While paid advertisements and social media can still be effective, most of the online traffic still comes from search engines. In fact, only around 3% audience actually click on paid advertisements. SEO offers up to 20 times the amount of traffic, while compared to paid advertising. It is evident that with such statistics, you cannot simply ignore its importance. If SEO seems too complicated to understand, consider hiring a business that specialises in SEO.

Good quality SEO is evergreen as the content stays forever on your website unlike paid advertisements, which last as long as the money lasts. There are several strategies for SEO, all of which work together to create a high ranking. We will list some of the most important ones in this blog.

1. Website SEO Audit

Does your website have issues that are hurting your visibility or turning away visitors? Technical, UI/UX and SEO issues can be unfavourable for your business, leading to a drop in traffic and visibility in search engines. Performing a simple website audit can help you find out. A website audit discovers discrepancies that could result in Google penalising your rank on Google’s search ranking. This report would cover aspects such as on-site SEO, the current state of keywords, backlinks from other websites, etc.

2. Creating Helpful Content

One of the common mistakes made while writing content for SEO is that people do not write content for humans.. Content needs to be firstly for humans, and then for Google’s crawlers. Focussing too much on keywords may end up in creating a mess, thereby dropping user experience on your website. Make sure that you break your content into headings and subheadings. Headers create a pause in the human mind, while also is an effective strategy for robots. These headings could focus on what the next section is about, leaving the decision to your audience on which sections stand out the most and are important.

It is also important to have a clear and concise link to pages in your websites. A great example would be https://companyname.com.au/services/service1 clearly displaying all the information to the reader.

3. Backlinks

Used in the search engine for years, backlinks are the most important SEO tool. The more third party links redirect to your website, the more resourceful your website is considered by Google, thereby ranking higher in search results. While good quality backlinks are still effective, the time has gone where backlink could be made on any website. Links can now only be generated on websites that firstly have high authority, and secondly, have relevancy to your website. For example, a restaurant should aim to get backlinks from directories and review websites.

4. Keywords

Everyone knows the importance of keywords in SEO but rarely do people know how to embed these keywords into the content. Keyword spamming is looked down on by readers, as well as robots as it is evident when you are trying to spam as many keywords as possible. Keywords should only be used a handful of times, amounting to not more than 2-4% of the total word count.

Furthermore, focussing on long-tail keywords can also ensure results as the competition for them is less. There are multiple tools available to find long-tail keywords, with Google itself providing several SEO tools.

5. Optimise your Webpages

It is called Search Engine “Optimisation” for a reason – everything needs to be optimised, from website loading speed to usability. User experience is a key aspect in SEO wherein if the user is not happy on your website and bounces quickly, it can result in a lower ranking in the next searches. There are multiple ways to optimise your webpage viz., compressing the images to reduce page size, considering the placement of links for easier navigation, etc. A well-optimised page has more chances of capturing leads.

What is SEO? The answer seems more complicated than you expected. At the end of the day, SEO is all about generating organic traffic to your website in an efficient way.