What is SEO? and why does it matter to my business?

So you’ve decided to start your own business or blog. You’re setting up the site, taking the time to carefully craft your blog articles, tailor your service offering, or design your products. 

Then you start to hear the pesky word… SEO.

What does it mean? Why does it matter? And what can I do for my new site's SEO?

Don’t worry, this guide aims to be completely comprehensive in covering all the SEO fundamentals.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s the process of optimising your website in order to be more visible to users when they are looking online for products, articles or any kind of information via a search engine. 

Let's say you sell moisturiser. 

It would make sense to assume, most users will search for this in the Search Engine Bar, by typing in some variation of the product name. Let’s say they type in the word “Moisturizer” 

Google or any other search engine then has an entire algorithm going on in the background with multiple ranking factors to decide whether it should suggest your moisturiser page to the user who has searched this.

Put simply, SEO is all about setting up your site to be more recommendable (attractive in search engines eyes) for particular keywords searches such as this one.

What are keywords in SEO?

SEO Keywords are any words related to the topic or product you sell or talk about. Just like in the example above, where the relevant SEO keyword for your business could be "moisturiser", it could also be "day moisturiser", "night moisturiser", "moisturiser for dry skin" or any number of keywords related to subcategories of your moisturiser product.

Google assesses content or web pages on your site to give each a ranking for a specific keywords.

What is a keyword ranking?

Keyword rankings are the positions your webpage will show up for in a search engine results page (often abbreviated to 'SERPs') In the example shown below, we would consider 'moisturizer' the keyword and the Clinique page to be in position #1 for said keyword.

Ultimately every effort you make for SEO is to serve the ultimate end of improving keyword rankings for your site through multiple SEO tactics. Better keyword rankings = better visibility for your brand online and to users who can buy your products or read your articles.

What types of SEO is there?

There are three core pillars of SEO you can enact for your site that will help these rankings:

1. On Page SEO: Improvement of the on page content and copy of web pages

2. Off Page SEO: This involves getting recommendations, brand recognition and referral links to your site via other websites or sources

3. Technical SEO: The technical health of your site (Including whether it loads well and that search engines can access it)

These three work together to improve how search engines understand and improve your site. Think of it in simple terms: If the content is accessible easily (Technical) , good (on page) and recommended by others (off page), then it makes sense Google would want users to view it.

On Page SEO (Content Optimisation)

Your end goal should always be to publish helpful, engaging and high quality content whether that be in your blog articles, or in your product display pages.

Website content can be read by both users and search engines (they read the code).

So there are two steps to optimising on page content: Improving the actual copy for users and improving the way the copy is marked up in code for search engines.

To improve content for users ensure your pages are:

• Relevant to your product offering or area of expertise

• Include the relevant keywords to your offering (so Search Engines understand what a page is about)

• Bring something new to the topic/ be unique

• Be well sourced (especially if dealing with sensitive topics)

• Accurate and up to date

• Offer an edge against any of your competitors (Why should users go to your page above others?)

• Easy to understand, read and follow a logical structure

• Quick to offer answers. Be concise without losing originality or TOV.
  

To improve content for to make easier for search engines to read ensure you have the following:

• Keywords in Meta Titles

• Keywords in Meta descriptions

• Keywords in Header tags (H1-H6)

• Image alt text

• Time to answer (bite sized information bits)

• Readability

• Schema markup

• No duplicate content across site or in a single page (try not to repeat topics)

These are just some but not an exhaustive list of best practices when it comes to writing and editing your onsite copy for your business.

Off Page SEO (Link building)

Increasing your brand presence on other more traditional marketing channels like TV and radio, or on forms of social media, can increase the chances that users come to your site. However, they do not really have any impact on whether Google sees your content as more valuable or suggestible for user searched keywords.

What does suggest your content is high quality is whether it has backlinks.

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to pages on your site.

Acquiring these links in SEO is a process called Link Building. The goal being to get high quality links from highly authoritative sites that suggest your content.

I link from authoritative site is much more valuable than a link from a less reputable or spammy site. i.e choose link quality over link quantity.

How do I build these backlinks?

There are several ways other people, brands and webmasters (owners of a site) will recommend your site:

• Digital PR or Traditional PR campaigns that generate buzz

• Creating great content that people want to recommend

• Promoting your site, content, brand and products on social media. Set up a brand account on all relevant platforms

• Getting Ratings and reviews and being active in engaging with them

• Listing management: ensuring you are set up on relevant directories and lists online

Technical SEO

Technical SEO can often be the most crucial pillar for your site. It covers the crucial set up and maintenance of your site being accessible on the web. Sites that are spammy, slow, broken or inaccessible provide the user with a bad (or no) end experience and understandably Google is unlikely to suggest them.

Technical health of a site all begins with whether Google can even find it. If google cannot access content or you mark it as not to be found, it will not even begin the process of ranking a page for a relevant keyword.

Technically healthy sites will always have the following:

• Be crawlable and Indexable by Google (Google can find the site and you've set it up so it will save it to its database)

• Be secure

• Follow a logical informational architecture and structure

• Give good user experience (good load times + core web vitals)

• Have good accessbility

• Have Schema Markup/ Structured Data

• Properly set up canonical links

• Properly set up redirects

• Well set up internal links (so Google and Users can flow through the site easily)

There are many more sub issues involved with keeping a site technically healthy, but these are the most logically important, especially to those of you to whom SEO is a completely foreign subject.

What is the difference between SEO and and SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) considers Paid streams of traffic as well as organic streams of traffic from SEO.

SEM = paid (ppc) + organic (seo)

SEO = organic traffic

Now I understand the basics, what do I need to know?

This blog should set you up nicely for the next step of the process: which involves understanding how search engines work, how they access your site, and how your content ultimately gets promoted to users.

Next Chapter: Understanding How Search Engines Work

Common Beginner SEO Questions

Can I do SEO as a beginner?

You absolutely can do SEO as a beginner. SEO is not necessarily hard, it just requires time, consistency and effort in order to continually monitor, update and expand the content and health of your site.

What is an example of SEO?

Is SEO free?

Can SEO earn me money?

What are the three main areas of SEO?

What happens if I don't care about SEO?

Should I learn SEO first or Google ads?