Search engine optimisation is absolutely critical for businesses to drive quality traffic on a consistent basis through to their website. Not only can SEO help create visibility across search engine for specific keywords that are relevant for your website, but it can also help improve the user experience on your website by focussing on key areas including website structure, content, and backlinks. Here are some of the key areas you should focus on if you want to employ a digital marketing agency like Firefly to provide SEO services for your business.
Audit and keyword research
All effective SEO campaigns can start with careful planning, research, and analysis. There is no point spending tens of hours and wasting valuable marketing budget ranking for a keyword that has fewer than ten searches per month. A strong strategy will have a variety of keywords that have healthy search, a variety of competition level ensuring there are some quick wins and are highly relevant to your business to generate quality traffic.
On-page optimisation
Content is king. To create a highly relevant website not only for search engines but for your website visitors and potential customers, on-page optimisation needs to be carried out. This includes looking at the websites structure, content placement and theme on each page. Understanding that Google looks at key elements on each page to understand what the website is about is critical to delivering effective on-page optimisation. You should look pay close attention to your URL structure, Title tags, Meta Descriptions, Content and headers, and make sure they all are centralized around a key theme per page that has been uncovered in the initial audit and keyword research stage.
Off-page optimisation
Building quality backlinks should be part of every successful off-page optimisation strategy. This will help Google and other search engines trust your website, building authority through high-quality links to your website. Not all links are the same, and content should be created in a way that will drive value to your potential audience and not created for the specific purpose of backlinking. There are a variety of ways to drive backlinks to your website including articles, commenting, infographics, press releases and directories to name a few.
Test and measure
If you take care to follow through these 3 phases, you should have created a well-optimised website. It’s important to track and measure your success with tools and tracking methods so you can test and measure your work. Having transparency over keyword positions, and also seeing what your competitors are doing is key to ensuring you remain high in Google search rankings and continue to deliver high-quality content to your audience. Tools such as Google analytics is also vital to monitor visitor numbers and the quality of traffic coming through the website after starting SEO. What you should be looking for is an increase in organic traffic over time, with an increase of online conversion, which is a great result.