What is SEO and will it help your website deliver results?

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – consists of a variety of strategies, actions and best practices put in place on your website with the end goal of improving its position on search engines. Having and maintaining a website that is well optimised is more likely to receive higher volumes of traffic as well as the right quality of traffic from various search engines, to improve conversions and ROI.

How do Search Engines determine where to rank a website?

Back in the day it was easy to manipulate rankings by using bad techniques that would literally get websites to rank for anything and everything. From a user’s perspective this would mean the results they were given for their searches were irrelevant and a waste of time. Nowadays, with modern SEO, it is the prime goal of search engines to ensure they deliver the most relevant results to match a user’s searches.
Search engines perform several different activities when delivering search results.

Crawling

All search engines use a web crawler, spider or robot to browse the world wide web looking for new or updated content. The content can be in many different forms such as webpages, videos, or PDFs for instance. The most important thing to remember is that all the content is found through links. The robots follow links from sites to sites and stores this information ready to be retrieved to match relevant searches by users.

Indexing

From the crawling process the content is stored and organised. Once a page has been indexed it is then available to be displayed for relevant searches.

Ranking

Search engines then provide pieces of content that best match a search query, ranking from most relevant to least relevant.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how search engines crawl websites visit: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate

Why should you SEO your website

SEO is not a quick fix to get you new customers within 24 hours. It is a long term strategy that delivers long term benefits. For anyone just starting a business with a new website it will take at least 6 to 12 months to start seeing the results they want. Although this may seem a long time, if the optimisation is done correctly, your website could benefit from years of being ranked high on search engines results for the terms you want to be found for. You can find out more about how to ensure your website is fully optimised by visiting: https://www.theukdomain.uk/get-online/top-seo-tips-new-websites/

Ultimately your website should be targeting the right people who are looking for your products and services. With an optimised website you will provide a great user experience for your customers as they will find what they want, quickly and easily on any device they are using to search. Happy customers are more likely to return to your website and buy again. If you’re feeling a little daunted about how to get started an experienced SEO Agency will be able to perform an audit of your website to work out how to improve your SEO to start delivering results.

If your website is fully optimised and meeting the requirements of search engines by providing users with the relevant information and giving them a great experience when they come to your website, your website conversions will increase, your brand awareness will grow larger and your ROI will improve.