ESO? SOE? EOS?…..It’s SEO silly, and it stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

However, it’s certainly a bit of a minefield if you’re new to the world of digital marketing.

To help you get your head around it we have consolidated the mysterious, dark arts of SEO into one place so you can evaluate whether it’s something that your business could benefit from.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is generally seen as a fundamental aspect of digital marketing, offering some of the highest and most consistent returns over time. SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines.

For example, if you live in Glasgow and need a self-storage facility you would probably go onto Google and type  “Self-Storage in Glasgow” or “Storage Facilities in Glasgow” or something similar. Google Search Results will probably return a couple of Google Ads for storage companies that are employing a PPC campaign, but underneath the paid results are the organic results of companies that Google believe most suit your needs based on your search terms; making the aim of the game to be one of the first organic results that comes up for search terms relating to your business. This is the essence of SEO.

Ok so if you’re still following and thinking that this is something that your business definitely needs to start doing, then there are two aspects to getting really good SEO results for your website. The first is backlinks and the second is on-page content.

We’ll look at these individually:

Backlinks: these are external to your website. They show the transition from one site to another or from one page to another. They help to index your website’s pages correctly and are an essential part of SEO process.

On-page content: The content of a page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. If your customers are searching for “Self-storage in Glasgow” then we need to give them content that has those words/phrases in it. We can use the website itself and the news/blog section to help.

SEO focus’ on ranking as highly as possible for the core keywords people are using to search for your business on Google. Generally, when you do the work to get to these better positions on Google you stay there for an extended period of time, unless of course competition is very high. Once you achieve these better search results, they continue to send you traffic over time and that allows the opportunity to concentrate on ranking for other keywords. The specific enquiries that are generated through a proper SEO strategy will show in Google Analytics Goal Completions and will be named “Organic”- this means that you can accurately calculate your ROI.

There is one important caveat to employing an SEO strategy however and it’s important that you are aware of it. SEO is a marathon not a sprint and requires consistent and substantial monthly investment, which is why we advise our clients to budget SEO for a minimum of 6 months but ideally longer.

And remember that you won’t see results immediately, SEO isn’t just a “quick fix” and it takes time for your site to build up authority and out perform your competitors. If you are looking for an immediate burst of enquires then this probably isn’t for you,  and you’d be better off using something like Google Ads or Paid Social.