The business world as we knew it will never be the same again. A complete shift and transformation is still yet to come in the way we buy and sell in both a B2C and B2B space. The question is, which businesses will come out the other side and reap the benefits currently on offer? Many have successfully adapted to these changes and pivoted their way of thinking, their marketing and how they plan to interact with customers not only now but for the next 12 and 24 months. So which marketing channels provide the greatest return? There’s no denying that the shift to online commerce will be absolutely massive, so where are your customers and how do you find them? One of the best answers to that question, is SEO.
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation is essentially the power to assist a website in climbing Google infamous rankings ladder. Outranking your competitors for valuable keywords and gaining market share from customers actively looking and searching for goods or services that you sell. SEO services are something we provide to our clients across Australia and New Zealand with an expert team of specialists behind us, we know the rules, we know the algorithm and we do the ground work to set you up for success. So, we’ve outlined a straightforward 3 step guide to help you improve rankings for your website.
1: Technical Onsite Optimisation
This is the core of SEO. Laying the foundations and setting yourself up for success. Making
sure the main elements of your website are all correct, titles, meta descriptions, internal
linking, page structure, H1’s, content density. The list could go on, now 9 times out of 10, if
you wanted to do this properly you would need to find someone with experience so that it’s
not done the way you want to do it, but the way Google wants you to do it. The big thing
with SEO is you may be forced to write or show something that may not necessarily be what
you want, but if Google prefers it then that is key.
The list for technical onsite elements that influence Google rankings is not only endless but
it’s constantly changing. Google updates their algorithm yearly if not half-yearly and so
staying on top of the game is almost as important as the ground work you do at the start.
Another part to optimizing your website before you’ve started any of the above changes is
actually quite a simple one. Directory listings. Just like in the early 2000’s, the yellow pages
and white pages held a physical database of businesses, contacts and phone numbers.
Google likes to still see this but in digital form and there are hundreds of online directories
you can list your business on. For our clients at Oxygen Media, we tend to deliver around 50
local listings which massively helps with SEO.
2: Content Many digital marketing experts now believe content marketing will be as big if not bigger than SEO over the next year or two. But when you think about it, that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? Google’s main goal is to essentially provide its user with the best, most accurate and most up to date content available. Every time you search for an answer on Google, or search for something to buy, content is what makes up those results. Now content could come in the form of internal page structure, making sure your content is specific enough to your topic with a decent number of keywords naturally positioned throughout your pages. Or it could be in the form of blogs, both internally and externally. Either way, blogging is a great way to keep fresh content on your site and help show Google that you are providing value to your audience and potential customers. 3: Linking The final part to the 3 step SEO puzzle. And annoyingly one of the hardest. The first 2 are relatively easy to do and even someone with no digital marketing experience could theoretically give them both a really good go. But linking is not so easy. One of the most important parts to SEO is attracting high quality backlinks pointing to your website. Essentially Google looks at this and says, “yes that website is vouching for that website by placing a backlink on their own site”. Google again looks at a number of factors here but one of the most important is the domain authority of that backlink source. Things can get a little technical here but basically if a website has been around for a few years, has continued to improve their website, provide value to customers and attracts quality web traffic, Google likes this and values this kind of website over a website that launched last week with no authority. The general rule of thumb is, the higher the domain authority on the website, the better quality the backlink is for you. So how do you go about attracting or receiving backlinks? There’s no easier answer here, and the most obvious answer is pay for them. Millions of websites worldwide sell backlinks. The harder but cheaper alternative is by contacting or outreaching to websites and asking them nicely. Obviously, you will have to provide them something in return so maybe it’s a blog post on a piece of content relevant to their website, or a guest comment on a blog they have already published. Either way, high quality backlinks will do wonders for your SEO rankings. So, there you have Oxygen’s 3 step process to improve your SEO rankings. There is no easy trick to it and it does take several months for Google to even recognise changes made on your site but with a greater shift to online business imminent, SEO is something that no business can overlook. If you’re interested in joining our unique Oxygen SEO program then let’s chat and see if we’re a good fit for each other.
Ollie Brazier
Founder
Oxygen Media