All of the new websites I build include on-site SEO as standard. For clients with a larger budget and/or for those with a greater need to be listed higher on Google, I work with a local SEO expert to enhance the SEO of the website.
What exactly is SEO and how can it help your website?
To quote an SEO expert :
Search engine optimisation, otherwise known as SEO is about making sure your website is Google-friendly for the phrases your customers are using to find your products or services. When people ‘Google’ for something they get a list of websites that Google thinks are a good fit. Google has a list of over 200 criteria that it uses to decide which order to put that list in and to move up the list means pushing your competitors down the list.
SEO is about researching what is needed to be on the list for your chosen search phrases and making sure your website meets as many of those 200 criteria as possible.
Getting your website listed on the first page of Google will likely take a while, it is common to take as long as two or three months or longer depending on how many competitors you might have and because your competitors may ‘fight back’ there are no guarantees that even after optimising your site that you will rank on the first page. However, the rewards of being in the top half of page 1 are massive. The top 2 or 3 listings get over 60% of the clicks whilst the bottom of page one gets just a few measley clicks.
Ranking high on Google is a bit of a popularity contest, often with the website with the most ‘friends’ winning. In this context ‘friends’ are mentions of your website, brand name, address and phone number on other sites that Google trusts. Sites like local newspaper business directories, specialist industry directories, local community websites and sites like Yell, Facebook and Twitter etc. These ‘mentions’ are called ‘citations’ and the more citations your website has the better. Your business will get more benefit if those citations include a comphrehensive description of your products or services, lots of photos, videos and reviews. The trick to maximising the benefit of citations is to make sure that your business contact info is exactly the same on all of them so Google can match them to your website.