The lingo of the marketing world isn’t always easy to keep up with. If you’re a business owner or new to marketing or if you’re still learning, here’s a quick guide to keep you up to speed. Because marketing is such a broad topic there are many branches. SEO is a key aspect of digital marketing. We’re a Surrey marketing agency that specialises in SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing, and we want to help you learn the basics of SEO in Surrey.
What is SEO?
Search Engine optimisation is less complicated than it sounds. In layman’s terms, it is the process of getting as to the top spot on Google’s search rankings. This may not seem important at first, but when you consider that 68% of people don’t leave the 1st page of Google when they are searching, it starts to seem more important. SEO can determine the success of a business in that without viewers, your company’s sales drop and all goes down from there. Our job is to get you absolutely on the top page of Google, but the aim is to be in the top 3 positions. But how do you get there? That’s simple to answer – keywords.
Keyword Research
So what are keywords? They’re the word or phrase that you type into google in order to find what you’re looking for. It’s generally something like “builders in Surrey”. But depending on your business it can be very specific. The idea is to rank for these terms, but how do you know what you are and aren’t ranking for? If you’re new to SEO but already have a website. You can scrape your site to find the appropriate keywords. We use SE ranking to see the progress of your keywords. Tools like these allow you to see how well specific phrases are doing, and which ones you need to improve. But what about your competitors? Well that’s where SEO in Surrey gets more tricky. Generally if you’re in a big industry, there are at least several other competitors, if not more, that are all vying for the same top spot. This is where you need to take into consideration the search volume of terms and the competition rate in each. A high search volume means that if you optimise that term, you are more likely to reach more people. Whereas a term with low competition means that it will be easier to boost the rank as less people are trying to optimise for it.
Blogs
How do you actually optimise for particular keywords? This task is variable. If you have dropped one or two places in the rankings, a simple way to fix this is through blogs. These are posts that can be specifically optimised for keywords. Yoast plugins are a great way to measure the strength of your optimisation, this can vary on factors like the length of your blog, the alt text of a picture, and the number of times a keyword appears. However, this is generally a simple fix, but isn’t always effective in the long term. Blogs create a patchwork quilt of fixes overtime, they are generally so focused around a keyword that they may not be interesting and engaging to read. Try to use less keywords, maybe only once or twice in the blog, and make the blog more relevant to what your readers would want to read. Don’t create the same style with each of your blogs, try changing the format and title type.
Copywriting
How do you maintain your search ranking for longer? Well this is more complicated and takes more time. The copy of your website needs to be updated with the times. The keywords that you are ranking for are ever changing, you need to keep up with this. New pages can boost your SEO ranking with each individual page ranking for a different term. This allows you to rank for more than a few keywords at any one time. These changes can allow you to compete more effectively with your competitors. Try to use pictures in the new copy, as the alt text can be altered to boost SEO too. New pages may be an awkward thing to do, so you could even try updating the copy on your current website in order to rank, as this will create less hassle as you won’t need a developer.
Keyword Stuffing
You may well be tempted to write loads of blogs in an attempt to boost your rankings and try to maintain it. But trust us, this won’t work. Not only will you run out of things to write about, Google can also penalise this. You shouldn’t write more than about 4 blogs a month. Another mistake people often make is putting in too many keywords. This is known as “keyword stuffing”. The SEO value of the blog or copy that you write can be diminished by doing this. Another thing that Google looks for is irregular phrasing that doesn’t sound natural. Try not to write the same phrase over and over and put it in a sentence where it doesn’t make sense; this will mean the optimisation has less effect as Google will recognise that you are keyword stuffing and not give you as much credit. SEO optimisation will still work if the components of your keyword or phrase are in the same sentence, or even the same paragraph, so don’t use the same phrasing in each paragraph, try to mix it up.
Contact Us:
Thunderbolt Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency & Google agency partner in Surrey, we’re only a phone call away from improving your digital marketing campaign and your SEO in Surrey! Get in touch today by calling 01252 413757 or email howdy@wearethunderbolt.com – we can’t wait to hear from you.