do it a little differently. There were just more rules that applied, and what once worked, no longer works. This actually hurt some businesses, and websites, as they received a penalty for certain things.
Now it’s getting a little more confusing, huh?
Don’t worry. You’ll be ok.
So how do you get ranked?
A simple blog post isn’t going to be enough to cover the finer points of taking down your fiercest competitor who’s somehow hogging the best positions on Google. There’s just too much to learn. But, there is a lot you can research online and teach yourself with some time taken.
Our advice? Don’t.
You hire an accountant to do your tax returns, a lawyer to check over your contracts – you don’t spend time learning how to do those vital tasks (unless you’re actually training to be one!) so we’d recommend rather than spending copious amounts of time in trial and error, wading through the endless supply of SEO information, courses and software – just hire someone who knows what they’re doing and have done it before. Preferably someone who isn’t working with your competitor!
They’ll know what they’re doing, they’ll send you reports showing the improvement every month – and before you know if you’ll be the competitor that’s dominating the search results on Google.
Need help with your SEO? Thought you’d never ask. Contact us, we’d love to help.