What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your website so that it appears when people ask questions or search terms related to your business. If you can nail SEO, you’ll begin to see your organic (unpaid) traffic increase, allowing you to generate leads and a growing audience without the need for paid ads. 

The best way to understand SEO is to first understand that search engines, like Google, want to provide the best service to their users. Simply put, Google wants to provide high-quality content that accurately matches what a user is searching for. In order to meet Google’s (and other search engines), there are 5 main criteria you want to focus on:

• High-Quality Content
• Keywords 
• Site Layout
• Expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness (EAT) score
• Backlinks

Beginning with high-quality content, you want to produce content that is original, readable, accurate and engaging. If your content is low quality, users are more likely to leave the page in search of something better, negatively impacting your bounce rates.

Then we have keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that users search in order to find content. For example, if someone is looking for information about skateboards, and you produce extremely high-quality content that has nothing to do with skateboards, your content won’t show up for that search. Using tools like SEMRush, you can identify relevant keywords in your niche and begin to include those keywords in your content so that your site shows up for those searches. 

After that, we have site layout. It’s critical that your site loads pages quickly, again to avoid the risk of a high bounce rate. There are a variety of tools online that you can use to identify your page speed, and you want to ensure that your pages load in under 2 seconds. Once you’ve nailed page loading speed, you want to have a clear page structure and simple navigation that doesn’t add extra work for the user to find content on your site. Lastly, you want to ensure that your site has a responsive layout that is optimised for all devices including mobile. 

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Then we have the EAT score. In order to build your expertise, authority and trustworthiness, you want to produce quality content that includes citations or links to external, more credible sites. Additionally, you want other sites to link to you which will effectively lend you their authority. This leads to the final point.

‍Backlinking is one of the best ways to build up your domain authority. Through guest posting on other sites and linking back to your own, as well as producing high quality content that other sites refer to, Google will see that a growing number of websites are effectively pointing to your site and saying “Hey this site is legit!” When Google deems that your site is both authoritative and trustworthy, it will begin to prioritise your site over others.

So there you have it, those are five of the main factors that you’ll want to pay attention to when attempting to optimise your site for search engines and boost your organic traffic. 

Need Help?

Ready to boost your website's visibility and attract more organic traffic? Look no further! Get in touch with our Affordable SEO Agency today and let us help you optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Don't miss out on potential customers - take the first step towards success with our expert SEO services!

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