What is SEO and why do you need it?

If you run a website or are a business owner and drive enquiries through an online presence, normally a website, at some point you will have come across the term SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. You’ll also hear it referred to as Online Marketing, Internet Marketing and Website Optimisation.

These fundamentally mean the same thing, getting more people to your website by getting higher rankings in the Search Engines. The higher your website ranks, the more clicks you receive and the more enquiries and ultimately business you’ll get.

When we talk about Search Engines, in the UK we’re talking about Google which has 85% of the search market.

Most people regard getting on page one as their goal and this is indeed what we should all be aiming for as a minimum. However, as the graph below shows, getting on the bottom of page 1 still doesn’t guarantee a lot of traffic. Your website needs to be on page 1 but as high up page one as possible, as marketers would say “above the fold”, this means what people see on their screen before they have to scroll down.

Look at the graph below and you’ll see how the percentage of clicks drops away the further down the page you appear. SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Page and the positions here are from 1 to 10.

The majority of the clicks are for the positions 1 through to 5.

This is why every website needs SEO, without it you’re not telling Google what you do and that means that Google can’t bring you back in its search results for the sort of queries that you want to be found for. When we run SEO Courses, one of the things we hear all the time is that business owners face a barrage of calls from SEO companies, very often from call centres berating them over SEO and telling them “they need to be number 1 on Google”.

The graph above is the reason why. However, this is why you need SEO, there are lots of different ways to implement it which we’ll talk about over the coming months.

For more information talk to us.