Have you been wondering what SEO is in digital marketing and whether it’s right for your business?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it’s been around for a while now. It’s an internet marketing tactic that has grown with the rise of Google and online search.

Google is a search engine, just like Bing, Yahoo! and Baidu (the Chinese competitor) and they work as a massive cataloguing system for a majority of the 400 million active websites that exist.

I tend to speak about SEO in respect to Google, as Google has over 94% market share within Australia (StatCounter) and therefore is the search engine you want to be optimising for!

Google’s focus is on delivering the best results to its searchers. Not helping businesses to reach their customers. Sounds like a pain, but from both a consumer and business owner perspective it’s a great thing.

For many of the early years of SEO, businesses were able to find loopholes and trick the system. Resorting to dodgy tactics (known as black hat in the industry) to improve their presence in search results.

These days, Google is far too smart and it’s always improving, updating its algorithm to guide the GoogleBot hundreds of times a year. So, businesses need to focus on legitimate efforts to improve their online visibility in Google.

What does Search Engine Optimisation do for online visibility

It’s important to understand how Google decides where websites rank within its search results before talking about optimisation tactics.

Google’s 3 main steps to generating results:

1. Crawling: this is how the Googlebot discovers new and updated pages on the web; it may find new pages through links or submitted sitemaps, and it does recrawl previously visited pages.

2. Indexing: this is how it tries to figure out what the page is about by reviewing the content and other signals on-page

3. Serving: this is how it decides to rank websites when delivering search results for any given query

In summary, the Googlebots crawl all the websites that are active on the internet looking for a range of signals to understand what your site offers and how your website performs overall in order to rank it appropriately within search results.

There are over 200 ranking factors that the Googlebot looks for when deciding which websites to serve within search results, including:

• Domain age

• Keywords in metadata

• Word count

• Load speed

• Link volume, theme & quality

• Mobile usability

• Reader engagement

• Clear site architecture

• Appropriate contact information

• SLL certificate present

How to Optimise Your Website for Google

Now you know how Google decides to deliver websites in the results, you can appreciate that work is required on your website to improve your chances of being served.

This is the ‘optimisation’ part. SEO is literally the tactic of optimising your website for that extensive list of ranking factors that you’re being judged on.

For many new websites, the first step of optimising your site may just be telling Google that it exists. Because with half a million new websites estimated to be created every day you can’t just expect Google to know about yours…

From there, the optimisation tactics used will be completely dependent on the website, it’s current performance, the keyword-relevance of content, the offerings & preferred keywords to rank on, what industry it is in, how competitive the industry is, what top ranking websites are doing… and more!

I’ve said it a hundred times, but there really is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to SEO. Instead, each business requires its own strategy and continual review of performance… optimising again and again until the desired results are achieved, and then potentially optimising more to maintain ranking results.

Why is SEO important for business?

You might be wondering if all of this is relevant for you and whether SEO is necessary for your business. Let me first share some statistics for you:

• There are 40,000 Google searches every second (Internet Live Stats)

• 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (BrightEdge)

• 0.78% of Google Searchers click on results from the 2nd page (Backlinko)

• 46% of all Google searches are local (99firms)

• The volume Google searches grows roughly 10% every year (Internet Live Stats)

So, yep, long answer short. SEO is very relevant for your business and there’s not many businesses that SEO isn’t a viable marketing tactic for.

Especially for local businesses, showing up within the results for relevant search terms is critical for your business. Having a strong presence within the organic search results can deliver a steady stream of enquiry/sales to your business, as these searchers are warm leads, actively interested in your offerings and depending on their search query may have very strong buyer intent.

As there are so many factors that go into optimising your website to improve it’s visibility within the Search Engine Results Position (SERPs) it’s extremely beneficial to work with an SEO company that understands how it all works and knows what’s best for your specific website.

Though there are many items you can DIY to improve your website’s performance in Google, there’s also a lot of technical factors to be addressed, and even those that can be DIY’d can be done incorrectly leading to poor results.

I have prepared a SEO Checklist for business owners ready to start optimising their website and who feel up to the task, this checklist covers the easier items and will allow you to understand where you’re site’s falling down.

I recommend getting started with the checklist and reviewing your site’s current performance across them, from there you will know if you’re up to the task or would prefer expert SEO support on optimising.