Will SEO work for your business ?
The different types of SEO
It is generally accepted that there are 3 main buckets when it comes to SEO, this is important to understand, and it’s a question we get asked a lot. With all 3 strategies, the key is quality and user experience.
On Page SEO – Adding SEO related text/copy to your website, including home page and service pages outlining what you do. It is important that your copy still reads naturally and is not filled with keywords that are out of place or added too many times to look spammy.
Off Page SEO – This refers to backlinking, reviews and social media links back to your website, you can acquire backlinks through outreach, or creating quality content that other websites link to. Again, the focus should be on high quality links, years ago SEO agencies could (some still try) get away with low quality, high volume backlinks in order to fast track the authority. Think of Off Page SEO as like ‘word of mouth’ on the internet. Links back to your site can be similar to one person telling someone you do great work.
Technical SEO – This is the most complex of the 3, and focus is on ensuring all the activity above is being indexed and picked up by Google when they crawl your website and give it a ranking. It can also be looking at user experience and optimising your website to ensure the user has the best experience, which in itself is a metric Google favours.
How to ensure SEO success?
Will SEO work for your business is the question you want answered, so let’s get straight to it. SEO works for any business.
Similarly it’s like asking will the gym make me healthy? Yes! As long as you stay consistent and do all the right things.
SEO is the same, long term game, creating consistently good content, that is written for the person reading the content.
Understand quality over quantity, and it takes time.
Working with a reputable SEO agency that has all 3 covered would be my advice.
A lot of lazy digital agencies tend to dump a lot of backlinks on your site and hope that helps, they may update some home page copy initially, but month on month their service starts to drop off.
This also helps to explain why there is such a price discrepancy in quotes you might acquire from different agencies.
Summary
Google cares about quality,
It does not discriminate, so yes SEO works for any business, you just need to respect that it takes time to build authority, to climb to the top of the search engine. Build trust with Google through relevance in content, relevance in backlinks and being genuinely helpful to users who take the time to read your blogs and website pages.
This is a great question and tough to answer succinctly. It comes down to what are you getting. If it includes on page, off page and technical then you could expect to pay upwards of $2000 + GST in AUD. If it only includes one or two of those then obviously it is less. The great thing about SEO is that there is no need for additional ad spend, and you’re building great content, which is evergreen and can help your business for years to come.
Partnering with a reputable SEO specialist is key to understanding this, you’d ideally have someone who can educate you on the why, and bring you along the journey. If traffic is increasing then SEO is working, but also note, this does take some time to see tangible results. Once you have traffic increasing, keyword rankings improving, then you should see more enquiries, and you can also optimise your keyword listings for better click through rates
Depends on how much time you have to dedicate to improving your search results. SEO is usually the most efficient way to generate more website traffic and leads, so the strategy itself is worth doing. Find someone who will work within your budget, and give them the chance to succeed. I’d steer clear of locking in long term contracts, as this is where most businesses get into trouble, they lock in with an agency and then the agency disappoints and they cannot get out of this. Understanding SEO takes time, but if service is not up to scratch you should be able to move within a 30 day written notice period.
Of course, ChatGPT can be a great tool to assist writing content for your SEO, however, without a plan or strategy you’ll likely end up with a lot of blogs that aren’t optimised and might not make any difference to your business. Google regards quality content as far more important than quantity, so be the actual expert, write good quality blogs that show authority in that subject.
93% of all internet based search activity start with a search engine. Success rate of SEO can vary however depending on the strategy and execution of your plan. The success rate of incorporating SEO over many years is very high, the success rate of SEO when businesses undertake this for 6 months or less is very low. So, go in with a mindset of this takes time, effort and skill, and be in it for the long haul.
This article highlights how to do best SEO practices. Approaching SEO with a mindset of building EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) in all your content is a great mindset to start with. Aim to build authority and create content that truly serves the person who is looking for this information. This ensures that, that individual will have a great experience reading your blog, which means more time on your website, more time on your site is a great flag for Google that you have incorporated EEAT into your content, thus rewarding you with higher rankings. This doesn’t happen overnight, so build consistent content for the long term.