The importance of SEO and how it all works in very basic terms.
will take about 6 minutes to read…..
In this section, I am referring mainly to Google Search Engine, as it is the biggest. There are other search engines, such as Bing. To understand SEO you will need to be familiar with three major terms. 1. Keywords, 2. Paid Ads, 3. Organic – free ads.
A keyword is a word/term you type on google when you search for anything. The result of your search would be one of two:
Paid Ads which the website owner pays Google for every click on their ad.
Organic result where Google rewards the website owner for being a trustworthy and relevant website by not charging you for clicks. SEO would help you show organically on Google search and save you all those paid clicks.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation, and all online stores/websites must look at optimising their website. It is a process that experts in this line of work, bring traffic to your website for free. It is not paid traffic that you would typically pay a search engine to have yourself displayed in a premium position. It is traffic that comes organically or through a natural search result. Getting this right is important, and choosing the best people for the job is just as critical.
SEO involves various and detailed practices, and getting it wrong can destroy your rankings on google. I have often seen people take the “cheap” approach by outsourcing their SEO to offshore individuals who promise them prime free organic positions on google in record times. This can be achieved through unethical ways and can give you the result you wish to achieve, but it will be short-lived.
The rules of SEO are few and simple:
It takes time, work, and patience.
It is built over time, and therefore, you will not see a return on investment in the short term, as you would with paying advertisement. You are looking at a long-term strategy. SEO experts can charge a lot of money to get this done for you. Most charge a per month retainer. Ensure you are getting value for money and that they are making every effort to give you detailed reports that are tangible and that you can see the return on investment.
I spoke about the importance of building your team. SEO is part of that team. I went through a couple of SEO companies before finally finding the perfect person to do my SEO. The first company talked the talk but failed the walk. The second company had a great SEO guru who worked well with us for a few months before leaving the company. Somehow between the first and the second SEO companies, our site was loaded up with bad backlinks and where we held a perfect organic position for some months, we somehow disappeared off googles radars in a matter of weeks. For essential keywords that were showing us organically on the first page, we ended up on page 72! Organic traffic dropped, and organic leads were at an all-time low. Here’s another Cranky Boss moment!
Bad links can be added to your site either by a competitor or some other malicious source, or it could be the work of the people you hired as your SEO to speed up your optimisation. Your site needs good, quality backlinks that come with time.
A backlink is simply a link between two sites. A good quality backlink is formed when a brand reads one of your posts and finds it useful to its audience. It then links your site to its own, creating a backlink. Search engines see these backlinks that have been created and understand that your content is of good quality and what people are looking for. Search engines then reward you for this by improving your ranking. When you create many good links, you also gain authority and trust.
On the other hand, bad links can harm your trust and your rank. Search engines will generally penalise you if you have too many bad links. Bad links can be spammy, come from a domain with a low trust score, or be unnatural. An unnatural link has the sole intention of manipulating rankings. The whole purpose of search engines is to provide a positive experience to the user whereby they find valuable and relevant information when searching for something. If people manipulate their sites to achieve a higher ranking, they are not ranking because people find them useful; they are ranking because they have manipulated the guidelines. They could have either bought links or loaded up your pages with keywords with no context or no natural flow. These are just a couple of examples of bad SEO or otherwise known as Black Hat SEO.
Search engines such as Google will penalise you for this behaviour as it is a direct violation of their rules.
The SEO team you pay monthly MUST look at your links and overall score. It is part of their job to do so. It would help if you asked them where they intend to find links, as this is one of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks.
It took us literally 12-24 months to rebuild and recover from our disastrous google ranking caused by toxic backlinks. The financial ramifications were also enormous.
So how do you find a good SEO company?
It may not be a company you are looking for, but a person who has the expertise and knowledge.
You could always ask me, and I would be more than happy to recommend mine! I will just have to ask if they are willing to take on new clients.
I can tell you these few tips that were the difference between the first two companies I hired and the last expert who got the job done.
Tip 1. Anyone who claims they have some sort of superpowers that will bring your google ranking up in a matter of weeks are both dodgy and shifty. Please beware of the methods they use, as they could destroy your reputation and ranking.
Tip 2. As difficult as it may seem to understand what SEO is, an expert will sit with you and discuss what SEO means and simplify the whole process to get some understanding and knowledge. They will back themselves up with simple and detailed reports and evidence of what they have been able to achieve and your site’s progress. These should all be measurable. You should not be paying an SEO company month in and month out thousands of dollars with no accountability or the standard response of “SEO takes time”. Yes, it sure does, but its progress can be seen and measured like everything. Ask for detailed reports and accurate performance tracking.
Tip 3. My SEO expert always advised me to work on my site’s content and that if I manage to write great content, I will eventually rank for a lot of keywords. They also advised adding good quality content every so often, which was suitable for the reader, as the rest would fall into place. Be careful of SEO companies who throw around keywords with no context whatsoever and create quantity over quality. This is not what the search engines are looking for and will eventually penalise you for it.
Tip 4. Word of mouth. Consider asking for references or look at their portfolio and see how other companies are travelling with their SEO. Ask questions such as how easy they were to work with, and what sorts of time frames they had in delivering results. Ask if they offered to sit with you an explain in detail their findings, their progress. How was their reporting done and was it easy to understand.
Tip 5. Avoid anyone who gives guarantees quickly. It’s a working progress, and your SEO person should ideally guide you on what is expected to occur and what they are confident they can achieve.
Tip 6. Ensure you are all on the same page. Note down your objectives, goals and expectations. Set time frames or KPIs to ensure you are on track and on top of things.
SEO Tools
If you are on a limited budget and you feel that you have a good sense on what SEO is and how to manage it on your own, then the following sites have great tools that even some of the best SEO Companies use.
- AccuRanker
- Long Tail Pro
- Semrush
- Mangools
- SE Ranking
- Serpstat
Now that we are done looking at SEO the next logical step would be to look at an overview on how to drive traffic to your website through paid advertising. In particular Google Ads. It is in my opinion one of the most powerful advertising platform out there and i can tell you that most of my revenue came from the Google Ads platform.
Let’s discover together what Google Ads is, how it works and how you can drive traffic to your website.
Google Ads should not be the only selling platform that you use and in general, you should never be reliant on one service provider or supplier for any part of your business. This strategy would form part of your Risk Management which is part of your business plan. Business planning is imperative to the success of any business and is part of good strategic management.
These were important contributors to the success of my business. In fact, my 5 step guide to running a successful business has a lot of practical information on what to do and what to avoid when running a business. It’s all the real stuff that you need to know that doesn’t really get taught. It gets picked up through experience along the way. This is the stuff you need to know and what will help you run a successful business.
