As a company, one of the most important tools for promoting your business is whether it appears on a search in Google. If your business sells fashion items, when someone searches for dresses or shoes you would want your website to appear at the very least in the top 5 search items. This way, a customer can find your products and start buying them.
SEO, or ‘search engine optimisation’ are the actions taken to promote a website’s search engine rankings on Google™. The higher the ranking, the more people are going to be able to find your website. Therefore the more traffic and customers you get.
SEO is one of the fastest growing marketing disciplines. Companies are increasingly investing higher amounts in this in order to get their websites more visible for customers.
There is no doubt that there are many benefits to investing in SEO. It should not be ignored by any company that has a presence online. But it can seem complex and confusing choosing which SEO services are right for your company.
Equally, the SEO services that may be right to get more bookings for a hotel’s website may be very different to what would be most effective for something like a restaurant.
What Different Services Are There?
Analytics.
Analytics comes in two basic forms. Firstly, an SEO company will gather information and analyse it for you, presenting their services in a way that is easy to understand and read. But this is only the beginning. They say if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he will eat for life. This adage is same when it comes to SEO. Any good SEO company should be teaching your business how not only to interpret the data but how to find it and compile it themselves.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is quite literally the optimisation of the content on your website’s pages to ensure it ranks highly. This is not only about the wording but includes the coding like HTML, and the website’s running speed.
Your content should be current and up to date. If there are any addresses or phone numbers that are wrong on your page it can get flagged up as bad information and lower your ranking. Equally, if there are bugs that are not fixed, or if there are very slow upload speeds then this too will lower the rank. Google records how long a person is active on a website for and if they continuously have low scores, Google knows that there is something pushing users away.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to external links that exist, unsurprisingly, ‘off’ your page. The majority of off-page SEO services focus on link-building. The bare bones of this are literally to have links on your page that connect to other websites and have them returned. However, increasingly social media marketing is also becoming a major part of an agency’s off-page offerings.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of collecting and analysing a consumer’s use of keywords relevant to your business. Once the keywords are determined, this information is fed back to you. This will produce a list of keywords that a site should be optimised for, and they will show you how to use them. A key aspect of this is also to understand key word optimisation and how you should be using this to your website’s advantage.
Content planning
From keyword research or planning, this naturally leads on to content planning. The SEO agency, through consumer research and analysis, recommends blog posts and other content that is designed to drive quality traffic to a site. A step above this is when an agency will actually create quality content for you. This is a very common service that many websites are choosing to opt into. A good SEO company will provide posts such as blogs that are not only interesting and relevant to that company’s industry but will have an excellent SEO score.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a specialised service that works with businesses whose customers are located in a specific geographic area. It works with programs such as Google Maps and other directories to ensure that when customers use these to search for businesses, your business comes up first.
This type of SEO requires a different approach and an understanding of the local area and demographic.
It is particularly useful for companies that work in industries such as hotels, restaurants and hospitality.
A good SEO company will not only know the local demographic of the area, but will also know things like what local events there are, and how the business’s sector works. For example, there might be a specialist SEO company for a large city like Bangkok. They will understand how the Bangkok market works best and will be able to advise accordingly.
But That’s Not All
There are literally hundreds of techniques and ways to improve your SEO score. Applications such as Google+, Facebook and many others are shown to have a significant impact on SEO scores.
In the past Google has gone as far as denying links between Facebook usage and SEO rankings, but research and analysis have shown otherwise. Some have even gone as far to suggest that Google+ was initially created with the idea of SEO in mind.
If this is even slightly accurate, which is the common consensus, then any good SEO company is going to know this and work with Google+.
If you add on top of that all the different consoles that exist on the market, and the different ways people access the internet, the process of increasing your rank on Google becomes more and more complex.
There are many guides on the internet to show how a company can increase its own SEO. There are simple steps that every website and business can do and you will see your ranking increase. However, this will only get you so far. Companies are finding that a company offering SEO services is worth the investment. The higher the SEO ranking, the more customers and traffic will enter your website and buy your goods, it’s as simple as that.