SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. You’ve probably heard the term, but do you know what it means? SEO incorporates various organic strategies on and off page to enhance your website and its presence online, resulting in a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Its aim is to boost the quality and quantity of the traffic your website attracts, leading to a greater number of conversions.

The ranking of a webpage is determined by Google’s algorithm. A successful SEO strategy will systematically fulfil the algorithm’s various ranking factors, boosting the website’s position. These include the technical aspects of a website like site speed, code, and backlinks, alongside more content driven factors such as site structure and the quality of web copy.

On page SEO involves creating regular content with specific keywords, optimised metatags, and titles that provides a comprehensive, user-oriented overview of a subject. Doing so means Google is likely to find your website a reliable source of information, and rank it higher for relevant search terms.

Off page SEO involves optimising factors outside of your website, such as backlinks. Off page optimisation can be integral to the success of an SEO strategy because it boosts your website’s domain authority, helping search engines identify a website as being a reliable, high quality source of information.

Content marketing is a great way of achieving ethical backlinks because other websites within your niche may find your content useful and link to it from their own website. If you want to get quality backlinks, you need to create link worthy content – it’s as simple as that! Beyond this, promoting your content on social media and to relevant bloggers can also be a great way of establishing a linking relationship between you and similar websites.

An SEO strategy can generate quality traffic and leads without you having to shell out for an expensive paid advertising campaign. Users are more likely to trust organic search engine results, making conversions more likely, and it creates happy customers by necessitating focus on user experience. And SEO is all about long term impact, meaning the effort you put in will build and grow with your business, leading to sustainable traffic way into the future.

Though SEO can take an extended period of effort before you start to see results, the advantages largely outweigh the negatives. Done according to guidelines with a focus on user experience and sustainable strategy, SEO will reward you handsomely for your efforts. However, resorting to ‘black hat’ tactics like keyword stuffing, cloaking, negative SEO, and more, can result in some serious disadvantages for your business. You could end up pushed back down the SERPs or even blacklisted.

SEO isn’t about quick tricks. A successful SEO strategy may take 4-6 months before it starts giving you demonstrable results. But sustained effort will lead to a robust, authoritative position in the SERPs that will help relevant traffic to find their search intent with you. This isn’t something that can be rushed, and only a disreputable agency will tell you otherwise. The best things in life can sometimes take time, but trust us, they are well worth waiting for.

SEO is a holistic process, incorporating technical and creative tactics to boost your website’s search ranking. Even a small change can make a big difference at scale. At Squarebird, our SEO strategy centres around user experience and content creation. After auditing and refining your website on the technical side, we find specific, relevant keywords and create a content strategy to suit. This content should be high quality, tailored to your business, and comprehensive, leading Google to see your site as an authority in your chosen niche.

Depending upon your business and its aims, you might prefer to go with SEO or PPC (Pay Per Click) or a combination of the two. PPC generally provides quicker results, but these results will only last as long as you keep funding the campaign. On the other hand, SEO is cheaper and generates higher quality traffic that is likely to last for a long time as long as you keep up with continually optimising your site and refreshing your content. More than that, users will find you more trustworthy and are more likely to convert if you appear in front of them organically, rather than through an advertisement.

When we talk about local SEO, we’re talking about boosting your online presence in such a way as to drive organic traffic from a specific geographical area. This kind of SEO is particularly relevant for small businesses and independents where local support can be crucial. National SEO works on a broader scale, using more general keywords to target users on a national or even global level.