SEO FAQs

Your SEO Questions, Answered. 

If you’re running a business or heading up a marketing department, ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ will be a phrase that’s thrown at you a lot. And rightly so, in our opinion. 

To the layman, ‘SEO’ can just be chucked onto a pile of marketing jargon acronyms along with ‘KPI’ ‘ROI’, ‘CTR’ and many more. But it’s worth sticking around and learning a bit more about this one- in this article, we’ll clear a few things up; answering questions like ‘What is Meta Data’  ‘How does SEO work’ and the big one ‘Do I Need SEO?*

*Spoiler alert, yes. 

What is SEO? 

The goal of SEO is for you to rank higher than your competitors on results pages and, therefore, have the biggest and most relevant online presence in the eyes of your target audience. 

SEO is all about relevance. Google wants what’s best for their customer, so will always try to give them the most accurate result to what they’re searching. And you want that result to be a link to your site. 

What are SEO keywords? 

SEO Keywords are words or phrases that you’re hoping to rank highly for. These are what your audience will be typing into Google to find you. 

So if you’re running a Banana bread delivery company, some of your keywords might be ‘Banana Bread Delivery’ and ‘How to get Banana Bread Delivered’ 

Obviously, some keywords have higher search volumes than others, which makes them more competitive, so the trick is to find phrases that your audience use, but your competitors don’t. 

How does SEO work?

SEO involves creating and changing the content on, and in reference to, a website in order to appear more relevant to Google’s web crawlers. You’re optimising your website for the search engine- funny that. 

There are many techniques, but they can all be sorted into one of two categories- on-page and off-page.

What is on-page SEO?

On-Page SEO is everything that you optimise ON your website. So this includes changing the content of your pages to be more densely populated with keywords, adding keywords to your titles and also to the alt tags of your images, so Google images knows what they’re about too. 

(A picture of some delicious looking banana bread may be just as likely to get you a sale than someone searching for delivery)

On-page also involves the stuff that you can’t see on your site (Meta Data) which gives the crawlers a secret summary of your content without it needing to be shoved in your users’ faces. 

What is off-page SEO?

Contrastingly, off-page SEO is what you do on other sites that relate to yours. 

As well as relevance to the keyword, Google will base your rankings off your Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EAT). E is down to how knowledgeable you are on your subject matter, which is largely down to your content. But A and T can be improved by creating links to your site from other sites with high EAT scores. This includes directories, clients, and reviews. 

So, getting your banana bread delivery company an inbound link from a famous chef’s site, would count as off-page SEO. 

What is Meta Data?

Meta data can be thought of as “Data about data”. As discussed briefly in ‘What is on-page SEO?’, Meta Data gives Google a summary of what your page is about and how it can interest the audience. 

Your Meta Title and description are the most important place to get your keywords in, as they’re the Search Engine’s first port of call when finding out what you’re about. 

How to get seen on Google. 

After everything that’s been said so far, ‘SEO’ might seem like the obvious answer to this question, but it goes deeper than that, 

It’s a common misconception that, just because you have a website setup, you’ll be seen by Google. This isn’t the case. Your site needs to be indexed with Google’s crawlers, page by page- allowing it to become a part of the engine’s Rolodex of results to share with its users. 

Do I Need SEO?

Google Processes 63,000 queries per second, with well over 1 Billion individual users. 

Chances are unless you’re in a business that no one has ever heard of, a good deal of those searches are for products and services that you’re ready and willing to offer. So yes, you probably need SEO. 

Request a FREE SEO audit to find out how we can help, or see how we’ve helped clients like you reach their full ranking potential.