The art and craft of good SEO
- Written by
- Harri Sharman
Where does your business rank online?
68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Most people won’t look past the first 3 results, never mind onto a second page. Is your business being left behind because of where you rank in Google? If search engines like Google and Bing aren’t finding your website easily, your target audience won’t be able to, either.
What is SEO, and why is it important?
Search engine optimisation (or SEO for short) is the art of threading together technical and content improvements to make it easier for search engines to both find your website and push it higher up the results page.
To put it briefly, SEO is a set of best practices for optimising your website. The aim is to increase your visibility and ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo (yes, people still use Yahoo!). A major part of good SEO is having a clean, user-friendly website, where a visitor can easily find all the information they are looking for.
It also involves keeping your site up to date with the latest technologies. Employing these principles will accelerate your business’s online success. Here’s how:
- Increased brand awareness: SEO helps increase brand awareness. The higher up you appear in search results, the more people are likely to see your site and remember it.
- Increased traffic:the more people see your site, the more likely your page is to be clicked on – simple!
- Increased sales:more visitors equals more potential customers, and more opportunities to drive your profits.
What is SEO not?
SEO is several things, but there are just as many things it’s not. Here are some common misconceptions we encounter about SEO.
1. SEO is not a total digital marketing strategy. It doesn’t include paid advertising or consider other valuable channels for driving traffic to your site, such as social media. Good SEO however is a crucial part of any sound marketing strategy.
2. It is most definitely not about cheating your way to the top. Search engines now actively punish websites that engage in “spammy” behaviour, like stealing or duplicating content, stuffing pages with irrelevant keywords, or hiding things in the code.
3. Lastly, it is not “set and forget”. Technologies change all the time – just look at the recent explosion of artificial intelligence tools. It’s crucial to keep on top of your web performance often, or better yet, have an SEO expert looking after it for your business on a regular basis.
How to maintain strong site performance
Whether your site is brand-new, or a few years old, it doesn’t matter – good SEO is necessary for any site to keep performing well. If you’re not in the market for a full website refresh, even an hour or two per month spent optimising your site can get you results. Here are a few areas of SEO that can impact your rankings.
On-page updates
Google loves fresh content. Adding new content to your site tells search engines you’re an active business. You can do this by posting a blog about a new product, adding a case study of a recent project you worked on, or going through with a fine toothcomb to update imagery and key information. Also check for any broken links, missing meta data and that your pages are properly structured with headings and include relevant keywords.
Off-page updates
Did you know that sites with poor authority linking to yours can cause your own ranking to decrease? Attracting good quality backlinks and disavowing any toxic backlinks tells Google that you’re a reputable business.
Technical updates
This one’s trickier unless you’re a developer. It involves updating code for mobile responsiveness, minifying JavaScript or CSS, checking the latest versions of plugins are installed, and any APIs or external programs that run on your site are all working correctly.
The first way to supercharge your web performance is to do an SEO audit. At ninetyblack, their SEO experts will run your site through several industry-leading tools to get a complete picture of how you’re doing online. They’ll identify key areas for improvement or build a content strategy for you based on competitive market analysis. Take advantage of ninetyblack’s monthly maintenance packages to get ahead of the curve, attract high-quality traffic, and ultimately boost your conversions.
So, what are you waiting for? Get proven results for your business with ninetyblack’s expert SEO services.
Client Testimonial
“We’re so happy with the SEO improvements that ninetyblack did for our website! They were able to increase our new users by 80% in the six months after the work was done, and our conversion rate increased from 0% to 1.6%. The website loads much faster, and we’re now regularly the number one organic result on Google for “wardrobes taupo”. We’re so grateful for their help in growing our business’s online visibility.”
Jeff Page
Wardrobes by Design, Taupō
