Posted 05.05.2016
By Rob Twells
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic/non-paid search engine results.
There are many different areas to SEO from the content within a page, to the code structure (behind the scenes), all the way to how other sites link to your site. All of these can affect your search engine rankings. Marrying up a variety of different techniques can be the perfect recipe for an increase on your search engine visibility and an increase of your profits!
We decided to make a real push with our SEO around the beginning of 2014. It was time we began to produce another avenue for sales in our business and, although word-of-mouth recommendations were working fantastically, we were very much ready to speed up the growth of our business.
To begin our SEO journey, we sat down as a team and decided where we wanted traffic to come from. Initially, we decided to target local businesses in Derby who were interested in having a new website produced. This process began by creating a long list of keywords associated with this using Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI). This essentially gives you a measurable figure for a list of your chosen keywords based on the monthly search volume, relevance and competitiveness for a given keyword. Using the outcome of the keyword research we had a good list of keywords, ordered by priority and effectiveness.
Once we had some keywords to target, we could start getting stuck into the practical changes to our website. First of all we tackled some on-site SEO, otherwise known as technical SEO, this included (but not limited to):
An essential part of SEO is making sure your website is providing the most up to date and relevant information possible. Google wants to provide the best results possible to their users so it’s important that content is kept fresh.
Google likes to know that you keep your website updated constantly, evolving the content for visitors. We (and still do to this day) kept our site content updated regularly. We’ve made a real effort to blog more often and adjusted our social media strategy in order to get more and more people to our site increasing our visibility.
It’s crucial you know that SEO is not an instant process. Be aware that there’s likely to be many different businesses competing for the same keywords as you are. We are very proud to say that we are currently ranked at the very top for our chosen keywords (as of April 2016). We started at around page 16 of the search engine results and the timeline went a little like this:
As you can see, it took around 4 months to start seeing the benefits and traffic increasing from organic results.
We’re now around 2 years in and traffic has dramatically increased since we began our SEO journey.
Below is a screenshot from our very own Google Analytics account. The image shows how our website performs compared to when we started our SEO efforts. Take a look at how much our website has improved in performance as we have continued to build upon and improve our content:
As you can see from the graph, compared to 2014, we have seen a huge increase in traffic. This is all down to our persistence in updating content and ensuring all content is optimised around select keywords which has, in turn, improved our rankings. As our website content has evolved over the years, we have solidified our rankings allowing us to pursue additional keywords.
We’ve seen a massive increase in the amount of traffic coming to our website, largely from our investment into SEO. With this traffic, we have seen an increase in business we are able to generate (increased traffic = increased opportunities!). In fact, organic leads now account for around 50% of our sales.
People often assume that SEO will have an instantaneous effect on their business, that one day of optimisations will skyrocket their sales and make them the next Steve Jobs. But this is so far from the truth, a myth that has been created and spread by rogue agencies who cheat the system for quick results but no long term gain. Like most things, good things come to those who wait. Good SEO takes time and attention. When done properly, SEO can have lots of nice effects on your business.
We started investing in our SEO efforts and building up our website to where it is today early on in 2014 and it has been a journey of constant change and reflection (as proper SEO should be). Over the years we have seen many a Google update come and go, each time dramatically changing the SEO landscape.
Increasing your website’s visibility online can be a long process, as we have proved, but it is possible. By honing in on what keywords you feel are most relevant to your business, optimising your content for them, updating your website regularly with new content, or improving existing content after measuring its success, search engines will begin to take notice of you. And when they do, you can normally expect to see a jump in your rankings, increasing your visibility to potential new customers.
Many people come to us with SEO questions claiming nothing works for them, but what they fail to realise is that SEO goes beyond writing good keywords in your content. SEO now encompasses technical and design elements and it all comes together under the term User Experience. Search engines are scarily intelligent and can actually understand the level of experience you are providing. Since search engines want to provide a better experience to users, they will direct them to websites providing a good experience. I.e. the better experience you provide to users, the better rankings and subsequently traffic you can expect to see.
Improving your user experience won’t just help your rankings though. It can have a much more direct impact on your business. With a better experience and more users, you can actually expect the number of conversions on your website to increase too. The quicker your customers can find the information they need, the quicker they can convert, the quicker you make money and the quicker your business grows. Seeing it laid out like this makes it sound like the ultra-quick process so many often think it is, but it does take time and patience.
Believe it or not, well-implemented SEO can also have an impact on physical traffic to your business location. Local SEO is an incredibly powerful tool that should be used by every business. Not only will it help to drive footfall to your premises and increase the potential for in-store sales, but it can reinforce any location-based keywords you want to be ranking for. This means your business shows up better on things like Google maps, local 3-pack listings on SERPs and for location-based searches.
And the best thing is, it’s not very complicated to accomplish. Simply registering your business with platforms like Google My Business and Bing Maps whilst ensuring your NAP (that’s your name, address and phone number) is consistent and accurate across all of your social media profiles, website and any directory listings you may have, can go a long way. To reinforce these efforts you can always alter your keywords to include your location, but be careful to not across as spammy.
So, that’s how much of an impact SEO has had on us as a business. Do you feel you could benefit from more opportunities in your sector or local area? See our SEO page or contact us today for a free enquiry!
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