Why is SEO Marketing important?
Have you ever wondered why some of your competitors seem to pop up in almost every Google search result?
It’s probably because they’ve been strategic about how they’re spending their advertising dollars and funnelling some of it into Search Engine Marketing (or search engine optimisation) to get their Sunshine Coast business seen online in organic search results.
So how can you use local SEO marketing (sometimes called search engine optimisation) as a crucial marketing strategy to grow your business, generate more leads, and make that phone ring with eager customers keen to pay you money?
First, let’s quickly look at what is involved in this specialised area of digital marketing. It’s a bit technical, but bear with us, as that’s why it’s not easy to do unless you have the technical skills.
SEO Marketing and its amazing effect on your Sunshine Coast business’s website search results
SEO marketing is the process of optimising your website and online profile for both search engines and visitors (customers and potential customers). An SEO marketing strategy helps you to make your website more relevant, user-friendly, and authoritative for your target keywords and your ideal audience.
And most importantly, strategic SEO helps you appear consistently at the top of the search engine results (we call these the “search engine results page” or SERPs).
Some of the more specialised elements of local SEO marketing include:
- Keyword research: Finding and selecting the best keywords for your website and content
- On-page optimisation: Improving your website’s structure, content, and code for your keywords and user experience
- Off-page optimisation: Building links and relationships with other websites and online platforms that can boost your website’s popularity and trustworthiness
- Technical SEO: Ensuring your website’s speed, security, and compatibility with different devices and browsers
When we get to work and employ SEO marketing for your business, our aim is to rank your website higher on search engines for relevant keywords and phrases that your customers use to find your products or services online. SEO marketing also works to drive more (free) organic search traffic to your website, and to convert more of your ideal visitors into customers.
What Are the Main Components of SEO Marketing?
We focus on four main components of SEO marketing that work together to optimise your website and online profile for search engines and users.
Here’s a quick overview of how SEO works:
1. Keyword Research
Probably a mission-critical skill, meticulous keyword research is the first and most important component of SEO marketing. It can also be the most overlooked and easily trivialised by those without experience.
A skilled SEO technician will take the time to make sure the keyword research they carry out uncovers and prioritises the best keywords for your website and content.
These keywords are the words and phrases that your customers use to search for your products or services online – also called “search term” or search query”
Keyword research helps you to understand your audience’s intent and expectations, and to create relevant and engaging, high quality content that matches their needs and goals.
We use industry-specific seo tools and software to drill down into your customer’s needs and wants, as well as analysing and assessing your competitors and their search engine rankings to discover their keyword tactics.
Typically, everyone starts with the most obvious keyword phrases, for example if you’re an electrician in the Sunshine Coast, some initial keywords would be:
- electrician Sunshine Coast
- electrical contractor Sunshine Coast
- best sparky Sunshine Coast
- how to find a qualified electrician on the Sunshine Coast
And so on.
But this might be missing some very valuable phrases that could get you upfront in the search results, for example:
emergency sparky power cut near me
Or for a plumber, it might be:
same-day plumber Maroochydore
Our skilled SEO keyword researchers make sure we first take the time to understand your business and the typical ways customers look for you. Then we scour the data to unearth similar, relevant keywords that business owners sometimes never think of.
2. On-Page SEO and Optimisation for Search Engines
On-page optimisation is the second part of SEO marketing. This gets quite technical, as we work on improving your website’s structure, content, and code for your keywords and user experience at the same time as aligning it with our keyword research. On-page optimisation helps you to make your website more relevant and user-friendly for your audience and search engines.
Typical tasks we do here are:
- Using your keywords and typical customer search terms in your title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and content, but avoiding keyword stuffing and instead use synonyms and variations
- Using schema markup where applicable, which is a code that helps search engines to understand and display your website’s information, such as your name, address, phone number, ratings, etc.
- Implement internal links (those links that connect your own web pages), to help your users and search engines to navigate your website and distribute your authority
- Use external links (links that point to other websites), to provide additional value and credibility to your content and website
- Use images, videos, and other multimedia elements to make your content more engaging and appealing, and optimise them for size, speed, and alt text (alt text is the text that displays if the image doesn’t load, or the user has switched off image display on their browser)
- Use responsive design, which is a design that adapts to different mobile devices and screen sizes, to make your website mobile-friendly and accessible
3. Off-Page SEO as part of your ongoing Digital Marketing strategy
To be found on the major search engines – and even better, to consistently be found at the top of Google’s Sunshine Coast search results – takes more than just your website and its own optimisation.
We need to build links back to your site – this is called off-page optimisation (or building backlinks) and is the process of obtaining backlinks and relationships with other websites and online platforms. This will dramatically boost your website’s popularity and trustworthiness, in both your customers’ eyes and with the search engines. Off-page optimisation helps you to increase your online visibility and credibility, and to improve your SEO ranking.
Off-page optimisation for SEO marketing is where your agency’s well-honed skills really come to the fore. We have a multitude of methods to make sure we get solid links and references back to your site.
This also helps protect you against changes in search algorithms and secure your place as a trusted business on the Sunshine Coast.
4. Technical SEO to improve organic search results and ranking
Geeks only from hereon in! Technical SEO is where we optimise your website’s speed, security, and compatibility for different devices and browsers. Technical SEO helps you to enhance your website’s performance and functionality, and to avoid any errors or issues that can affect your SEO ranking.
And these days, Google rewards fast-loading, mobile friendly websites with higher rankings, so technical SEO is more important than ever.
If you’d like to make sure your business outperforms your competition when it comes to Google rankings, then we’d be happy to book you in for an obligation-free consultation!
