What is SEO?

SEO is a digital marketing technique used to drive traffic from search engine’s “free” or “organic” listings to key pages of your website.

SEO’s main purpose is to attract new visitors to your website for conversion into new business. This is achieved through the continuous improvement and promotion of a website so that it gains high organic listings in search engine result pages (SERPs). Particularly for when key words and phrases associated with high volumes of search traffic are used to browse the web for products or services like yours.

For example:

An on-line store selling mobile phones (lets call them “Mobiles Online”) will want to rank highly for the following types of key phrases:

Branded key phrases such as their company name “Mobiles Online” so that customers who know of them by reputation or previous purchase can find them again.

Non branded key phrases so that new customers can find them through searches using generic product phrases such as “mobile phones”, “smart phones” and “mobile phone accessories”.

Product brand phrases such as “iPhones” and “Blackberry phones”.

For example:

As opposed to paid advertising, we have no control over these organic listings and are somewhat at the mercy of the search engines, who regularly update the algorithms they use to assess and rank a website.

The role of SEO is to gain some form of control over natural listings by understanding these algorithms and implementing necessary changes to a website. These might include changes to content, technical set up and site structure as well as how other sites link to you on the web.

But SEO doesn’t stop there. Another important aspect is to make your site the best it can be for the people visiting it.  Building great user experiences, clear navigation structures, stunning design and clever conversion techniques go hand in hand with optimisation for search engines.