Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a marketing technique that that aims to improve your website’s performance in organic search rankings. Better SEO means your website appears higher up the list of results when someone searches for something relevant to your local business, making them more likely to visit your website and become a customer.
What are organic search rankings?
The idea is simple. When someone searches for something like “Coffee Shop in Manchester”, Google has to choose the order in which it will display the results.
Search engines use super complex (and secret) sets of rules to decide the order in which search results are displayed. They measure loads of things about websites, from how often they are updated to how many other websites link to it.vWhen SEO is done properly, all of the things that search engines look for are improved. This will mean that search engines show your website higher up in the list of results it gives.
It’s important to remember that this is different from having an advert at the top of the page, you can’t directly pay to move up organic rankings. And if you try to cheat, search engines can punish your website by removing it from results.
Why do rankings matter?
When people use search engines, they expect to find what they’re looking for quickly.
While about 30% of people click on the top results, the second result is only visited by about 16% of people and then the third position by about 10%. After this there’s a steep drop off, with the website in position 10 at the bottom of page one typically getting around 1% of clicks.
Unfortunately this means that progressing from position 50 to position 30 in the rankings for your preferred search term may not have have a huge impact on the amount of business your website generates. However, once you get your website into the top half of page one, there will be an exponential increase in the interest in your site. Even moving up from position 10, at the bottom of page 1, to position 5 would probably double or triple the number of visits to your website from organic searches. The key is to keep pushing until you get to this pivotal point.
Continue reading: What will better SEO mean for my local business?
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