What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” In simple terms, it means the process of making your website the best it can be so Google will be able to see that your customers will get a great user experience with relevant content when they click on your listing and therefore if your site is better and more relevant then you will be listed higher than your competitors whose sites aren’t as good.

How does SEO work?

Search engines such as GOOGLE and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. Search ranking factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. Our list of SEO Factors organises the factors into categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO.

For example,

1. content – are your articles relevant to the user – if not you will be marked down for this, we write your content so it’s appealing and relevant to what you are offering
2. quality – is your site the best quality it can be and not just full of irrelevant stuff and poor images that don’t match what you are selling
3. crawlability – is your site set to allow Google access to read it
4. mobile-friendliness – does your site look good on all mobile devices
5. accessibility for disabled or hard of vision visitors – is there an option for somebody with vision problems to access settings automatically to make your website easier to see?
6. security – is your site secure and protected from hacking – if not you will be knocked down immediately
7. load speed – does your website load quickly – if not Google will penalise you
8. photo quality and labelling – are all your images correctly labelled and optimised for loading – if they aren’t labelled correctly or are too large you lose points again
9. original content – some website designers take articles off other sites to fill out your website but this is frowned upon massively, so all our content is written by us for you
10. Authority – does your content put you in a position of authority in the realms of your subject – explainer videos that we can create for you as the one on this page above are a good way of building this as it lets your users know that you know what you are talking about

Optimising your site and content with these factors in mind will give you an edge over your competition can help your pages rank higher in the search results. Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.

However, the search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Here at Strawberry Website Design, we build websites with full optimisation and we can also supply you with high-quality backlinks from high quality referring sites to help with your ranking. Have a look around on our website for further information on how your website should be built or get in touch with us and we can arrange a 15-minute telephone audit with no pressure, all we need is your current website address and we can take a look for you free of charge and no obligation or fill out the form below and we’ll get in touch.