How to improve your SEO today

Posted on: 28 May 2015

Marcus Miller shares some quick tips about where to start with SEO and how you can make improvements today.

Transcript

Often the hardest part is to understand how to get started and what the right path to take is. The approach is different for every kind of company but for a small local business really some simple things you can do are register with the Google My Business platform. Make sure that Google knows about your business, make sure it’s categorised correctly. Make sure listings on third party sites like Yell and Yelp are all correct because Google uses all of this information to understand your business.

Providing authoritative content to people at the beginning of their journeys is one of the better things people can do to get in front of people earlier on in that process. And then, potentially, converting them to social media channels to stay in front of them. Keying into other paid search services like banner adverts and offers relating to what you’ve been reading about.

"It really comes down to getting an understanding of your potential customer and how they use the web."

Paid search has become more and more prominent over the past 10 years, particularly now. Any commercial search terms will always have a big paid search component. You can’t come up with a specific price. To be at the top of the page all the time, it’s an auction. It just depends on what the other people are paying. But you should over time be able to say “well if we spend £100 in search and we generate two orders or two leads and come up with an acquisition cost so that you can work out whether it makes sense for your business.

This is where we go back to the content marketing and everything else. Where are people in their life cycle of searching for something? Are they searching for reviews of that mountain bike or that television? Where paid search then isn’t quite so dominant and we see more traditional organic results.

We really have to think in traditional marketing terms but then sprinkle some SEO smarts on top of that. So if we do this, and it will have a benefit but also an SEO benefit as well, that’s great.