The Complexities Of SEO Outsourcing And In-House Tasks

Search Engine Optimisation might just be the most complex digital marketing strategy out there. It requires months, and even years of work. But when you do it right, the results have the potential to accelerate the attention your website receives, lifting quality traffic and conversions.

To get there, you usually have to sift through a morass of complexities. When one of the most trusted SEO resources compiles a glossary of “200 of the most common SEO terms“, you might as well be looking at a foreign language. The good news: it doesn’t have to be that way.

SEO success doesn’t happen overnight. Yes, it is complex. But in most cases, you’re not on your own. In fact, splitting up the work between your own website maintenance and an expert partner might just be your best bet. 

Just The Basics: What Is SEO?

Let’s begin with a basic definition: search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of optimising your website and content specifically to improve your rankings in relevant search results.

Considering the fact that Google is the most popular website in the world and 3 of the 10 most popular global websites are search engines, achieving a good rankings through SEO can multiply your site visitors. You just have to know how.

Google’s aim is to provide its users with search results which are as relevant as possible to their search. On top of this, increasingly over the past few years, those results need to also provide those who click through, with a good user experience. So when a person enters a search term or phrase into the Google search bar, the resulting SERP will rank the pages that Google’s incredibly complex algorithm deems the most relevant and useful in relation to that person’s search.

As a business, having your site rank well when a potential customer Googles a relevant search term, is incredibly important in bringing traffic to your website. If you’re doing things right, it should be relevant traffic that has a strong potential to convert.

So essentially, SEO is making sure your website provides quality information which answers the needs of your target audience, and that information should be easy to access and provide a positive user experience.

Understanding The Nuances Of On-Site And Off-Site SEO

Countless SEO strategies can help you to improve your website’s chances of appearing in relevant search results. We’ll focus on some of the most popular and effective ones below. For now, let’s make a distinction between the two basic types of search optimisation:

• On-Site SEO is the process of optimising your own website for better search rankings. This might include anything from writing content focused on specific keywords to optimising your source code in order to speed up page load times.
• Off-site SEO includes the strategies taken outside your own website to improve the site’s search rankings. You’ll hear terms like link building and guest blogging.

4 SEO Best Practices For Your Business To Follow

We’ll get into some specific best-practice strategies below. Regardless of which you prioritise, though, there are a few basic best practices that you’ll need to follow regardless:

1. Content comes first. No matter how advanced the strategies get. No SEO venture can be successful without great, readable, engaging content tailored to your audience needs.
2. Long-tail keywords rule. For most businesses below the Fortune 500, the keywords to focus on are not single, industry-spanning words like MBA or consulting. Instead, it’s long-tail keywords that are entire phrases or questions, which are more specific to your audience and less competitive.
3. White-Hat SEO is vital. Search engines have gone through lengths to outlaw any questionable practices. Forget about shortcuts to any of the below strategies, like buying links or stuffing keywords. They’re more likely to push you down the rankings than up.
4. Build for the long run. We already mentioned above how long it takes to see results. If you’re looking for quick wins, search engine ads will be more effective than a long-term SEO strategy.

Simple SEO Tasks You Can Achieve In-House

So much for the basics. Let’s get specific. SEO is so complex, you will either need a team dedicated to it or an external partner helping you with some of the more advanced techniques. That said, you can take a few simple steps that set a great baseline for initial search optimisation:

• Build a web of internal links. Internal links are links that go to another page on your own website. This helps users navigate to other relevant sections, and tells Google that those pages you’re linking to matter. The more, the better — as long as it stays relevant.
• Be strategic about your title tags. It’s the headline of your business. Optimise it for the keyword(s) you’re looking to rank for, and keep it to one title tag per page. Every bit of content on that page should relate back to the title.
• Set up your pages for engagement. Users (and search engines) love clear, easily skimmable content that tells them what they’re looking for clearly and easily. Multiple subheaders, bullet lists, and visuals that all build on each other can accomplish that, as can a clear call to action or next step at the end of each page.
• Write a compelling meta description. These descriptions (up to 150 characters) show up under your page title on search engine results. They should include a compelling reason for visitors to visit that page.
• Be careful with your images. Size them to fit the exact size, avoiding large files that slow down load times. Name them and include an ALT tag that describes what the image is about, for both accessibility and search engine benefit.
• Write some great content. It sounds basic, but is absolutely crucial. Make sure each paragraph, sentence, or word you write is relevant to your audience and actually adds to the page you’re writing on.

Advanced SEO Tasks that Need a Specialist

The below can put you a step ahead of businesses that don’t prioritise SEO. If you truly want to compete for that first page of Google results, though, you need to get advanced. The below strategies usually require the expertise of a dedicated expert.

• Conduct an SEO audit. A comprehensive audit will be painful. It’ll tell you everything that’s wrong with your page, from broken links to slow load times. That, though, forms the basis of where you can improve.
• Engage in strategic link building.  Getting other sites to link to yours is one of the most difficult tasks in SEO. Specialists will know what tactics to use, from guest blogging to strategic social media links.
• Maintain and nurture your backlinks.
• Optimise your page load speed. It will likely include some streamlined code, but go far beyond that. Remember: your audience expects your page to load in five seconds or less.
• Refine your site’s navigation and URL structure. It should be simple and streamlined, but also take your keyword strategy into account. That’s a task to be taken on during, not after your website build.
• Eliminate your redirects and 404 errors. Too many of either tells Google that your page is low-quality. You’ll need to find them and continually make sure that no outdated, broken, or redirected links get into your users’ path.

Placing SEO at the Centre of Your Website Project

Of course, the above are just a few of the countless tasks that lie ahead of you to truly achieve search engine optimisation success. To get there, SEO should be the centre of your entire website design project.

Building your site with SEO in mind helps you prioritise all the above and more. We’re the perfect partner to help you get there.

At Impact Media, we work with specialist partners to help create and implement the strategies that make sense for your business. That usually happens before the development begins, but can also take place later in the process. These specialist make the recommendation, and we make sure that as we build your site, we prioritise them.

As a result, you get a website designed to move you towards premier placement on Google search results. With consistent maintenance and optimisation, you’ll build the backbone of your website towards a constant stream of visitors and potential customers.