SEO for beginners

It doesn’t matter how good your business’ website is, without visitors, it’s never going to achieve its’ full potential for your business.  Chances are, if your website has been online for a while, when you type in the name of your company it’ll pop up in the search results somewhere near the top.  The problem is, the only visitors you’ll get are those who already know you exist – what you really need are new customers who don’t know you exist.  This is where SEO becomes at least as important as the website itself.

What you need are visitors looking for the thing you offer, whether it’s a service or a product.  People use search engines to find things that they want - if they’re looking for an accountant in Morpeth, they’ll type ‘accountant in Morpeth’ into a search engine.  If you’re an accountant in Morpeth, that’s what you need your website to be listed under.  The good news is, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

The main thing you need to do to begin with is ‘on-page’ optimisation - telling the search engines what your website is about.  Sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many don’t - if the heading of your front page is something like ‘Welcome to our website’, you’re not really telling them much. So how do the search engines know what your site is about?  It’s all about keywords or phrases that describe what your business does - you need to get them (like ‘Accountant in Morpeth’) in the page title, the H1 tag and scattered, sparingly, throughout your main text – the search engines ‘read’ the page and know what your site is all about.  On a basic level, that’s all you need to do for ‘on-page’ optimisation, if you’re only up against a few other websites – things get way more complicated when you start getting into ‘competitive’ keywords and companies do spend literally hundreds of thousands of pounds to get to the top of the results.

If you’re just starting out, read as much as you can on SEO, choose your keywords, make some changes to your site and above all, be patient!