What is SEO, anyway?
In simplest terms, SEO helps your business be more visible online. Using SEO can improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your business’ website, as well as help with offline sales, with the ultimate end goal of more customers and sales. This goal is achieved by increasing a company's visibility in organic search results and improving its Search Engine page rankings meaning prospective customers find you ahead of your competitors.
How does SEO work?
SEO isn't something you look at once and then tick off your to-do list. It is a complex and ongoing process of growth, putting your business first and your customers front and centre to really get to know them and learn what they want from you.
Several techniques need to be considered along the way, all of which need focus in order to maximise your efforts. These include technical SEO, relating to the non-content elements of your website, focusing on back-end structure, security, and readability for users.
Technical SEO specialists analyse, test and optimise your website for a better user experience and to increase search visibility. SEO Experts will also carry out on-page SEO, which looks at optimising your website's content to improve search engine visibility and producing new content, focusing the quality and relevance of your content in relation to what the user is searching for.
And then there is off-page SEO, which involves techniques such as building good backlinks to your website, instilling authority and trust. There is also social media management, and listing management, which is particularly important for local SEO. It's also important to keep an eye on your competitors' performance and know how to analyse how well they are doing, too.
A solid SEO strategy for your business will incorporate multiple techniques and it will adapt over time to account for evolving needs - not to mention those pesky algorithm changes! As you can see, it's a real science.
What happens when you stop your SEO?
In the current cost of living crisis, it's understandable that business owners are looking to save money where they can. But SEO is an essential element of your marketing strategy.
Much like giving up on weeding your garden, stopping investment in SEO won't have an immediate impact. But slowly and surely, your search visibility could decrease if not maintained. Over time this can lead to drastically less organic traffic to your website and less visibility online, stifling sales.
Search engines are constantly updating - there are around 12 updates a day to Google, every single day, not to mention the core updates, which can really shake up the search results and may not favour a site that has yet to keep up with the changes.
So mere weeks after stopping your SEO, it would take months to get those rankings and results back to where they were. If your site is new, it's hard to know where to start, the search engines won't know your website, and there are many steps to take to get the ball rolling again, on top of the fact that you have a business to run.
An SEO success story
Sheffield FC is the world's oldest football club and ranks number one for national key search terms. Our SEO experts at Hydra created and implemented a strategy that resulted in a 56.49 per cent increase in new website users, which significantly boosted their online visibility and growth. Find out exactly how we got the ball rolling with an SEO and digital PR campaign for the world's first football club.
Getting started with SEO
Before committing to any SEO campaign, we spend time with clients, getting to know their business requirements and goals, as well as understanding their target audience. We conduct a complete analysis of your website and evaluate past performance too. Only then can we build a bespoke SEO strategy tailored to an individual business using the latest techniques.
Book a free consultation with our team of SEO experts today, and see how effective SEO can transform your sales pipeline.
