Print, Design & Websites
Posted: April 3, 2018 • Posted in: Marketing Tips, Website Design
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the practice of improving a website’s position in organic search engine results. Or in other words, any action taken to try and make the site appear higher on a search engine’s results page.
Search engines rank sites based on a number of factors. Estimates suggest that there are over 200 considerations that Google takes into account when ranking sites. These factors are then entered into a complex algorithm (a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations) to determine where the page ranks.
Although these ranking factors are not disclosed, it’s accepted, through experience and testing, that the following factors are amongst the most important:
So, in basic terms, you’ll need your site to be well structured, responsive, fast loading and packed full of high-quality content that is liberally scattered with relevant keywords. This should then result in good inbound links and engaged visitors who spend a long time on the site.
Again, this can vary, but we would suggest that a site should have found it’s natural ranking after about 3 months. Pages can take years to appear on the first page, however. Research by ahrefs.com suggests it takes on average three years to rank number one in Google for a global search.
There are two types of search engine optimisation. Global and Local. As the names suggest, one is targeted towards a global audience, while the other is aimed at people in a specific local location. Useful for business with a physical location, local SEO aims to make your site appear in searches for businesses in a specific area as well as in the local pack group of listings, which shows related businesses on the Google map.
For local businesses, appearing highly in these results is vitally important, and can be the difference between getting a job or losing out to a competitor.
There have been many studies into the importance of ranking highly in search engine results. Because of the many variables involved the figures vary hugely. Some suggest appearing in first place will get you up to 45% of all click-throughs for that search term. Others suggest this is only 25%. Regardless, they all agree that ranking number one gets you significantly more traffic to your site than the site ranking second. This is then true of the relationship between second and third, all the way to sixth where it starts to even out (often because people don’t scroll down that far).
In other words, if you want to get visitors it’s vital to appear on Google’s first page. This is an incredibly competitive task to achieve though. There are now over a billion websites on the web, and for a typical web query there are hundreds of thousands – and frequently millions – of web pages that are identified as containing potentially relevant information.
Therefore, targeting local SEO is often a more realistic ambition for most regional businesses.
To highlight the point:
As the terms being searched for are more specific, the number of results generated by the search engine are lower and more accurate to that term.
SEO is a complex and ever-evolving practice. Hopefully, this article has given you an overview of the factors involved. If you’re looking to create great, keyword rich content to help you rank more highly, especially in local searches, Kall Kwik can help. We can generate this content for you in the form of interesting blog articles related to your business and optimised service pages, which could just give you edge over your competitors.
To find out more about our copywriting service, or other web improvements we can make to help improve your SEO, give us a call on 01284 752266, or email [email protected].
Read more: ‘Get your business on Google’ »
Read more: ‘Your Google Analytics report explained’ »
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