Unlike Pay-Per-Click (PPC), SEO is purely organic. This means that you cannot pay search engines to show your website further up the organic search results.
As search engines are often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complement other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line. SEO can take time and ‘organically’ rising through the rankings is a process but it’s definitely worth the wait.
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
In simple terms, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your site with the aim of increasing visibility for relevant searches.
The better your page’s visibility in search results is, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
However, SEO isn’t just about making your website ‘search-engine friendly’, it also needs to be useful and engaging for the website visitor – your potential customer – too.
How does SEO work?
SEO uses a range of different techniques to help achieve this. From ensuring relevant keywords appear on each page of your website to driving links from other websites to yours, as well as from a technical point of view making sure that your website loads quickly, and that search engines can find and interpret its content correctly.
While the main goal of SEO is to get your website on page one in search results, this will depend on how competitive the market your business operates in is, and the quality of your website in terms of both content and build. If your product or service is a little more niche or your business operates in a limited geographical area, you actually stand a better chance of being found in relevant search results.
Why Do You Need SEO?
A huge proportion of website traffic is delivered via just two search engines, Google and Bing. So, you need to make sure your website is optimised for search engines to attract people who are looking for your products and services. So if the search engines can’t find your site or understand what you offer, they can’t direct potential customers to you.
This is where the right SEO techniques can bring you thousands of extra ‘ready to buy’ visitors, and the wrong moves can lead to your site being penalised so it’s pushed further down in search results where people will never find you. And just as the world of business is fiercely competitive, so is the world of SEO. Many of your competitors will also be working on their website’s SEO, so it’s important to be ahead of the game by staying on top of the latest techniques and making sure your website meets these best practice
What Are The Alternatives?
While you can pay Google and Bing to appear in their search engine results using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising (they appear like normal listings but at the very top of the search results page, and increasingly at the bottom of the page too, with a small ‘Ad’ label), they are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, and once your set budget is spent, your ad will no longer appear – so you need to commit to an ongoing budget.
However, with SEO, the aim of the game is to boost your visibility long-term, so the cost of optimising your website is much less than paid advertising.
Free Website Performance Checker
Analyse how well your webpage is optimized for a certain search term as well as reveal errors that affect how your website performs in search results.
Search Engines rely on many factors to rank a website. This SEO Checker reviews these and more to help you identify problems that could be holding your site back from reaching its potential.
Additionally, we provide a clear, actionable, prioritised list of recommendations to help improve.
