The world of search marketing has changed significantly in the last couple of years, but there are still a huge number of business owners, and SEO companies, that make the mistake of assuming that old techniques such as keyword stuffing and automated link building still work. Google's latest updates have made those techniques obsolete, and the dominance now of the "mobile web" has changed user search behaviour forever.
Local Optimisation for Massive Reach
The internet is a global tool, but most businesses don't need to optimise their content to reach a global audience. A local business based in Sussex may only ever be interested in people and other businesses in Sussex and the surrounding areas. Narrowing down your optimisation to focus on users from that area, and users who enter local town names or even post codes, reduces the amount of competition you face and ensures that the organic traffic you earn is highly targeted.
Untargeted traffic from geographically distant locations looks good in your server log, but those visitors are highly unlikely to turn into customers. For this reason, it's better to focus on quality traffic and strong leads. Customers who explicitly search for your type of business and narrow the search down to a geographic area are customers who have a strong intent to buy locally. Take advantage of that intent and capture those leads while they are strong.
Digital Content for Marketing
Digital content marketing is an essential part of growing an online business. The Hummingbird update greatly emphasises the importance of high-quality content and prioritises websites that provide engaging and informative content for their visitors. This content can include articles, infographics and videos.
The benefits of quality content are not just limited to SEO, however. Good content helps with brand building, brand authority and PR. By engaging with current and prospective customers and giving away a small amount of your expertise for free, you build trust and goodwill, which makes it easier to encourage future conversions.
On-Site Website Optimisation
On-site website optimisation is one aspect of search marketing that remains as important as ever. We specialise in optimising websites for usability and SEO purposes, and we've won awards for doing so. On-site optimisation involves both improving the usability and accessibility of the website and making changes to the back-end code so that the website is responsive in order to look good on all devices whether desktop or mobile. Many older website designs use out-of-date coding practices that produce bloated pages or pages that do not display correctly on devices with small screens. Slow-loading and broken designs drive visitors away and are incredibly harmful for your brand.
Investing in SEO may sound like an expense that is hard to justify, especially when your business can see instant returns by investing in display and social advertising or paid search. However, in the long term SEO offers a huge return on investment and it is well worth taking advantage of it. After some investment organic search traffic can yield high rewards and SEO is an effective way of targeting relevant keywords. You cannot afford to ignore the stream of traffic that comes from having strong organic visibility.