SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Don’t be the needle, be the haystack

Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In general, the earlier, and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users, and these visitors can be converted into customers. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

The Process

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is integral to any business, that is of course unless you have infinite funds to market and promote your business online. Which if we are being honest, there are very few in that position.

There are three companies you need to think about when dealing with SEO

Google – Controls 64.5% of the search market
Bing – Controls 32.6& of the search market
Your Company – Your company is always the priority.

SEO can be a tricky, a balance has to be found between how another computer regards your site, and how a user will read and navigate your site. Google always changes their algorithms in regards to SEO, in 2015 their algorithm was changed in excess of 600 times. So whilst you can simply set and forget your SEO, you do need to keep on top of changes in the industry to fully reap the benefits of SEO. That’s where we at DiD-Digital come into the picture.

We use a multitude of tools and methods to increase your prominence and presence on both search engines to increase your exposure and attract a larger pool of customers to your website.

The Tools

Google Analytics

This is where it all starts, a simple code embedded on your website. The code allows you access to a Google Analytics account, in turn this allows you to see everything that is happening on your site in terms of hits (Visitors), demographics, Country of origin. In fact if you can think of a metric you want to track, it is most likely a suitable report can be created.

The best thing about Google Analytic’s is that once you have set it up you can monitor all traffic to your site, this information is invaluable as it can provide you with a quantifiable figure to assess success or failure. Also points of weakness can be pinpointed (e.g. people are leaving your site after reading a post or viewing a page.)

As mentioned this is the first step to SEO, knowing what is happening on your site is the first step to improving it.

Google Search Console

Another Google product. Your website needs to be linked to a search console account and in turn you now have usable information relating to search queries, site structure, site errors etc. Through the search console you can have your site re-indexed by Google or alter particular aspects of how your site is displayed in search results.

IMPORTANT: The search console can cause damage to your sites ranking so we do advise caution if attempting to submit and edit your site directly. Your physical site cannot be harmed, but how you appear in searches (if you appear) can be adversely affected by using the search console incorrectly.

The Search Console is a complimentary product to Google Analytic’s and when used in tandem can extract a lot of information about your visitors and site usage.

Google Adwords

Another Google product (yes that’s number 3). Your website once again needs to be linked to an Adwords account, and that is where we stop using Adwords for its advertised purpose.

Adwords for those that do not know is googles paid advertising platform, When dealing with SEO we are aiming for organic growth, Anyone can be number 1 on google if they have enough money to throw into advertising. That is not what we want to do. We use Adwords as a research tool, we analyze your business and your market and your major competitors. We find the top keywords and search terms used in your industry and create your SEO campaign accordingly.

Ultimately there will always be a company that will pay $10.00+ for a click and page prominence on a google search, the trick to good SEO is to get on that first page with them, without having to pay the $10.00+ for the click. Depending on how competitive your industry is and the search terms used (i.e. a one word search term is near impossible, while a 3-4 word search term is quite probable), it is quite reasonable to expect a page 1-2 ranking with some effort.

Bing

Much like Google, Microsoft has its own search engine, you would probably recognize it if you use a windows based PC as it prompts you to set Bing as your default search engine (this is after you have set google as your default).

So why do we bother? Bing is great! we cannot stress this enough. As people often argue about Mac Vs Windows superiority you will find the same disagreements between Bing and Google.

Bing accounts for over 30% of the searches online, so we like to cover our bases.

Something to think about

77%

people make their choice on Page 1 itself.

73%

users turn to search engines to find products

72%

users totally ignore paid ads. Organic results win over

44%

online buyers had begun from search engines only.

Is that it?

The four tools above let you know what is happening on your site, in terms of traffic and other information. The above tools do not actually improve your SEO, it is simply used as a starting point, a baseline so to speak. Once the above has been implemented then we have a starting point on which to work off.

The above tools allow us to gauge and quantify the success of any SEO work undertaken. It goes without saying that the results attained are always positive, the above tools simply allow us to show it.

IMPORTANT: A lot of SEO is waiting, changes can be made on a website, on keywords and phrases but the speed at which results are attained can vary greatly. Unfortunately it comes down to indexing time, in some instances Bing and Google will index a site immediately or within in a handful of days, we have seen other instances where it has taken months. If you are running a new site, the expectation is that your site will be indexed very quickly. If you have an established site it may take some time.