Search engine optimisation (SEO) remains an important digital strategy. Yet, it’s been amplified by the pandemic, and an online presence has become more important than ever. Done right, an effective SEO strategy can complement a company’s PR and communications and help them reach a wider audience.
Let’s start with the basics. Here’s a quick summary of what SEO is and why it’s important for your business.
What is SEO?
SEO is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website through organic search results.
Research from SEO Inc in March this year found that organic traffic to websites is growing and has reached 53 percent in 2021. Now think back to when you last searched something on Google. Did you click the top result or did you scroll down the page? How often do you click to see results 11 – 20?
SEO Inc suggests that about 20 percent of people click the top result, dropping down to around 8 percent for the 10th result. People expect instant answers and trust search engines to provide them. If you don’t appear high on the list of results, you won’t get the traffic you want.
Quality traffic
SEO is as much about attracting quality traffic as it is quantity. It’s all very well ranking high in search results for a particular search, but if it’s not relevant to your business then it’s not the traffic you want. You need to identify which search terms you want to rank highly for and this starts with keyword research.
This research will help identify a list of key words or phrases that meet the following criteria:
- Relevance – does the search match what your business offers?
- Volume – what is the average monthly search volume for a keyword. If no one is searching for a keyword you are targeting, no one will find your content.
- Intent – ‘cleaning company’ is quite broad and the searcher may be looking for a number of things. ‘Office cleaning service near me’ has much more intent.
- Difficulty – SEO tools give keywords a difficulty rating based on how competitive it is. You want to find the sweet spot between one that is relevant, has good search volume, shows intent AND isn’t too competitive.
Content strategy
With your keyword research in place, your SEO strategy is ready for the next stage. Existing website pages can be edited and optimised to ensure that they are targeting the right keywords.
Creating a blog calendar is a great way to ensure that you have regular, fresh website content that targets your chosen keywords.
Your research can even be applied to PR. If part of your PR strategy is to secure bylined articles, you can include keywords when relevant to help reinforce your internal content.
Of course, keywords must be used naturally in content and Google frowns on ‘keyword stuffing’ – packing keywords into a piece of content.
SEO results
SEO takes time to have an impact – you won’t become the top result on Google overnight. However, given time and strategic thinking it will have positive results.
For example, in the summer of 2020 Magenta wrote a guide about communicating with furloughed employees. It offers clear and concise guidance for businesses and contains important keywords that are relevant.
At the time of writing, our guide is the top result in the Google search ‘communicating with furloughed employees’. We continue to attract traffic that is relevant to one of our services – internal communications.
At Magenta, we offer SEO services that integrate with traditional PR and communications. Contact us today to chat about how we can support your business. And be sure to check back on our blog for more SEO advice!
