Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving organic (i.e. natural) traffic to your website via search engines. Successful SEO increases the quality as well as the quantity of traffic – because attracting lots of visitors is only good if they’re the right kind of visitors, i.e. potential customers. Here’s how to get started with maximising the pulling power of SEO…
Not long ago, people could improve their SEO by ‘hacking the system’ to optimise for Google’s search engines. But search engines and algorithms are getting smarter all the time. These days your SEO will be much more successful if you optimise for humans rather than machines – by creating good quality content that’s accessible and sharable. (This will organically rank well from an SEO perspective, keeping your customers AND the search engines happy.)
The anatomy of SEO
SEO is made up of several elements that work together. The two most important divisions to think about are ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’.
On-page SEO – optimises your website by making sure everything is easy to find, that you have a site map, that there are no major technical flaws and that Google can access and read your website.
Off-page SEO – positions your website by creating good social profiles, by getting high-quality links to your website from other quality content and by getting good press coverage.
Your on-page and off-page SEO work hand-in-hand: you need high-quality content on your website and high-quality links that lead people to it.
SEO on mobile and desktop websites – your SEO can be different between each of your sites. By default, Google will review (and rank you by) your mobile website first.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – when you search for something on Google, you’re shown ads (paid results) at the top of the list, followed by organic results. The organic results are listed by how relevant Google thinks the content is to the user. The ads are ordered by a combination of factors – for example, which ad has paid the most and how relevant the website is.
Getting started with your SEO
Here are some important first steps that many people skip – at their peril:
1. Customer research – not doing customer research is one of the biggest reasons marketing fails. It’s essential to understand your customer personas and find out what goals they’re trying to achieve. How are they currently going about this? What are their obstacles? Why is your solution the best one for them?
2. Value proposition – communicating what value you bring to your customers is crucial. You need to figure out how to get your message across in a way that makes sense to them (not just to you) so they recognise the true worth of what you’re offering.
3. Messaging – when you’re starting out, you’re naturally keen to tell the world all about your business, but it’s important to do this in a smart and targeted way. Taking the time to research, plan and talk to lots of customers may feel like the ‘boring bit’ but it helps you succeed at the ‘exciting bit’, i.e. your launch campaign (which, after your solid groundwork, will contain the right message for the right people).
4. Budget – the cost of hiring a decent SEO expert tends to be at least £500 a month. So if you’re an early-stage startup with a limited budget, you may prefer to manage your own SEO (the basics are relatively easy to do, and there’s a lot of high-quality information out there to help you). If you go on to hire an expert in the future, having a basic grasp will empower you to work with them on a more equal footing (and you’d be less vulnerable to ‘experts’ trying to take advantage of your ignorance).
5. Goal – start with your goal and work backwards. For example, if you’re an e-commerce store, you may decide that your goal is to sell X amount of products over X amount of months, using X amount of marketing budget. Now you know your goal, you can decide what budget to allocate and how you intend to use it.
Secrets to understanding your customers
Everything you do should revolve around your customers, so getting to know them isn’t just important at the beginning; it’s essential to your ongoing success. Here are some top tips:
- Manually create customer personas – map out everything you think you know about your customers and then overlay this with your actual customer data.
- Put your customer personas on your wall – they should be a living, breathing document you constantly refer to and keep updated.
- Keep talking to people – the closer you can get to your customers, the better. Literally, sit down and chat if you can. Surveys are great – but a holistic, free-flowing chat can answer questions you didn’t even know you had.
- Find out which keywords your audiences are searching and with what intent – this way, you can guide them through a journey of low intent to growing intent. For example…
– Searching with intent: if someone searches ‘Buy cat-themed mug online’ it’s highly likely they’re looking to buy a mug decorated with cats.
– Searching with low intent: if someone just searches ‘mug’ (which has multiple meanings as a verb as well as a noun), this could be for all sorts of reasons, from wanting to find the dictionary definition to seeing pictures of cups, etc.
- Read ‘The Mom Test’ by Rob Fitzpatrick – it teaches you how to ask people questions without biasing their answers.
- Explore Ahrefs.com – it has useful tools for helping with your data and SEO and can reveal opportunities you’re missing (e.g. with content gap analysis).
- Test and learn – apply your assumptions to the real world, learn from them, and feed your discoveries back into your business.
- Take advantage of Google Search Console – many people don’t know about this tool which can tell you about any issues with your website.
Finally, some fun facts
At the start of this article, we mentioned SEO ‘hacks’ people used to try before the search engines became too clever to fool. Here are a couple of examples of things NOT to try:
Keyword stuffing – this was the trick of listing lots of keywords at the bottom of the page. It’s frowned upon by Google and they’ll penalise you if it’s not done properly, i.e. if it doesn’t benefit the user.
Metatag for keywords – this was the trick of inserting into the code of your website, certain keywords you think customers might be searching. Now Google doesn’t even pay attention to this – their search engines can understand intent and recognise website content in a much more advanced way.
This how-to guide was inspired by one of our Zoom Dives with Daniel Johnson, founding partner of We Scale Startups. Zoom Dives are deep-delving discussions between our founder, Carolyn Dailey and hand-picked business experts from the creative world.
Fancy catching our next Zoom Dive, live? See our Events calendar and sign up for free. Meanwhile, feel free to plunder our Knowledge bank for more advice on setting up your online presence.