What is SEO?
Have you ever wondered how some organisations show up first on Google or have you ever asked any of these questions:
- How do I make my website appear on Google?
- Why don’t I see my website on Google?
- How do I make my website appear first on Google?
Perhaps you might think that companies and organisations are paying search engines such as Google to show up as the first listing or even the first page?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is the process of optimising and increasing the quality of your website to increase the level of quality traffic coming to your website from search engines such as Google and Bing which in return increases your page rank.
Is SEO important?
Studies show that over 90% of web traffic comes from search engines, which demonstrates the importance of appearing in a search engine. But simply appearing in a search engine is not enough, it’s important where exactly your website appears in the search engine.
Having your website appear on the first page of the search engines is incredibly important because somewhere between 75% to 90% of people don’t go past the first page of search engines, plus about 35% of web traffic usually goes to the first result listed on search engines, while 70% to 80% of people ignore paid adverts on search engines.
So you can see if you are not applying high-quality optimisations to your website the vast majority of your traffic may end up going to your competitors, reducing your sales.
Are SEO companies worth the money?
There are many factors that you need to take into account before deciding if it is worth your money to pass on the responsibility of your website’s SEO to a third party, these include:
- Knowing if it will increase your sales
- Costs and your budget
- Required time
- Required skills.
Will SEO increase sales?
Many people believe that they will automatically get a high number of sales just by having a high ranking within search engines, but many factors contribute to converting visitors to customers including:
- The relevance of your website to the visitors.
- The seamless navigability of your website by visitors.
- The ease of use of your website on portable devices.
- The perceived value of your products & services on your website.
What will SEO Cost?
Depending on the size of your business and the type you require, SEO can cost from nothing all the way to tens of thousands of pounds, one of the cheapest ways of optimising your website for search engines is to do it yourself although this may not cost your business anything, you should still consider looking at third-party digital marketing companies or hiring marketing staff and decide which would bring more value to your business.
Required time for ongoing SEO?
Due to the high levels of competition, SEO is not a one time task, because many factors change over time that may cause your efforts to become outdated, the main reason is your competitors are always improving their SEO to improve their rankings on search engines with varying budgets.
This is why it is important that you optimise your website regularly to ensure its effectiveness, this can be done in many ways, such as content marketing which requires you to publish a high level of high quality and relevant content that encourages people to visit your website.
The effectiveness of the SEO for your website should also be regularly monitored, this is because your competitors are always making changes to their SEO, and search engines are continuously updating their algorithms, so what may have been a good tactic 4 months ago, maybe rendered useless by a change in algorithm.
You need to decide if you have enough time to do continuous optimisations to keep up with the competition and the changes in the algorithms used by the search engines or if you’re better off employing marketing graduates that have the relevant knowledge, using 3rd party services, or employing a specialist.
Skills Required for SEO?
SEO is not like it used to be where websites just added a few keywords and got found, nowadays it requires high-level analytical skills, IT skills (including a bit of web development), research skills, social skills, and even to some degree a sense of humour among other things.
Bear in mind that if done incorrectly there is a possibility to permanently damage your search engine ranking and cause you to be blacklisted by the search engines.
Conclusion
SEO is incredibly important as it helps increase the number of visitors to your website which in return could lead to an increase in sales.
You should make a decision on whether the optimisation will be done inhouse or done by a third-party factoring in the time, skills, and costs required.
Before deciding to make sure to do some research and hopefully, you will see an increase in the number of relevant visitors on your website.