Imagine that your SEO strategy is like building your dream house…
A house is nothing without a solid foundation, just like an SEO strategy is futile without some keyword research. Your company website is your online property – every brick is a blog, and the mortar is your website’s coding. Backlinks to your company website are your neighbours, who are vital to the value of your house. If a beautiful house is built in an area with high crime rates or next to a landfill site it loses most of its value after all. As is often the way with neighbours, it’s about quality, not quantity. And from an SEO perspective, having high-quality backlinks to your website shows a search engine that you’re from a well-to-do neighbourhood. And finally, what would Grand Designs be without Kevin McCloud? Kevin is Google, perusing your property from top to bottom under his steely professional gaze, much like Google’s crawling bots, called ‘spiders’, trawl your website and rank it based on hundreds of ranking factors that form its algorithm.
This analogy illustrates the bare bones of SEO. To say that SEO has changed a lot in recent years would be a massive understatement – hardly a week passes in which Google doesn’t announce an update to its search algorithm. In basic terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results”. And when we say ‘search engine results’, we’re really only referring to Google. Google is the top dog, answering more than 2 trillion search queries each year, and 88,700 searches worldwide per second. In other words: for every second that your website is not found properly on Google, you miss out on hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities in which someone might have accessed your website, viewed your content, and bought your products or services.
It’s no surprise, then, that SEO has become the buzzword in communications. Broadly speaking, SEO can be divided into two camps: the technical (i.e. website coding) and content (PR!). Content is at its core. Just like PRs, Google loves content in all its shapes and forms, be it blogs, articles, infographics, or guides. Much like Kevin McCloud loves all the weird and wacky buildings on Grand Designs. Or so I like to think…
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