If your customers can’t find you online, they’ll find someone else. Whether you’re a small or large business, a start-up or an established company, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a must.
In this guide, we break down the basics of SEO and share some practical, easy-to-follow tips to boost your site’s visibility and help your business grow.
What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation is the practice of optimising your website so that it ranks higher in search engine results like Google or Bing. There are different elements of SEO that work collectively to help your website rank well, from content creation and link-building to site structure and user experience.
How does search engine optimisation work?
To understand SEO, it’s important to first understand how search engines work. Their goal is to deliver the most relevant, high-quality content in response to a user’s query, which they achieve through three main processes:
- Crawling: Search engines send out automated bots (also known as crawlers or spiders) to scan the web for new or updated pages. This is a never-ending process where the bots essentially follow links from one page to another to find new content. A key part of SEO is therefore to make your website “crawlable” by strengthening your internal link structure and other technical aspects. If your site has broken links or hard-to-find pages, your content might get missed.
- Indexing: After it’s finished crawling a page, the search engine tries to understand its content and stores it in a massive database or index. This is what allows them to quickly retrieve information and deliver speedy responses to queries. During this phase, the engine analyses on-page elements like metadata, keywords, and structure to figure out what your content is about. Making sure your pages are clear, relevant, and well-organised will help search engines to index them properly.
- Ranking: When someone performs a search, the search engine goes through its index to determine which pages to show and in what order. This ranking is based on a complex algorithm that considers many factors, such as keyword relevance, page authority, mobile-friendliness, and overall user experience.
So, in short, SEO is about making it as easy as possible for search engines to find and understand your website, while also optimising your content to improve its chances of ranking highly in search results.
What are the benefits of business search engine optimisation?
SEO has many powerful benefits for businesses, including:
It generates more website traffic
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of SEO is that it increases visibility and traffic. If you can get your web pages in the top search results, you’ll gain a lot more click-throughs to your website. Not only that, but by optimising around relevant keywords, you’ll attract more of the right people to your website – people who are genuinely interested in what you offer and are likely to become customers.
It creates a better user experience
The work you put into SEO can also have a positive impact on user experience. A website that’s slow to load, confusing to navigate, or difficult to use on mobile devices can harm your ranking and result in more people bouncing away from your site. But a good user experience will encourage them to stay longer, explore multiple pages, and eventually convert.
It’s often cost-effective
SEO can be a very cost-effective strategy in the long run. Organic traffic - visitors who find your site through search engines - doesn’t cost anything per click, unlike paid ads. Traffic also tends to drop sharply as soon as you turn off paid ads, whereas a strong SEO strategy will steadily pay off over time, with optimised content continuing to bring in visitors long after it’s published.
Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term strategy requiring a lot of upfront work. It won’t deliver immediate results, unlike paid ads, which are great for this. It takes time for search engines to crawl, index, and rank new content, especially with ever more complex ranking algorithms. Generally speaking, you’re looking at a few months before you begin to see initial results, and even longer to see big changes. But once you’ve laid the groundwork, the rewards can be significant and sustainable.
SEO tips for businesses
Here are several tips you can use to optimise your website for search engines, organised into the main areas of SEO.
Technical SEO
As we’ve mentioned, SEO involves making your website easy for search engines to crawl and index. Technical SEO focuses on optimising your website’s backend infrastructure to achieve exactly this. There are lots of components of technical SEO, but here are a couple of key tips to get you started:
Optimise website speed
Page speed is crucial for user experience and can also improve your website’s crawlability. Search engines want to deliver a positive experience for the user, and since few things are more frustrating than a slow-loading website, page speed is an established ranking factor for Google. To boost site speed, you can compress images, enable browser caching, and minimize HTTP requests, among other techniques.
Make your site mobile friendly
Given that most searches now happen on mobile, and Google boosts the ranking of mobile-friendly sites in search results, making your site mobile-friendly is essential for SEO. A few steps you can take include developing a responsive layout that will adapt to various screen sizes, using readable fonts, and keeping the design organised and uncluttered. Regularly test your website on mobile devices and use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test for feedback.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimising the content and structure of individual web pages to improve their rankings in search engine results.
Create high-quality content
Content creation is a huge part of on-page SEO. But it’s not just about producing any content – it has to be well-written, engaging, and valuable to your audience. When a page is useful and relevant, search engines are more likely to rank it higher in search results.
Carry out keyword research
Keyword research involves identifying the words or phrases people type into search engines when they’re looking for information related to your business. By knowing what these search terms are and creating content around them, you can boost your visibility in search results and generate more organic traffic.
There are lots of online tools available that will help you discover the best search terms. They offer insights on things like search volume (how many times people search for for that particular keyword) and keyword difficulty (how difficult it is to rank for that keyword based on the competition). You can then incorporate these keywords into your content. However, take care to avoid overusing them on a page (a practice known as “keyword stuffing”), as you’ll make your content less readable and will likely get penalised by search engines. A good rule of thumb is: write for your readers first, search engines second.
Optimise on-page elements
Once you’ve written a piece of content, you’ll want to make sure that it’s fully optimised for search engines by refining on-page elements such as:
- Title tags - pieces of HTML code that specify the title of a web page, appearing as clickable headlines in search engine results
- Headings (H1 – H6 headings) - HTML elements that define the structure of your content
- Meta descriptions - a brief summary of a webpage’s content that appears in search engine results pages below the page title
All of these elements make your content easier to navigate and understand for both users and search engines.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to a set of optimisation tactics that take place outside of your website. The main goal is to build your website’s authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines and users.
Earn backlinks from reputable sources
Backlinks are one of the most important elements of off-page SEO. A backlink – when someone links from their website to your website – acts as a vote of confidence to search engines. The more reputable and relevant the website that links to yours is, the better. One method is to write guest blog posts for other websites in your niche and include backlinks to your site.
Gather customer reviews
Positive reviews signal trustworthiness and can help to boost your SEO, especially in local search results. Don’t be afraid to ask satisfied customers to leave a review, and make it easy for them by providing a direct link or QR code to your reviews page.
While SEO may seem overwhelming at first, it becomes much more manageable the more you learn and put it into practice. Take it step by step and stay consistent. Over time, your efforts will pay off – increasing your visibility, attracting more customers, and supporting your business’s long-term growth.
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