What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

As its name implies, SEO is the practice of optimising your appearance in search engine result listings and increasing your opportunity to rank organically.

Why does it matter?

Think about your own behaviour when connected. Imagine you’re searching for a product or service that is not served by the businesses you know. You might ask family/friends, especially when you’re in their company the moment the idea enters your mind. But if you’re on your own, or the people you’re with can’t help you, you’ll likely resort to a search engine like Google to find that business.
For example, imagine you’d like to work with a life coach in Brighton and turn to Google to see who’s around. You type in “life coach Brighton” and get some ideas. Chances are you’ll only pay attention to the first few businesses listed. In fact,

To put this into context, we know through insight tools that an average of 90 individuals search for life coaches in Brighton using the query “life coach Brighton” every month. We also know they’re motivated and driven to find one, or at the very least in a consideration phase. If you rank on page 1 of Google, between 4 and 32 individuals will click on your site each month! If on top of that, you’re also listed on Google’s location-based business listings (e.g. show up on maps), your chances to generate that traffic are even higher.

Although you might see some ads and be interested to invest in paid advertising yourself, there is evidence in the numbers that Google users (i.e. searchers like you and I) are more likely to trust and click on organic results. The notion tends to be: if Google places this website up there, it must be trustworthy…

So, how does SEO work?

The truth is, SEO is among the most time-consuming digital marketing channel to invest in. Google checks multiple times a day whether or not results are still relevant the way they were last week for particular search terms. Competition can be incredibly high, especially for popular search terms like “car hire london” (7,300 monthly searches on average). However, the benefits in many cases mean that the majority of your traffic that led to a conversion occurred following a Google search for what you can offer.

In order to understand the type of site that Google would reward with great rankings, it’s worth considering what motivates Google as a company: Their very first value is to ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’. This user-friendliness is the most important principle to remember for SEO newbies.

To assess the user-friendliness of your site, Google deems the following elements to be ranking factors.

1. Technical elements such as page speed, domain, your site architecture, domain and more.

2. On-page content such as your website copy, meta data, content structure, cadence and media.

3. Off-site elements which are the links from other (respected) websites to your site and increasingly mentions.

How can I help you?

As a content marketing consultant, I can help you with steps 2 & 3 of your journey to better rankings (don’t worry, I can connect you with some great tech SEO people who can help you with step 1 if your technical SEO isn’t quite right). SEO requires a specific content strategy, patience, commitment, consistency as well as a level of agility that adjusts to any of Google’s algorithm updates. I can help you with: