Search Engine Optimisation – Where does it fit within your business?

SEO describes the strategic approach used to boost your organic search ranking in Google. Sounds simple enough. But with the ever-changing e-commerce landscape, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand how SEO fits within your business. Is it about marketing? Social media? Content? PR?

It’s vital to understand how SEO should be integrated in your business. Brennan Lukav from OnlySEO, explains why SEO should be thought of as an integrated practice, and not a separate entity.

Content

Authoritative, engaging content is essential. This doesn’t just mean blogs. It extends to legitimate customer reviews and unique product descriptions.

Images

Google can’t see what your images are, so be sure to describe them! Optimise picture titles and alt tags and so that even the visual elements of your site contain content that can be crawled.

Site Design

Site design is just about usability, right? Wrong. It has SEO value too. Google likes simple navigation. Complicated sites that require too much digging to find desired content will not only create a negative result when it comes to your customer, but when it comes to your search engine optimisation too.

Avoid site errors

As with site design, links that lead to a 404 error are not great for user experience. It also makes your site difficult for Google bots to crawl. Make sure your site runs smoothly and error-free.

Marketing

There was a time when search engine optimised press releases were all the rage. However, Google updates mean optimised anchor text links in press releases may qualify as ‘unnatural links'. What does this mean? Releasing press releases stuffed with keywords and unnatural links will be penalised. While there’s no denying that links are important in press releases, if you’re using your press releases just for SEO purposes, this will backfire. Press releases drive awareness and drive traffic to your site. Solid marketing efforts mean that a well-written press release will garner journalist or blogger interest and create content that will link back to you naturally.

Social Media

Social media is many things (brand awareness, customer relations, consumer interaction….the list goes on). But it should also be considered part of your SEO strategy. For example, creating video content on YouTube (which is owned by Google) and optimising it for terms you want to rank for, will help with search engine optimisation. Videos tend to have a better chance of high rankings so it helps to consider optimisation when it comes to social media.

As you can see, for a site to be fully optimised for SEO, it takes all elements, from IT to marketing, to content writers. Search engine optimisation should be part of a complete and integrated strategy when it comes to delivering the greatest outcome for your business.