SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of making your website visible in the organic search engine results for the keywords and locations most associated with your products or services.

With an effective SEO strategy in place, over time you can drive more traffic to your website and individual web pages, generate more relevant leads for your business, boost sales and ultimately achieve more revenue and profit!

Why you should care about SEO

In its simplest form, consider where the first place you would go to if you were looking to buy a product. For 9 out of 10 of us, we’d heard to our preferred search engine, probably Google in most cases, and pop into the search exactly what it is we are looking for.

By incorporating good SEO practices into your digital marketing campaign, you can ensure that your website is visible in the search results when people do just that- search for products or services that you have to offer.

Google in control

Google is the most used search engine in the world, so when implementing SEO best practices on a website, they are usually in line with what Google looks for and their extremely complex algorithms.

Whilst nobody outside of Google knows exactly what their algorithms look for, we do know some of the key things that makes a website perform well in the search results:

• High quality, relevant content and information in line with what the user is searching for
• Relevance is determined by Google ‘crawling’ your website to identify whether the content on there is relevant to the search query, and is mostly based on the use of keywords
• Quality of your website is determined by lots of different things, with one being the number of other high quality, relevant websites that link to your pages and website as a whole
• How well people engage with your site- do they stay on your website for a good period of time, or do they bounce straight back to the search results?
• Whether your website is mobile responsive- therefore works on a combination of mobile and tabloid devices, not just the traditional desktop format
• How fast your website loads- people don’t like to wait around for a website to load, so if yours takes too long, they’ll soon go elsewhere and Google will recognise this too
• The amount of unique content you have- Google loves content, especially if it is your own and unique to your website, not just copied from somewhere else
• Submit an XML sitemap to make it even easier for search engines to understand the make-up of your website

The important thing to remember is that Google factor hundreds, if not thousands of different elements into their ranking processes, and they are constantly updating, adding and changes these too so one can never be sure exactly what is going to work and what isn’t.

However, by ensuring your site meets most of the key principles, you should soon see it move in the right direction in the search results.

At Leicester Websites, we can create a brand-new website for your business that is built with SEO in mind, providing the perfect platform for long term success.