SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the optimisation of your digital assets (such as your website) to help them rank better in organic (non-paid) search engine results. The basics of SEO haven’t changed much over the years. The core tactic we believe in (and always have) is to develop digital content or websites that help people find the answers, services and products they’re looking for – to deliver information based on their search intent.

SEO encompasses a broad range of tactics that help your online assets rank higher in search results. At its core, SEO is about finding out what your users are searching for – the keywords and search terms they use – and then ensuring you have excellent content, services and products to resolve their needs. True SEO looks at a range of activities, which can be categorised as:

• On-site Optimisation
  Actions you take to optimise your website and digital content.
• Off-site Optimisation
  Actions you take away from your website and digital content to generate traffic and links to your website (e.g. link building). Be careful here, we’re looking for quality, not quantity.
• Technical Optimisation and User Experience
  One of the core factors of any internet browsing experience is ease of use and workability. A broken website drives people nuts. An inability to find what you’re looking for on a website will hastily make you retreat and find another place to look. Making sure your website or digital assets work properly and are easy to use important, as is having excellent, good quality content.

These days, your online presence is just as important as the rest of your marketing. We’ve dealt with countless businesses who can easily say that if they don’t have a decent website, they don’t get short-listed for tenders or project applications. Making sure your online assets are SEO friendly can help both your off-line and on-line sales efforts.

How fast you get results from SEO depends largely on your industry, the competition, and how well everyone else is doing with their SEO. In other words, you can have some great results quite quickly once you start optimising, but as a rule of thumb, we look for results over a three to six month period that then continue to consistently build and grow. SEO is not a quick fix, it’s a long-term strategy that has proven valuable for many businesses.

A great example is a Travel Vaccination website we worked with a couple of years ago. At the beginning of the project, they were achieving around 3,000 organic visitors from search engines a month. We tackled both their content, their navigation and the technical aspects of their website. Over 18 months we were able to grow their traffic four times over. Yes, we’re talking about an increase in traffic of 400% (without even getting to the link building part!). If they can, you can too. Your results, however, will really depend on your efforts, your marketplace and the competitiveness of the keywords you are trying to rank for.

We believe that any SEO project should start with an audit. An SEO audit can tell us:

• how your website is currently fairing
• how well it has been built
• if there are broken links
• if your on-site SEO can be improved and more.

It delivers a starting point for delivering an SEO plan or strategy to get you started.

You sure can! As SEO gets more technical, hiring a specialist comes in handy, but the basics of SEO can be implemented by anyone in the know. We can spend an hour running over SEO for you, run an audit and give you a list of things to tackle, or you can be brave (and you’ll have to be quick) and you can sign up for an SEO course through the Recipe for SEO Success with Kate Toon. For those that really do want to take the reigns and handle their own SEO, we can’t recommend a better starting point!

We can most certainly help you with your SEO. We’re able to perform SEO audits and deliver an SEO action plan, as well as help you implement the actions once you’ve agreed with them. We’re here to help the smaller guys, so if you’re talking massive spend on SEO, we can recommend a great company to help. For the rest of you, where SEO is simply a piece of your strategy that needs to be completed within a small budget (and if you are happy to take the time to do it right) we’re more than happy to lend a hand and get you ranking better!