What is SEO, and why is it important?

TravelDigitalCreativeStrategyInside Accord

22 Mar

Are you looking to improve your brand’s online visibility and reach a wider audience? If so, you might not know it, but you’re looking for SEO.

Search engines are the first port of call for most when using the internet. From looking for last-minute holiday deals to trying to work out why that actor on the screen seems so familiar, we’re a world powered by search. And the more we search, the better search engines are becoming at showing us exactly what we want.

We all know that being as visible as possible is essential for businesses to succeed; that’s why businesses rely on word-of-mouth, invest in out-of-home advertising and pay for their brand to appear in the ad breaks of prime-time TV shows. SEO allows you to also be visible in search engine results. If your website isn’t optimised for organic search, you could miss out on a huge opportunity to reach potential customers.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO aims to increase website visibility by improving its rankings on search engine results pages. Essentially, an SEO strategy will do everything in its power to make your brand appear at the top of the list for the most relevant searches.

What are the benefits of SEO?

SEO increases your brand’s visibility.
SEO is cost-effective.
SEO improves user experience.
SEO improves your brand’s credibility.
SEO assists with other marketing channels.

SEO increases your brand’s visibility

The primary goal and benefit is to increase your brand’s visibility. This increased visibility in the organic search results means more website traffic, and more traffic means more potential customers. When a website is properly optimised for SEO, not only will traffic be coming from the most relevant searches, but it’ll also be directed to well-produced pages.

SEO goes beyond your brand name, helping you tap into a customer market that wants your product but doesn’t know your name. Instead of just having one door to your website, you’ll be opening entry points to all levels of your site; the homepage, product pages, blog articles and more; enticing people to come in and take a look around.

SEO is cost-effective

SEO is a cost-effective way to improve your website traffic, as you pay for the improvements to your website and enjoy the benefits in return. Unlike PPC, where your investment determines your appearance in the search rankings (useful for competitive keywords!), SEO services improve and optimise your website, and search engines reward you as a result.

Moreover, SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that compounds over time as works continue to improve. A little bit of SEO work a month can go a long way in the long term. As your website grows and builds its expertise, authority and trustworthiness, search engines will see it as a stronger website, helping it to rank higher.

SEO improves user experience

By optimising your website for search engines and following best practice, you’ll naturally be making it more user-friendly as well. SEO includes a wide range of optimisations, such as improving your website’s speed and responsiveness, the information provided on your key landing pages, ease of navigation between pages and more. All of these things don’t only impress search engines but website users too.

We’ve all had it before where we’ve gone on a website and it’s taken what felt like years to load, or the exact piece of information you’re looking for isn’t there. A proper SEO strategy makes sure this doesn’t happen.

And pair SEO and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) together, and you’ll be able to make that journey even smoother. Whereas SEO brings more users to your site, CRO helps them to convert, turning your newly earned traffic into newly earned customers.

SEO improves your brand’s credibility

We tend to trust the brands we know the best, it’s only natural, and by being more prominent in the search rankings, you are perceived as more credible and trustworthy by users. Plus, SEO will ensure the content on your website - from the information on your product landing pages to the blogs you’re posting - covers your niche in its entirety, answering customer questions, demonstrating your authority and making you a one-stop shop for users.

By improving SEO, organisations can position themselves as experts and authorities in their fields. And, when users click through to websites and see optimised content that’s well informed, they’ll be even more likely to have faith in a brand.

SEO assists with other marketing channels

Improving the content on your website doesn’t just benefit SEO but other marketing channels too. Take PPC, for example. If you are paying for someone to click through to a landing page, you want to know that that page will fulfil their search intent when they get there and not something that they’ll bounce from.

The process of SEO builds your website into a user-focused hub of information, which complements all of your marketing activity. Whether customers are coming from a TV ad or are clicking on a PPC ad, through your SEO activity, your website will be better set up to fulfil their needs.

How SEO works

SEO works by optimising a range of elements on and off a website to increase its performance. At Accord, we think of SEO in three main pillars:

Content

The content on your website is what users will look for when using search engines. This might be your homepage or about pages, product listings or services pages, or accompanying information such as blog posts and valuable guides.

Building this content out is an essential part of SEO, as these are the pages you want to appear in search engine results pages. And, from the recent E-E-A-T focus to the helpful content update, it’s an area that Google is always changing its lens on, and websites can always improve upon. Your SEO campaign will help you develop the pages that are already on your website and generate ideas for new content that people and search engines are looking for.

Technical

Technical SEO refers to how your website, and the pages on it, are crawled and understood by search engines. Covering factors including page speed, website navigation, URL structures, sitemap, internal linking, and more, technical SEO ensures your website is working and well connected. Although technical elements are less likely to be as apparent to a user, poor technical SEO can dampen the user experience and mean that search engines struggle (or are unable) to crawl and understand your website.

Backlinks

The final pillar is backlinks. These are the links from other websites on the internet that are pointing to your site. Building and earning high-quality backlinks to your website from reputable websites within your niche is something an SEO campaign should do.

Although there is a lot of talk in the industry about how significant backlinks are to your website and how much they influence rankings, time and time again, we see evidence that search engines view backlinks as a signal of your website’s authority and expertise. It makes sense; backlinks are essentially the word-of-mouth recommendation of the internet; the more people that ‘recommend’ you, the better you must be.

How to improve your website’s SEO

The optimisations you can make to your site are almost infinite, with the needle constantly shifting on what best practice is and search engine algorithm updates being continuously released. There is always something that can be better.

From optimising on-page SEO and title tags to fixing technical issues and link building, there is a never-ending list of ways to improve your website. And these optimisations shouldn’t be seen as a tick list to complete once and never return to; the way people search is constantly in flux, as is feedback from search engines, and websites need to adapt to that change.

At Accord, our team of SEO experts have up-to-date expertise; we attend SEO conferences and keep our fingers on the pulse regarding the latest changes in the industry. With an in-depth knowledge of everything organic and access to industry-leading tools, we will provide optimisations for your website that will help you succeed.

Working alongside your team, we’ll be able to help inform your content marketing strategy, highlight the most pressing technical issues to fix and assess your backlink profile. We’ll review your competitors, exploring their processes and what they’re doing that you are not, helping you to plug any existing holes. We’ll feed back on results, using tools like Google Analytics to determine the success of the actions we’re taking and highlight which areas of your website might need more love.

We’ll filter everything down into manageable actions and discussions, eliminating the noise and giving you more time to do what you do best.

Are you interested in learning more about our organic SEO services? Get in touch today and find out what we can do to help your business succeed.