How Will SEO Help My Business?

One of the questions that is asked every time we meet a potential new client is ‘how will SEO help my business?’. There are many ways that a business can benefit from SEO including brand awareness, site visitors and lead generation/sales. Before we delve into the specifics, it’s important to define what SEO actually is.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the search engine results. It should help position the site as the most relevant answer to the searchers query, making sure the site is indexable by the search engines.

How Does SEO work?

Every search engine uses different algorithms in order to present millions of search results based on what a person types in the search bar. SEO is the process of keeping up to date with a search engine’s complex algorithm by using various methods. There are three main pillars to SEO: technical onsite, link building and content marketing. If executed correctly, SEO can help move your business up the search rankings and towards the holy grail; Page one and position one.

With this in mind, it becomes fairly obvious that SEO would help a business in a number of ways.

Brand Awareness

SEO is the perfect accompaniment to a branding campaign. The sheer volume of searches made on the internet each day, 40,000 searches per second according to Internet Live Stats, means that no matter what product or service you offer, someone will be searching for it.

Therefore, being at the top of the search results for the product or service you offer will help your be best placed to take advantage of the intent of the searcher and potentially create a new lead or sale.

Qualified visitors to your site

When we talk about ‘qualified visitors’ to your site we mean they have explicitly searched for something that you have an expertise in and can help them in some way to find the answer to their query.

A good SEO campaign will help position you and your site to become an authority on your subject and have your site visible when a searcher types in anything to do with your business.

A great example of how this would work:

Say you are the owner of a small business and thinking about purchasing a new phone system.

The first place you are likely to look is a search engine, 94% of B2B purchasers do some form of research online. The results will show a number of sites designed and written to help understand what phone system is right, potential functions that will be available and what the latest technology is currently on the market.

Most people will buy once they have a good level of understanding of the product or service. And a buyer will more than likely by from a company they know, like and trust. By creating the type of content that helps a searcher learn, rather than just selling will help build trust.

Quotonga.com do a really good job of trying to help the searcher for hosted phone systems with this ‘guide to the benefits of hosted phone systems’. Have a read and see what we mean.

A qualified visitor therefore is someone who is somewhere within the ‘content marketing funnel’ as described by Moz.com. The above example is great for the top of funnel part, but you could easily create content for the middle and bottom of the marketing funnel.

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More sales leads or sales through your site

It’s fairly simple to understand why, with more search engine traffic you would see more leads or sales coming through your website.

If you have a site at the moment that is converting at lets say 3%, with 1,000 visitors per month you would be getting roughly 30 leads or sales. We then add another 1,000 visitors per month through the use of clever SEO, even if the conversion rate of the site dropped to 2.5% you would be gaining 50 leads rather than the 30 you were previously.

This doesn’t factor in any competitors who might engage in an ongoing SEO campaign either. Done right they will end up taking your traffic if you’re just standing still.

How has SEO helped small businesses?

‘We’ve enjoyed great success working with Tao Digital Marketing over the past year or so, our organic traffic has more than doubled. We’ve even been able to slow down our paid marketing and still continue to gain a great number of leads for our business.’ Dave Thornton, Founder & Director of Thornton & Lowe.

We also have had SEO success with a Wheel Refurbishment company in Bolton. We were tasked to get them to rank on page 1 on google for keywords specific to their industry. In no more than 4 months, we were able to get them to the first page of google for “alloy wheel refurbishment bolton” and “alloy wheel repair bolton”. You can read more about our case studies on our case study page.

Why is SEO important?

SEO should be considered a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. If your business has a website then it needs to get seen, visited and taken action on. Great SEO can be the difference between being ahead of your competitors or them overtaking you. If two websites happen to be selling the exact same product, the website with the higher search ranking can expect to generate more sales.

SEO isn’t just about appearing higher on google. It’s about creating a great user experience for your customers. If your website has terrible usability and user experience then it can have a negative impact on how people perceive your business/brand.

SEO agency or in-house

This question is posed by many business owners looking to gain from the masses of search engine traffic. We’re an SEO agency and so we’re probably a little biased in the way of an SEO agency rather than in-house.

We do find however that working alongside an in-house marketing team adds real depth to the overall marketing piece. Things can work together and gain more traction.

Most business owners are very busy, keeping track of all the updates, changes and requirements of SEO is a very time consuming job. It’s sometimes better to buy into someone’s knowledge and someone who is keeping up with everything to do with SEO because they need to for other clients.

One of the main areas that businesses can fall down when hiring an SEO company is when they have not done enough research. Make sure that the SEO agency you are looking to engage has the knowledge and understanding required. Speak to some of their existing clients to find out how they are getting on with them.

Bad SEO can do more damage than good for your website, be careful not to fall into this trap.

Summary

In summary, SEO is great for any type of business, no matter what industry, size or location. Done right it can drive significant increases in visitors to your website.

The key is to make sure that it is done correctly.

Check out our article on the cost of SEO.

Keyword Hero – How good is it? Here’s our review

Awesome! Pure and simple.

We were that impressed with the results, we thought we’d write up a quick review on the software.

What is Keyword Hero?

Keyword Hero promises to get rid of the dreaded ‘not provided’ information in your Google Analytics for any given website.

Match keyword to session in GA, get rid of (not provided), is the site strapline.

Does it work?

I’ve been using it now on taodigitalmarketing.com for over 2 weeks. It’s great. Although the website is still in its infancy it is seeing some organic search.

Search phrases such as ‘seo agency Bolton’, ‘digital marketing Bolton’ ‘SEO cost‘ and ‘bolton SEO’ are just a few of the phrases that I don’t see in my normal analytics view or in our Google Search Console account.

For bigger sites this could be priceless in terms of the information it is passing. Allowing for the technical SEO team to make sure that the site and any pages are being optimised to take advantage of the keyword driving traffic.

Connecting the conversion dots

The even better thing I think that you could use Keyword Hero for is to understand what keywords drive more of your conversions. What are the people who are making contact or purchasing from your website typing into Google?

This could then be used in a number of different areas to help improve the overall number of conversions.

Setting it up

It takes 2 minutes to set-up. You simply allow them access into your Google Analytics & Google Search Console accounts via the online tool they provide. And there you have it.

Keyword hero will set-up a new view within your Google Analytics account under the property you have selected.

Keyword Hero - 2 minute installation

Will we be using it?

100% yes, we’re just speaking to the team to see what we can do in terms of getting a deal in place for all of our clients. Even if we don’t manage it we’ll be making sure we recommend it to all of our clients.

It makes our job so much easier!

Google Search Console for your SEO strategy

For me, Google Search Console is one of the most underrated services out there. I mean where else will Google tell you about what they rank your website or if they have any worries about your site, how quick the site is downloaded by Googlebot and so on. All of this for FREE! Yes, nothing! Nada!

So, what is Google Search Console?

A no-charge service provided by Google as a web service for website owners, known as webmasters. It provides webmasters with the ability to check the status of their websites within the Google Index.

Previously known as Google Webmaster tools it became Google Search Console in May of 2015.

Why do you need GSC (Google Search Console) for your SEO projects?

You’re not really going to get the results you want without using this tool. Yes, there is a host of other software providers who can provide information on how your site ranks, an audit of your site’s health, missing keywords, backlink information for you, but they aren’t Google!

If you are looking for a great tool to help alongside GSC however, I can recommend Serpstat.

But, back to the reason, you’re here! GSC for SEO. The information I use most out of GSC is below, although I’ll be going into detail about all of the tools further into the article.

1. Search analytics report

The Search analytics report is where you will find the keyword information that Google is ranking your site for in the SERP (Search engine results page). This is really important as finding the ‘low hanging fruit’ is really easy when you have the information to hand.

Plus, although it is not all of the data that they are ranking you for, they don’t give you the keys to the castle sadly, but it is a great indicator of what they see you as being the authority on or not.

Example: Let’s say you had a blog, which I do, that reviews Dashboard Cameras. When looking in the search engine results report you can see that you rank and are gaining traffic from Google for one of your target keywords.

Such as Nextbase 412GW review which is one of our primary keywords for one of our reviews. The report will show you, what the average position in the results are, how many clicks for this keyword/phrase and also the number of times your site has been shown in the search results.

N.b it’s not a site we’ve done too much with just in case you do search it! 😉

2. Crawl stats

As SEO’s we know that page speed is massively important to where Google ranks us in the search results.

Within the GSC console, it tells you how long it took for Google to download the website and shows you a great graph from the last 3 months to see if there have been any issues server-side or anything to worry about.

We had a client recently, we moved the website to our dedicated server and they went from page 2 to page one for their main keyword within a month.

3. Fetch as Google

If like us and most of our clients, you’re not a news publication or a site which is constantly being updated by the minute, it might be some time before Googlebot crawls your site and finds the new content you spent hours producing and writing.

Fetch as Google allows you to ask Googlebot to come and crawl your site again. Even ask them to index the site too. There is a limit of doing this and crawling all URL’s of 10 per month so be smart.

The other tools provided by GSC are below.

I have added my thoughts on why these are critical to your website SEO too.

Submit and check a sitemap.

Well, how does Google know about your site without submitting it? Don’t wait till Google finds your site! Tell them using this tool!

Robots.txt tester

This tool basically tells you what pages are blocked to the search bots. By writing a robots.txt file you can help make sure Google knows exactly what pages you don’t want them to index on your site. Example being the wp-admin area of a WordPress website.

Links to your site

Google gives you information on the websites that link to your site. They list both internal and external pages that link to the pages on your site. You can use this information to complete a link audit and disavow any links that are potentially harming your rankings.

One of the most important ranking factors for Google is still Pagerank. Although they don’t give you this information anymore you need to make sure that the sites linking to you are Authoritative, Relevant and not Spammy.

Crawl Errors report

Ever wondered why that page you wrote which contains so much information Google should have it in position 0 on the SERP? Well, Google will tell you if they’re having difficulty crawling a page on your site and list any links that they can’t get to properly.

This information is gold dust if you are trying to rank a page but not having much look. They tell you what the potential issue is so you can just go a fix it!

Set a preferred domain

When you look at the SERP you might have noticed that there are sites listed that start with www. and others that start with non-www. This is due to the webmaster of the site setting this within Google.

This can be really important as if you don’t set this, Google find it harder to decide which version to rank in the SERP. Believe it or not www. And non.www are classed as 2 separate sites and can therefore potentially look like duplicated content on your site.

Make sure you set the right version in GSC.

Structured data report

The structured data section of GSC allows you to see what Schema.org markup your website has on it. And whether there are any errors with how your markup is configured.

The data highlighter tool also provides a really easy way of telling Google what you want them to use as your structured data.

We’ve used this to great effect for a client who provides bid writing courses. By highlighting the area of the site for each course Google can now show the course dates, times, locations etc. within the search results if anyone searches specifically for a bid writing training course in a location they have one booked in.

Disavow links tool

If for any reason you have links that you really don’t want Google to take into account when determining your site relevancy for a search term you can upload a list of them to Google and ask them to Disavow them using this tool.

Manual Penalty notifications

The one thing no webmaster wants to ever see in GSC. A manual action notification. If Google deems you have broken the guidelines for any reason they will let you know through this tool of any manual actions they have given you. Enough said on that one!!

Rich Cards

With the ever-increasing use of Mobile to browse the internet and search Google with, they have given you the option to highlight any important information on your site to help build ‘rich cards’ on the SERP for mobile devices. They do also show sometimes on the Desktop SERP so well worth investing the time in these.

In summary

One of the main things to consider when using GSC for SEO is how much information Google will give you for free! SEO is simple in reality, make sure your page is optimised to the best possible level in the eyes of the search engines and then get people shouting about you all over the internet in the form of backlinks, social mentions, social shares etc.

Now, we’re not the only ones who think using GSC for SEO is a great idea! Below are a number of resources that I’ve learned from over the years as a search engine optimiser.

Do let us know if we’ve missed any out and if you think I’ve missed something vital from the above article.