Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the processes and strategies that are used to get traffic to your website from free, editorial, organic or natural search results in search engines. If I didn't lose you in that first sentence, welcome to today's blog! Grab a coffee and stay awhile because you're about to learn how to boost your business's visibility online.
(Please read through to the end...it's important for my SEO.) 😅
To make it really simple, SEO is how you make sure that your website will be recommended in search results when someone searches for products or services that you sell or provide. You ensure that the search algorithms will recommend your services/products by having proper SEO strategies in place and auditing your SEO on a regular basis to make sure that your strategies are doing the best work they can to bring more traffic to your website and you are rewarded for your efforts with more clients/customers for your business.
Are there different types of SEO?
Yes. There are four different types of SEO: On-Page, Off-Page, Local and Technical. Each type plays a vital role in increasing your visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).
What is On-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO is the easiest and most common type of SEO that you can use to to boost your website's visibility. On-Page SEO is all about education and guiding your users properly to and through your website. This involves optimizing website elements such as meta descriptions, URL structure, title tags, images, internal linking and content. This is where the use of keywords and phrases from your keyword research that you have already completed comes in to play.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-Page SEO could be compared to what would happen during morning coffee hour at the local diner, it is essentially virtual word-of-mouth referrals. These SEO activities happen externally from your website and are what tells search engines that your website is trustworthy and relevant to what is being searched by humans. You want to use Off-Page SEO to your advantage to increase website traffic and your brand reputation as well as get a higher SERP rating. Using tactics such as backlinks (where other higher-quality website link to yours) and asking current users to leave reviews are two ways that you can increase your website's visibility using Off-Page SEO.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is not just important for those that have a "brick-and-mortar" store front business location. It is also important for those that run virtual businesses. Local SEO focuses on search results that are local to your region - you want the communities around you to know that your business exists. Local SEO tactics start with creating and maintaining your Google Business Profile, making sure that your business name, address and phone number are on all pages of your website and ensuring that you are listed in local directories, business listening as well making sure that your contact information is correct on all social media pages.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is not as hard as it sounds, but it does require having a working knowledge of how a website works and that stuff that goes on in the background of your website. When you use website builders like Wix, GoDaddy etc., a lot of these elements are built in to their programming when you are doing the build, however you still need to make sure that you monitor your website performance so that you can fix errors as they come up and they will. Building a website - even using a drag and drop program - does not mean that your website will always be error free. Continuous monitoring (SEO Audits) are very important!
Technical SEO components to keep an eye on are: page speed, site errors, whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, site mapping and more.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is when you, your web developer or an outside auditing company pull SEO reports using platforms such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, or other SEO Auditing tool to find out where your website is performing it's best, where there are errors to fix, what keywords are working and what ones aren't. An SEO audit allows you to identify issues within your website that may be affecting your organic search performance.
Where can you find someone to perform an SEO audit?
Well that's easy. Dreamweaver can. SEO audits are not all doom and gloom and scary numbers. It's really a way to get to the root of why your website may not be doing it's job properly. In order for you to do your job, your website needs to do it's job. Contact Dreamweaver today and schedule your SEO Audit so we can get your website working for you the way that it should.