Time to revisit our old pal, SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation if you want its full name).
SEO is all about making your website more visible to search engine users so you get more traffic. This is all organic too, unlike Google Ads where you pay for every click that you receive.
Increasing traffic is a solid first step to increasing sales. Especially if you go about SEO the right way and target the right audience for you. Therefore, you’ll find that SEO can be one of the best investments you can make.
If you have the time to spend doing research on keywords, earning backlinks, and creating content that ranks, then by all means give it a shot!
Luckily, if you’re too busy (doing much more important things we’re sure), then you can hire an SEO agency to do all this for you. A good agency will have years of experience seeing what works and what doesn’t first hand and can get you on the right track straight away.
How does SEO work?
A huge part of SEO is structuring and organising your website and the content on it so that it appeals to Google. If Google likes what you do and you’re an authoritative voice in your industry, then you’ll be rewarded by appearing higher up in the search ranks.
Google has algorithms that they use to rank the usefulness of websites. This algorithm is top secret and constantly evolving, but there are a few tried and tested techniques that you can use to play to Google’s algorithm and reap the rewards of showing up first on the results page. Cha-Ching!
Of course, Google can’t actually see your website like we humans see it. They use their own web crawlers to navigate through the billions of webpages that are on the internet and index them all so they know exactly what’s on them and where they link to/from.
When you search for something on Google, Google first works out what it is that you’re searching for and then they go through their index to find the most relevant websites for you. The search results that you then see are in order from the most relevant to the least relevant.
Take a look at these statistics showing the click through rate for websites in 2021 depending on their position on Google and hopefully you’ll be able to see the importance of optimising your webpages for Google. If you want organic clicks, you need to be optimised!
Is SEO free?
There are loads of SEO techniques you can use that will cost you absolutely nothing! Here, we’ll give you a freebie as a treat: you can optimise images for SEO without spending a penny by making sure the file size is as small as possible. Just like that, your website is now a little bit more Google friendly!
The reason for this specific technique is because Google place a big value on user experience. If your images have a small file size, that means that they’ll load in quicker and your user will be able to navigate around your website more enjoyably.
While SEO is marked as the ‘free’ marketing method, it will cost you money in one way or another. For example, creating SEO content as opposed to just any old content will take longer and requires a strategy. Developing this strategy and putting in the graft researching the content takes time, time costs money.
In the end though, if you do it right, it’ll definitely be worthwhile and benefit your business.
Good SEO vs bad SEO
You may have heard murmurs online of people asking ‘is SEO dead?’. Well, we’re here to tell you definitively that no, SEO is not dead. It’s very much alive and well, thank you for asking!
Usually, the people saying this sort of stuff have been burnt by agencies in the past who over promise and under deliver.
As a digital agency ourselves, we’re very much aware of the cowboy agencies that are out there and the negative impact that they have on our industry.
So how do you know if an SEO service is high quality? Here are a few quick tips for things that you can look out for when choosing an SEO agency to make sure you get one of the good ones.
First of all, don’t trust people who promise you that they can get you to rank first place, or even first page, on Google. Depending on your industry, ranking near the top on Google ranges from hard to very very hard! Usually, these agencies that blindly promise that they can get you to the top will be going about it the wrong way.
For example, they might create completely irrelevant content for you that ranks but brings in the wrong target audience. While your viewership may increase massively, your conversions won’t change at all.
Second, make sure their credentials are up to date. There’s no point in seeking help from an agency that had a successful track record in 2012. Google’s algorithm has between 500-600 changes per year. You want an agency that knows what Google are looking for right now.
Finally, only choose an agency that actually care about your business and are invested in what you do. While you might find an agency that’ll do some good SEO for you without caring about you, they won’t be there for you if things go wrong. They won’t go out of their way to make sure you’re having the best possible experience working together.
You want an agency that cares about your success. An agency that knows everything about what you do and why you do it so that they know how to benefit your business the most.
After all, you’re entering a business partnership and you’ll hopefully be spending a long time working together so it’s best to work with people that you can get on with!
Are SEO agencies worth it?
If you’re looking for local SEO or international SEO, and you heed the warnings that we’ve just given you, then an agency will 100% be worth the investment.
A dedicated SEO business will know the best way to improve both your on-page and off-page SEO from your first meeting when hearing about your goals and business strategies.
At Blaze Media, one of our skills that we pride ourselves on the most is our ability to translate what SEO means to our clients.
Listen, we understand that SEO is a jargon filled topic. What we do is break everything down in our reports to highlight the main metrics that mean the most to you: click through rate, sales figures, bounce rate, and show you exactly how our work has impacted these.
We only succeed when you succeed, and we love watching our clients grow to become absolutely massive in their industries.
If you’re interested in starting your SEO journey with us, then get in touch and let’s get started!