The Key to any good SEO

The key to good quality search engine optimisation is in the preparation and planning stages. Before you even begin you should evaluate your business and your website. What are your goals? Who are your customers? Who do you want to be your customers? Put yourself in their shoes and look at your website critically. Is it visually appealing to your customer demographic? Is it written in their kind of language?

Next go to a search engine and imagine what they might type in if they were looking for your product. Don’t just check out where your website is placed, check out the competition. Visit the websites of the major competitors you knew you had, as well as the ones who you’ve just found ranking higher in the search engine results pages than you! Compare their websites to yours, concentrating on the usability as well as the content, and thinking about what might be boosting them further up the rankings. The next question to answer is: what do you want to achieve with SEO? You would need to focus on different techniques depending on whether you want to increase brand awareness, increase sales, or just tell customers about a special offer you’re running. It’s important to be clear on this one – increasing visitors to your website doesn’t automatically increase sales if they are being directed to an information page instead of a product page, and the answer to this question will shape your whole optimisation strategy.

Even when your search engine optimisation campaign is up and running, you can’t become complacent. You have to keep checking your position on the search engines (hopefully you’re upwardly mobile!), your competitors’ positions (are they doing some SEO of their own to counterbalance your efforts), ensuring your visitors are being directed to the right landing pages to encourage conversions and ensuring that your content is still vibrant, accurate and relevant.