What is SEO Marketing?

Wondering How SEO Helps to Grow Sales?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about maximising the traffic to your website. If you want more people finding your online store, placing orders or making calls, SEO is the way to make it happen. If you’re wondering ‘what is SEO marketing? and ‘how does it work?’, read on. In this article we look at how to optimise your site to increase sales.

What is SEO Marketing?

Around 91% of the content sitting on the web gets no traffic whatsoever – simply because it’s not optimised for search engine ranking. This gives the 9% who have optimised their sites a huge advantage when it comes to attracting traffic. A site that is SEO optimised is also ‘Google-friendly’. This means it conforms to the criteria required by Google (and other major search engines) and will be promoted in response to online searches.

How Do You Do Search Engine Optimisation?

If only there was a published list of criteria that every website could adhere to! Unfortunately, no such list exists because the criteria are constantly shifting. Instead, SEO specialists who follow the ranking factors closely, provide ongoing commentary on what Google is looking for when it ranks sites in its search engines.

Perhaps the easiest way to approach SEO is via the 3 foundational pillars upon which it’s built: Authority, Relevance and Experience. These are the umbrella terms under which all the 200 or so ranking factors are gathered.

1. Authority – Are You Respected?

Google’s aim is to serve up the very best pages to users in response to their online searches. They do this so that those searchers will trust Google to do the best job of promoting useful sites. The more people who use Google, the more effective their paid ads offering becomes.

Google assesses a website’s authority in a number of ways:

• Outward links to relevant and respected sites.
• Backlinks to your site from quality sites.
• Reviews left by customers.
• Mentions of your brand online.
• A regular flow of queries, comments in articles.

2. Relevance – Do You Deliver What You Promise?

What’s your bounce rate like? If you don’t know, you can check it out in Google Analytics which provides ongoing reports on the performance of your website. A high bounce rate (in the 70s or above) suggests that someone landed on your page, but quickly decided it wasn’t relevant to their search.

Google assesses trust on your bounce rate which, in turn, is based on a number of factors:

• Does your website use relevant keywords/search terms for your product/service?
• Is your content original, researched, and relevant to your customers?
• Does your website regularly refresh/update content and resources?
• Is the navigation system simple, and are internal links used to help visitors.
• Are you using appropriate keywords for your topic?

3. Experience – Do You Care About Your Visitors?

Google wants to ensure that any site it promotes will offer a good user experience to its visitors. This is all about understanding your customers needs, knowing what they want to see when they’re searching online, and taking great care to deliver more than just the basics.

There are a number of ways that Google ranks user experience:

• Fast page loading speed. Content settles quickly.
• The page offers relevant content which is easy to read and navigate.
• In addition to content which answers the user’s query, there are helpful links to more resources.
• The page is up to date with no broken links, or old statistics.
• The content is unique; it has not been cut and pasted from elsewhere.