What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is the part art, part science of driving qualified traffic to a website via the natural listings on a search engine results page (SERP). There would be no digital marketing topic which has more written and said about it; and here are the reasons:

Lots of Money at Stake

The business level advantages of appearing high up on a results page for a given keyword phrase are undeniable - most people turn to their favourite search engine as their first stop for information discovery (and few search past the first page of results).

Once You're There it's a Beautiful Free Ride

There are no direct costs associated with appearing on a results page, or any costs incurred if a person clicks on a natural listing bringing them back to a page on a website.

Nobody Really Knows For Sure

Nobody but a select few really knows every in and out of how the search results are determined in the order in which they appear; the make-up of the underlying algorithms for each search engine is secret sauce. We know most of how it works, but not all of it.

This combination of high stakes and no definitive instruction manual has created a prevalent industry dynamic: money being paid to individuals and companies who have a less than a half-baked grasp of the fundamentals at play. Knowledge gaps are readily plugged with jargon and acronyms.

Here’s What We Do Know

Get these two sorted and you’re 90% of the way there:

Firstly, the staple of the search engine indexing process is words; search engines seek to match up search queries with web pages which have been discovered to contain the same words. Secondly, search engines attempt to serve web pages higher up the results page which are deemed as being more ‘important’ than others within a particular keyword phrase space; the determinants of importance from a search engine perspective are the quantity and quality of inbound links to a particular webpage (Google uses a 0 - 10 logarithmic scale called ‘Page Rank' to rate each webpage).

If you can get the right keywords onto your website and get the right kind of websites to link to your own, you will have gone a large part of the way to optimising your ability to attract search engine derived traffic, hence search engine optimisation. Be wary of anyone promising a page one position for a given keyword phrase unless it’s a performance based arrangement, i.e. no position, no pay. There are just too many uncontrollable variables at play to guarantee page one success.

The Importance of Segmentation

Like so much of digital marketing, segmenting your market is the key to successful SEO. We strongly recommend a good old fashioned ‘butcher paper’ exercise. Map out your business by isolating your various target segments, sub-segments and sub, sub-segments. Each defined segment should be allocated its own webpage with its own keyword focus. The chosen keyword phrases will be derived by researching how people within each segment search for the product or services which you offer. Don’t assume you know which keywords people are using – in our experience it’s not what you would first expect.

By optimising each webpage for each segment you’re targeting, you’ll end up optimising your whole website. Don’t build a website and then look for content to fill it with - let the butcher paper segmentation exercise drive the website’s final structure.