What can SEO do for me?
First and foremost, search engine optimisation (SEO), including both search engine optimization SEO and local SEO, can significantly enhance your business’s online presence. By effectively utilising SEO strategies, you can increase the flow of potential customers to your web page, thereby establishing your brand as a leading authority in your market segment. This process involves a deep understanding of how search engines work and the importance of search engine rankings.
To achieve such success, our SEO team engages in a meticulous process of keyword research, development, and testing. This cycle, repeated over time, crafts a website uniquely tailored to your business needs, ensuring it performs optimally in search engine results and attracts a growing volume of quality enquiries.
Research
Research The initial phase often involves identifying opportunities for new businesses to gain visibility in search engine rankings and search engine traffic. This includes finding niches with less competition and strategising on how to capture and expand market share in these areas. It’s crucial to approach popular, profitable terms with a realistic understanding of the investment required in terms of time and resources, as competitors are also vying for these positions. Effective keyword research and an understanding of search queries are foundational to this phase.
Development
Post-research, the focus shifts to enhancing the organic growth of your site through new content, backlinks, refining existing content, and making specific improvements such as improving page speed for search engines. This phase is not about random content creation but about targeted efforts that contribute meaningfully to your industry’s discourse, thereby improving your site’s visibility and relevance in search engine results and search engine traffic. Technical SEO and site structure optimisation play critical roles in this stage.
Testing
Testing is vital to ascertain the effectiveness of the implemented strategies. Given the opaque nature of Google’s algorithm, SEO managers must ensure that the site’s trajectory in search engine rankings is upward, indicating successful strategy implementation. This involves a continuous effort to meet and exceed the numerous criteria set by search engines, including those outlined by the Google Search Console.
What isSearch Engine Optimisation?
SEO is the process of optimising your website and online presence to increase visibility to potential customers via search engines. When people search for products or services, they typically start with a Google search. The businesses that appear in these search results have consistently applied SEO strategies, including on-page SEO and search engine marketing, to secure their position. This is a competitive necessity, as industries vary in the level of competition for search engine visibility.
In a nutshell, SEO refines your website (and your online presence to some extent), in a way that increases your website’s visibility to potential customers.
Think about it. You need a new pair of shoes. If you are like most people these days the first thing you do is search Google for ‘going out shoes’, ‘work shoes’, ‘best sneaker prices’ or something along those lines.
The list of websites that appear as a result are all businesses vying for your dollar. In order to appear in that list those businesses have done one or a number of things consistently to appear there (depending where they appear on the page). This doesn’t just happen automatically for them. They have to work at it, and they have to keep working at it if they want to keep appearing there.
The reason is simple: Competition.
Different industries, different services and different products all have different levels of competition. For example, every plumber wants to appear when someone types in “I need an emergency plumber right now”. Plumbers are clambering all over each other to get those calls! If a plumber at the top of the search results relaxes and says, “I don’t need to do SEO anymore – I’m at the top of the list”, then lo and behold, shortly after they stop working on their online presence, all their competition who are still working hard to top the list will just push past them, and eventually, like Caesar resting on his laurels, they will fall behind.
As it has always been in business competition, it’s basically dog eat dog.
SEOStrategy
A journey – not a destination
SEO is likened to a marathon, where success is about sustained effort rather than reaching a final endpoint. Competitors may have a significant head start, making it essential to outpace them with more effective SEO efforts over a longer period. Keywords play a crucial role in this process, serving as the foundation for improving search engine rankings and visibility. The goal is to enhance search engine results through diligent SEO efforts, including monitoring performance via tools like Google Search Console.
Getting into the lead, in this case, means appearing in the top spots on Google’s search results for any particular keyword combination that people use to search for your products and services etc.
What are keywords?
There are thousands, probably millions of keyword combinations. These are the combinations of words that people use when they search for something in Google. Here are a few that relate to web design:
- Search engine optimisation consultant
- Paid search company
- SEO Consultants Sydney
- Website developers Sydney
See how these word combinations are all quite different, yet relate to the same industry? While there is a lot more to SEO than just keywords, they are usually one of the baselines for a page to start ranking well.
In order to incorporate the right keywords (wisely – there’s no point spending resources on keywords that wont return a result), you need to know what keywords are being used for your industry, and what niches you can fill to get you started. In the beginning, it’s almost like finding the right cracks in the competition’s armour that you can move into.
Is my SEO strategy working?
Effective SEO requires a team effort, often involving tasks that are not immediately visible but are crucial for improving your site’s performance in search engine results. This includes securing backlinks from reputable sites and identifying the most impactful keyword combinations. The true measure of success is an increase in enquiries and site visits, reflecting the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.
If you are building a house, on the other hand, you can see the walls going up, the extra storey that took months to complete, the swimming pool that barely gets used, and the new washing machine that blends in to the kitchen counter. These are all in your face. In SEO you don’t see the weeks of negotiation to get a blog posted on a more prominent website that contains a single link to your site (which would raise your ranking by a huge amount), and you don’t see the hours and days scanning data for the best keyword combinations to expand your reach. It can be easy to not see the effort that goes in, but at the end of the day when your phone starts to ring more and more frequently, and you can see in our reports this is reflected by the increasing numbers of visitors to your site, you’ll know the strategy is working.
Can SEO be DIY?
While it’s possible to undertake SEO on your own, competing against well-resourced and experienced professionals can be challenging. DIY SEO may not yield the fastest or most effective results, highlighting the importance of expertise in this field.
Just like you can do mechanical work on your own car, you can work on the SEO for your website. All the tools are right there online. Of course, like a backyard mechanic trying to improve a race car, your SEO campaign will probably be one of the slowest on the track, and better qualified, more resourced, more experienced SEO managers will run rings around you – and occasionally one of your wheels may fall off, but sure. Do it yourself. Why not? Just keep in mind who you are ‘racing’ against: organisations with trained dedicated staff with accumulatively decades of experience.
White hatvs black hat SEO
There are 2 basic ways of getting SEO performed on your website, and to understand them you need to have some understanding of the way that Google’s search algorithm has evolved over the years.
SEO practices can be categorised into white hat (ethical) and black hat (unethical) approaches. White hat SEO focuses on quality and integrity, aligning with the evolving standards of search engines like Google to provide value to internet users. Black hat SEO, on the other hand, involves manipulative tactics that can lead to severe penalties, including being blacklisted by search engines. It’s crucial to adopt ethical SEO practices that contribute positively to the online ecosystem, ensuring a safe and trustworthy internet for all users.
The short version is that a lot of what was once ok to help your SEO, is now not ok.
Backyard SEO (read: DIY SEO) is quite often of the black hat variety. What this means is taking your friend’s advice and using deprecated, largely old fashioned methods to try and trick the Google algorithm into giving a higher rank than might be due. This includes keyword stuffing, spammy backlinks, plagiarism, cloaked pages, phishing, hacking, and many many other. Doing so will get your website blacklisted from Google, or heavily penalised. This is turn means you can say goodbye to the usefulness of the website and and probably the domain name for all eternity.
The reason people are attracted to black hat SEO is that it usually appears cheap and the advertising makes bold promises: “Rank number 1 within 2 months”, “First page guaranteed”. Anything along those lines may well do well for the first month or so, but will likely destroy your domain name once Google gets wind of what’s happened. In addition, competitors of your business can also report a website to Google if they think the SEO is dubious, so be warned.
TLDR: Black hat SEO: There are no shortcuts or cheats. Don’t do it.
White hat SEO, on the other hand (sometimes called Ethical SEO), concentrates on quality, integrity and on providing value services to the humans who use the internet. The Google algorithm has evolved through many iterations over the years, and has gotten cleverer and cleverer, and this is likely to continue. Google (and people just generally) want the internet to be honest, trustworthy, open and a celebration of all the most positive things that humanity is capable of. You want your kids to be able to get online and not have to run a risk of them having their identities swiped, their computers infected, bombarded with inappropriate advertising, or approached inappropriately. In needs to be safe.
TLDR: Is your SEO trying to trick the Google algorithm (black hat), or is it trying to make the world a better place (white hat)?
Conveniently Located
We’ve been lucky enough to work with clients from all over Australia and internationally. Given the nature of our business, in these cases we work remotely. However, if you are in Sydney, there’s nothing nicer than meeting face-to-face.
