The world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) may seem overwhelming due to the volume of information out there, but the fundamental goal is to optimise your site so that it ranks higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The benefit of ranking high on search engines is that more visitors will access your website, which can generate future custom.

How does SEO work?

When you type a query into a search engine, such as Google, it produces a list of results that contain the information you are looking for. To achieve this, search engines use crawlers that index website content and follow links to other sites. Crawlers then classify websites based on their content and links to produce the SERP.

SEO Fundamentals

To optimise your website, blog or article ranking on SERP’s there are a few fundamental aspects of SEO, these include:

1. Relevance – how appropriate the content of your site is for an incoming query and how trustworthy Google deems your site to be and how user friendly it is!
2. Domain authority – domain authority predicts your site’s search rankings, this is determined through the quality and quantity of inbound links to your site.
3. Page authority – similar to domain authority but page specific, therefore some pages from your site will rank higher than others in SERP’s.
4. Content is king – having high quality content increases your site’s authority. In addition to the quality, the quantity also counts, although longer content is often better, it must be interesting and relevant.
5. Keywords – these are terms that consumers type into search engines to find a website. Having keywords is essential to rank high up on SERP’s. Keywords can be found in titles, and the content of your site.
6. Links to your site – building links from external site’s such as social media increases your ranking.

Organic results & SEO

Organic results are search results that you have not paid for. SEO focuses on the technical and creative elements that improve rankings and drive traffic to your website without paying for ads.

Why should you care about SEO?

With 40,000 search queries on Google every second totalling 3.5 million searches per day, it is safe to say that consumers rely on search engines to answer their search queries.

Think about the last query you searched on Google. How many of the results did you look at? Did you go past the first page of results? It has been found that the first five results on Google get about 67% of all clicks. This emphasises why SEO is so important, if your website does not appear within those first 5 results, it will likely be ignored. For this reason, search engine results can make or break a business.

Would you like help optimising your website? Get in touch - we would love to hear from you.