When it comes to improving your website’s performance, there is a range of techniques and tools that can help. However, when it comes to increasing exposure, trust, and your visitor account, few methods work as well as SEO. SEO, also known as search engine optimisation, is a discipline encompassing multiple practices all designed to do one thing in particular: to help your site rank at the top of search engines.

How SEO works

The majority of web users use search engines on a regular basis. They use it to find products and services, to answer questions, or to get news, information, and advice. Search engines offer your website the chance to get low-cost organic traffic, instead of spending a big marketing budget on online advertisements. SEO is all about using a few tactics and changes to the site to get more and more of those people visiting your site.

The primary focus is helping your website rank higher on relevant searches. There are different ways that SEO specialists like Click Through Digital achieve this. Part of the strategy might involve the targeted use of keywords in site content, titles, headers, sub-headers, and metadata under the site’s surface. That way, if web users search for the most popular terms relevant to your webpage, yours is more likely to be the first site they see.

An SEO strategy can also involve surgically delving through the site for bad practices that might lower the score that search engines give the site. This can include duplicate content, broken links, broken images, poorly organised webpages and more. Another strategy is known as off-site SEO, which involves building links to your site from other valuable and reputable sites through the use of PR, affiliate marketing, and more. The more high-ranking sites you have linking to your own webpages, the higher they tend to rank.

Why your website needs SEO

Given that the primary intent of search engine optimisation is to increase your site’s ranking on the web’s most popular search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, some of the benefits are easy to see. You can end up attracting more traffic, which can lead to more subscriptions, sales, and engagement. However, there are other benefits that SEO can offer your site, too, including the following:

  • Brand awareness: More people are going to naturally become aware of your brand if your site is amongst the first that they’re directed to.
  • Building trust and prestige: The first results on search engines tend to inspire more trust in the webpages behind them. Because search engines rank you as the most trustworthy and valuable, web users are likely to do the same.
  • Improved user experience: From rearranging your webpages to making content more legible and understandable, SEO also makes your site much better from the visitor’s perspective. This means they’re more likely to stick around and visit again in future.
  • Beating the competition: Whatever your site offers, it’s likely it has competition. SEO can allow you to directly beat your competition in the search rankings, meaning that more people visit your site than theirs.
  • Target exactly who you want visiting your site: More visitors are good, but visitors that are actually interested in your content, products, or services are even better. SEO is about targeted improvements, it doesn’t just offer visibility, it makes sure that your site is aimed at those who have the most to offer you.
  • Cheaper than advertising: For marketing campaigns and short-lived boosts of traffic, ads do work. However, organic marketing like SEO lasts a lot longer and costs a lot less.

The potential value of an SEO campaign is not to be underestimated. What’s more, it’s all completely measurable. With tools like Google Analytics, you can measure the direct impact that SEO has on your website’s performance over time.

What an SEO agency does

Hypothetically, anyone can perform search engine optimisation on their own site. However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You need the insight to investigate what is holding your site’s search engine potential down, as well as the knowledge of the different techniques to increase its rankings and measure the results. It takes time and expertise, which is why many site owners rely on SEO agencies like Click Through Digital.

SEO agencies can audit the entire site for potential problems, as well as taking an overlook of the content and layout of your webpages. By identifying the issues, they can help you pinpoint which solutions best fit your site and start implementing them immediately. When it comes to SEO campaigns, teams like Click Through Digital can be an invaluable ally.