Guides in this series
Introduction
Getting a bright new shiny website is a bit like getting your first bicycle. Your needs can be simple: to get lots of happy, paying customers visiting your site and telling their friends about it. But how to bring customers means tweaking the working parts of your bicycle to make it as efficient as possible. Customers find you in various ways – maybe traditional marketing, social media marketing, buying Google Adwords, or SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of optimising a website to achieve a higher rank and better click-through rate in search engine result pages.
Do you need SEO?
To get visitors to find you, and to convert those visitors to customers, every site needs SEO. More than half of all site traffic comes from organic search. 40% of all online revenue is captured by search traffic on Google.
Do you need an SEO specialist?
SEO isn’t rocket science. You can do it yourself, and there are lots of free manuals on how to do it. On the other hand it might take you a few years. If you don’t have that long, we can help you.
Our SEO Services
Our SEO services are like the local bicycle shop, but for SEO. We are small, cost-effective, and want to help small businesses get the best out of their websites. We take tips from the big global players to keep us up to date, but our real focus is local. We are based in Cape Town, and are intent on helping business in Cape Town and the Western Cape.
To help small businesses afford us, we keep our own costs minimal and offer high quality input. Find out what we can do for you.
What does it mean to Optimise for a Search Engine?
To optimise for a search engine means to structure a website and its contents in such a way as to get found easily by search engines, especially Google as it has over 90% of search traffic.
Getting found at the top of Google or on the first or second page has a dramatic effect on the amount of customers that do business on your site. Customers are the ultimate goal. SEO includes getting your website rated high enough to be found, and converting visitors into paying customers of your product.
What gets you ranking higher on Google?
To understand this, imagine what Google wants. It is by far the world’s most successful search engine, and to keep there it needs to do better than all its competitors. “Better” in this case means delivering the best results for your search: websites that are an accurate reflection of the keywords you typed in, and that are known to be reliable.
“Reliable” is decided according to whatever Google is able to establish through its search-algorithm. The algorithm is Google’s big secret that its wealth is based on. It constantly crawls the world wide web, mimicking the experience of a user. It reads how accurately your product can be found by well-targeted keywords, whether the copy on the site is coherent, whether the site is respected by others in the same field deferring to it and linking to it, and whether the content on the site is well-structured. The algorithm also checks purely technical things like loading speed and longevity of the site.
To stay ahead of other search engines, the primary aim of Google’s team is to adapt the algorithm constantly to improve its performance. So, rank-building “tricks” like keyword stuffing or link-farming, which used to work, are now noted by the algorithm and can be penalised. The aim of SEO, then, is to make sure that you have a good quality site, where technical problems have been solved well, and your content is pertinent, beautifully written and makes sense.
What work must be done for good SEO?
In a nutshell, SEO consists of 3 parts which work together. The “shell” that supports it is the technical stuff and the seasoning that makes it impressive to others is the external links. But at the centre of it all, the most important part is the nut itself. This is the content, the writing, which needs to be rich and nutritious.
We offer you the whole package, and focuses the most on the rich centre, the content.
To return to the analogy of a bicycle, the technical part is the mechanics which clearly need to work well. The backlinks are the admiration from others for your great bike. The content is all the mental and physical health you get from biking, the fun of great adventures, and beautiful views constantly unfolding around you.
Get a free assessment of how we can help you get there.
Let’s get going
This rounds off the overview of what goes into great SEO for your website. Now you are equipped to delve to the next level. Start with the DIY Guide, or choose from the posts below where you would like to dip in and learn more.
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