Many businesses out there with an online presence find SEO and all its intricacies very confusing and either outsource it completely, or ignore it. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can really ignore, not if you want to succeed in the digital world. Here are some answers to commonly asked questions, which might help to get your head around the importance of optimizing your website and content to get maximum returns.
- Should I outsource SEO or do it myself?
It really depends on the size of your business and how much time you have available. Larger businesses could potentially afford to hire someone to take care of the SEO as part of a bigger portfolio, but smaller businesses may want to outsource it to a trustworthy digital marketing company who has more experience. If the business is a start-up and the owner has the time to learn about the basics of SEO and do it in-house, the experience and understanding of SEO practices will help with monitoring later on if it ever gets outsourced.
- Why is blogging such a big deal for SEO?
Google loves fresh content and websites that continually post, so blogging is one of the easiest ways to achieve this. In addition, your blogs posts will hopefully inspire other people and encourage them to share your blogs, which helps to stretch its reach. Blogging regularly helps to establish you as an expert in your field, increase exposure and establish trust with your customers. But quality far outweighs quantity, so concentrating on blogs that provide relevant, interesting and engaging content is more likely to be read, shared and improve your reputation.
- What’s the most important thing I could do right now to improve my SEO?
Do some research into what keywords your customers and potential customers are using in their searches. Also, ensure that your website has no technical issues. Fantastic content is wasted if there is a miscoded file that stops Google from crawling your site. Go into your Google Webmaster Tools account to see what HTML improvements they recommend for your site. Make sure you have an XML sitemap submitted too.
- How much time should I be spending on SEO?
This depends on your type of business – a product based website with many products would need more time than a service based business. You should dedicate a couple of hours to SEO per week, but only once you have a clear understanding of who your audience is and how you plan to target them. For small businesses focusing on blogs, an hour a week should be sufficient, but this includes commenting on other platforms, guest posting and doing interviews or podcasts.
- Just how important are keywords?
Google’s search algorithm will constantly update and change, but keywords will always remain a very important part of SEO. The numbers of keywords and how they are used may change from time to time, but at the core, they are what SEO is all about. Keywords form the basis of every search, so understanding what your audience is searching for can help you optimize your website and content, so they can find you more easily.
For more on SEO, getting an SEO audit or if you’re interested in chatting to us about the many aspects of search engine optimization, contact us.