What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an oft-used and much-misunderstood term. Most people equate SEO with high rankings in Google search results.

This is because Google has a dominant position in most countries, particularly English speaking ones, with over a 90% market share worldwide. In China, Baidu is the dominant search engine (no prizes for guessing why) and in Russia, Yandex is a bigger player than Google. In addition, depending on your industry, other vertical search engines, such as Amazon, could be as or more important for your business than Google.

Nonetheless, in general, when we are discussing SEO, we are predominantly concerned with rankings and traffic from Google.

Why does it matter?

The reason why high rankings are important should be pretty evident – most people do not look past page 1 of Google’s results. Many studies have been done on this and they typically show the same trend – about 70% of all clicks in Google’s results happen on page 1, with a skew towards the top.

Therefore, if you are on page 2, 3 and beyond, you’re not getting any significant amount of traffic from Google’s free or organic results.

But I can find my site on Google!

Two things are worth noting here.

Number 1 is the distinction between branded and generic traffic. Say you have a business, let’s call it Bob’s Café and you operate in London. Inventive, I know. You have the website bobscafe.com and you think “hey, when I put Bobs Bob’s Café into Google, my site comes up, so my SEO is good!”. Wrong. The term “bob’s cafe” is a branded term. Where do you appear when you put in “cafés in london” or “coffee shops in london?”. Unless you’re extremely lucky or have put in a lot of effort to your SEO, chances are you will not appear anywhere near where any potential visitors can see you.

This is how SEO often works. A potential visitors does their initial awareness searches using generic terms (e.g. “coffee shops in london”), re-visits a few websites during consideration and finally visits their preference either in person or online using a branded search term to make a transaction.

Number 2 is that Google offers both free (organic) listings and paid listings. The paid listings are paid per click, hence the abbreviation PPC. Google makes most of its money from advertising, hence these appear above the free listings in search results. The way PPC works is a discussion for another article, but for now, know that PPC results appear above free results for most commercial queries.

This does not mean that you should not bother with SEO and merely pay for traffic from PPC! What this does mean is that you should invest in both. Ideally you want to take up as much of the real estate of page 1 as you can. Typically what I recommend is starting off with PPC to quickly get good Analytics data on how people interact with your site and take that insight to make improvements to your site’s UX while also working on SEO. Eventually, you could switch off your PPC, but the likelihood is that, for commercial queries, you should do both.

So how can I get Page 1 rankings?

Achieving the goal of page 1 rankings requires having an easily used website with keyword targeted copy (also known as on-site or on-page SEO) with an appropriate amount of high quality links pointing towards it (also known as off-site SEO). In addition, sites need to be easily indexed by Google’s servers (known as technical SEO), but thanks to the likes of WordPress and Squarespace, you can build a new website quite easily with this in mind.

Oh, and of course, your website needs to actually be good. Like, really good. Google has explicitly stated may times that it wants websites to have Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EAT for short). Thinking you can just add keywords to a bad website and make it into an SEO success is not realistic.

In order to achieve the goal of high search engine rankings quickly, website owners often take on external help in the form of freelancers or agencies, some of which are good and some of which employ unsustainable strategies, also referred to as black hat, to artificially boost search rankings.

What generally happens in the latter scenario is a temporary boost in search rankings until Google realises the website owners are trying to game the system, which is against their Webmaster Guidelines. What usually follows is that Google pushes their search rankings down far beyond where most people look (e.g. page 5-6 and onwards of search results) or remove them from their results completely.

Due to my own dissatisfaction with these charlatans, I have decided to provide free information on how to do SEO correctly and sustainably, primarily for small business owners, who tend to be at a disadvantage when launching a new website.