Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

What is SEO?

Put simply, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an ongoing process which ensures you appear high up in organic search engines, such as Google, for the keywords and terms your target audience searches with. For example, if you’re selling funky, customisable t-shirts and someone searches for those sorts of keywords, you want to appear high up in the search results to ensure your website gets visited. The higher up you are in the results, the better your chance of getting a click through to your site. The Holy Grail is of course page one, position one which studies show gets 40% – 50% of organic clicks – second place gets 10 – 15% and it decreases rapidly from there.

There are two types of listings in a search engine; organic and sponsored (or paid). Organic listings are where you appear ‘naturally’ based on the content on your page and your page’s authority – there are many factors contributing to page authority – inbound links being the main one. Many websites use paid ads whilst they work their way up the organic listings, however paid listings are also used to supplement organic listings as a lot of users will click on the paid links before the organic ones – this is typically because they are often placed physically higher up the page, getting your attention first – paid ads typically get 30% -35% of all clicks.

The primary way to move up the organic listings is by building links to your site. The more high powered (determined by PageRanks), relevant pages link to your site using the right keywords, the more authority your website pages have, thus the higher up they will appear in the organic listings.

Working example

So you’re set up as www.funkytshirts.com and www.funkytrousers.com (in this example a well established website with a strong PageRank) links to your site with the anchor text ‘funky t-Shirts’ – this will then improve your rankings when someone searches for ‘funky t-shirts’ because of three things:

- The relevance of the inbound link from funkytrousers.com (clothes)
- The PageRank of funkytrousers.com is high
- The anchor text ‘funky t-Shirts’ is relevant (these are the keywords people will search for)

As you get inbound links, the amount you move up the search results depends on the PageRank strength of the page the link is coming from. PageRanks range from 0 to 10. Google would be a 10 and a brand new website would be a 0. The rankings are exponential so a 10 is many, many, many times more powerful than a 1, 2 or even a 9!

How does SEO fit into Digital Marketing?

After understanding your target audience and market place, SEO is a contender for the top spot in our ‘be found’ category, if not for all Digital Marketing subjects. Allthough every subject we cover plays a key role, there is an argument to say that it doesn’t matter how good your website, messaging and collateral are (not to mention your products and services), unless you are found by your audience, your business will not survive. As the volume of consumers who buy or at least consult the web before they buy continues to grow, ranking well in the major search engines is a top priority.

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