It has never been easier to create an ecommerce website or online business, but making sure that your customers can find you, that’s the real challenge.
A search engine is the likely first step for anyone looking for a product or service and ensuring that a consumer can find and choose yours is the essence of SEO.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is essentially the steps you take to ensure that you rank highly for keywords or key phrases in search engine results to improve your online presence.
A client might search for a product or service on a search engine using a keyword like ‘red trainers’, and the aim of SEO is to have the website delivering this product or service appear as close to the top of the search results as possible. It’s an essential part of digital marketing that cannot be overlooked for any business that wants to thrive and should be included in any business marketing strategy.
SEO is different to other marketing efforts such as email marketing. Email marketing is another effective strategy that helps a company to communicate directly with their subscribers who are already engaged. SEO allows companies to be found by consumers who weren’t previously aware of them.
Why is SEO so important?
If you’re looking for a service or a product, what’s your first step? If your initial thought was ‘Google it’, your part of the majority of modern consumers whose instinct is to use a search engine and look online.
Being found by their audience is the priority for websites and businesses and SEO enables this in the online sphere which accounts for an ever-greater proportion of business for most companies. Ensuring a good position in search engine rankings is crucial, when was the last time you went to the second or third page of results to find what you were searching for?
A good SEO strategy removes the barriers between client and company, and, if implemented well, allows companies to rival competitors that have much larger advertising or marketing budgets. And it isn’t just for websites, anything that relies on an online audience, such as mobile apps needs an SEO strategy to ensure they can be found.
Why Content is key for a website.
Search engine algorithms can now tell not just whether a particular keyword appears on a page, but how high quality a website’s content is and adjust its position on the page based on this. Practices such as ‘keyword stuffing’, where variations on a keyword are strung together in the hope that it will appear for all of them, now negatively affect a site’s ranking.
It’s not all about including a prize-winning piece of content though, taking steps to ensure that toxic SEO elements aren’t present and making sure some fundamentals are followed also helps.
Every page should have pictures and unique text, ensuring that pictures are tagged with keywords in their alt-tag and search terms are used throughout the text helps page performance, but it’s a fine balance and keywords should not be overused.
Content should be useful and answer the query that drove a person to click on the page in the first place. Harvesting clicks is one thing, but retention is equally important and a page that a user finds unhelpful or frustrating is unlikely to generate anything more than an angry click on the ‘back’ button. A successful strategy should include a blog that’s kept up-to-date with quality content.
Including a blog also allows a site to grow and keep fresh, avoiding the stagnation of a few tried and tested pages that never change and give clients nothing to come back to. It also helps rank for a greater number of keywords and longer tail words and phrases.
Although SEO is a priority as it allows potential conversions to find a website, it’s not the only step that you need to be aware of.
A clear, effective call to action (CTA) is vital in ensuring that the traffic that has been achieved doesn’t drop off and equates to a conversion that’s going to benefit the business. Make sure there’s a clear purpose to the pages that you’re driving traffic to and a CTA that’s obvious and easy to find.
The importance of SEO and Website Construction
SEO needs to be a fundamental part of website construction. It’s not something that can be tacked on at the end and there’s no magic ‘trick’ that can suddenly get your website to appear at the top of the results.
Elements of website construction that influence SEO include:
- Heading tags – to separate content on a page.
- Text within images – Search engines can’t read text within images.
- Website structure – A website that’s hard to navigate doesn’t rank well.
- Site speed – Slow sites mean that visitors will leave rather than wait for pages to load.
- URL format – Strings of numbers and symbols confuse search engines and clients.
Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine search engine position, and these are constantly being updated. SEO strategy is a specialist skill, and if you’re serious about improving your ranking and visibility, you should consider using an agency.
MaxWeb offer expert web design services and SEO services that not only set you up for success, but ensure you have an ongoing strategy to help you achieve the top spot and stay there.
Web Design Wirral and Web Design Liverpool give an outstanding service creating websites that you’d want to be found, as well as all the fundamental components needed to make it an SEO success. Working with small and large business on the Wirral, in Liverpool, or elsewhere, we give an outstanding, professional design service that will help your business thrive.
If you’re looking for SEO around Wirral or Chester , n the surrounding area, or further afield, our services offer a proven track record helping companies achieve the results they want to see and will strategically market your business with our award-winning digital marketing services.
Posted on Friday, August 13th, 2021 in SEO.
