How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google ‘crawl’ your website periodically. If you are regularly updating your site, it will be crawled more often than a site that is inactive.

What happens when your website is crawled is that it is being assessed in a variety of ways. They are looking at things like how fast it loads, if it works well across different devices like mobiles and tablets, whether the content is relevant and unique, if you’ve ticked the technical boxes, and much more.

If your website is deemed worthy, it will be shown in search results. The better it is, the higher it will rank. Ideally, you want to be in the top three results on the first page.

There are three main parts to SEO: on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and technical SEO.

On-site SEO is about making sure your website is full of useful content that matches what people are searching for, includes engaging visuals, and is easy to navigate. This includes things like having the right keywords, organising your content well, and making sure your site is user-friendly.

Off-site SEO is about building your site’s reputation online to show your website is trusted. You can do this through backlinks (other reputable websites linking to yours) and your social media presence. Also look at ways to have your brand and business mentioned in as many online spaces as possible; it all helps build your online presence and reputation.

Technical SEO is about having a solid website foundation, so that everything built on top (content, links, etc.) performs well. This is where you need to make sure your website is fast, easy to access, secure, and simple for both users and search engines to follow and understand.

SEO Tips:

• Update your website regularly.

• Resize your photos and videos to keep file sizes small – large files slow down your site.

• Don’t copy content from other sites, duplicate content will harm your SEO.

• Find other sites that can link back to yours.

• Build your online presence in a number of ways, think social media, news articles, networking directories, your Google Business Profile, and customer and supplier sites etc.