With the competition for online business increasing by the day, a Google search for your products or services becomes more competitive. Traffic from Google and other search engines is often the main source of traffic for a lot of businesses. Without traffic from search engines, we’re often left with no other alternative than to pay for traffic through platforms like Google Ads and social media sites. This can become expensive and isn’t always an option for smaller businesses on a tight budget.
Therefore, generating traffic organically through Google becomes the more attractive, long term option as you’re not paying for the traffic. However, in order to generate a decent volume of traffic from Google searches, you need to be on the first page of results and preferably at the top of the first page.
Due to the way Google displays some search results, organic listings often sit ‘below the fold’, meaning users have to scroll down to see them. The top spots (up to 4) are taken up with adverts, pushing organic listings down to position 5 and below. If your search terms have a local focus, you may also find map listings taking up a good portion of the page below the paid ads, pushing the organic listings even further down the page. This just makes the number one organic spot more valuable as it becomes less likely users will scroll to the bottom of the page.
So, how do we make sure our website comes up naturally in Google search results? SEO!
We need to optimise certain elements of our website in order to make it more relevant, more authoritative and generally better optimised than our competitors. There are hundreds of ways to do this (a topic for another blog post), but one thing that’s often overlooked is the timing of this optimisation.
It’s often something that’s a reaction to poor performance. For example, your website has been live for several months or years and you become aware that your competitors are coming up higher in search results than you. It’s at this point that people will turn to an SEO professional to improve their visibility and generate more traffic to their website.
Whilst this isn’t a terrible approach, it’s far from ideal. SEO as an afterthought can make it more of a challenge and it may take longer to get the results you want. Google has already indexed your website, so you need to wait for Google to update its index with your newly optimised website. The speed at which Google will do this will vary from site to site.
A better approach is a proactive approach. Before your website’s built; when you’re in the planning stages, is the best time to employ an SEO professional and optimise your website. They will work with you to identify your target keywords, provide recommendations for your code, structure, navigation and content.
The key benefits of doing your SEO before your site launches are threefold:
- Planning your website content and structure becomes easier. Your web developers will have all the URLs, page titles and meta descriptions that they just need to copy and paste across as part of the build. This should save you paying someone else to replace these a few months down the line.
- Your keyword research and content has already been done. Again, your developers will thank you for providing them with your content before the site is built.
- Your site is indexed in its optimised state. This doesn’t mean to say that your SEO is done forever as it’s still an ongoing process to tweak and refine, but it does mean that your site will stand a better chance of ranking well from day 1, not after several months or years when you get round to optimising it.
If you’re investing in a new website, it makes sense to invest in SEO and factor this into your budget. Building a website without SEO means you’ll either have to fork out for additional SEO fees in the future or get used to seeing your competitors rank above you in the search results. (And there’s nothing more frustrating than that!).
Very few web developers are SEOs as well, and although many websites are sold as “search engine friendly” or optimised “out of the box”, in our experience, it’s very rarely the case. Optimising a website takes time and specialist expertise, so seek out the advice of someone in the know to optimise your website!
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