What is SEO and why is it important?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an incredibly broad topic, and there are so many different aspects to it. Generally speaking, SEO is about optimising your website to ensure it has the best chance of being found and presented to users when they search for a particular phrase. Broadly speaking, there are several major categories which fall under the banner of SEO, and they are commonly accepted as "technical SEO", "Onsite SEO" and Offsite SEO"

Technical SEO is about providing a strong foundation for your website, and tuning the underlying technical components to make sure your website performs as best it can. This includes things like site loading speed and ensuring your site is secure. It also means ensuring your site is configured in a way that allows Google and other search engines to be able to 'crawl your site' and identify the pages you are aiming to serve to your visitors.

Onsite SEO, as the name suggests is about making changes to the way your site is presented to your users, and is consistent with what search engines expect. The majority of the time, onsite SEO relates to the content (written words, graphics, videos, etc) that you display on your site. Most importantly, it's about ensuring that your content is structured in a way that is both easily readable by humans, and by search engines.

Major factors for onsite SEO are things like headings, descriptions and links to other pages on your site. When you embark on a journey to improve your search engine visibility, and start adjusting your "SEO", you need to make sure that you are aware of what your target audience is looking for. That way, you can refine or create new content which is specifically targeted at what people are searching for. This is called 'Keyword Research'. A common misunderstanding among those who are new to SEO is that optimising your site is about encouraging search engines to find your existing site and make it appear at the top of the list. In fact, good SEO starts by understanding what your audience is already searching for, and your goal is to create content in line with that demand.

Offsite SEO is about maximising your reach and encouraging others to rely on your website as the source of knowledge and trust. In fact, Google even has an algorithm called E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. What that means is that Google relies on external factors to determine if a website is worthy of being presented to a user, and if it's regarded as providing the best overall experience to serve what that person was searching for. Often when talking about 'offsite SEO', we refer to building links back to your site (known as backlinks) which help demonstrate to search engines that your website is trusted among your industry peers and is a reliable source of information, has a good reputation and can serve the user's intention.

What should you do with your SEO audit results?

As we mentioned earlier, your free SEO audit report contains specific actions which you can take to fix some things on your website. You should aim to focus on those as a priority because they will help give you a strong foundation to build upon. Ground Zero Digital strongly believes that implementing a strong SEO strategy is about presenting great content on your site, and focusing on ensuring that your products and services are clearly explained. If you want to chat to our team about your results, book a call and we can go through the report with you, and help recommend the best action you can take to start maximising your impact online.