SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

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What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the least expensive strategies to get visitors and potential customers for any local business.

SEO is a strategy including on-page SEO & off-page SEO that must be fully implemented before your website can rank on the 1st page of Google SERP (search engines results pages) for your money keywords.

9-step SEO Strategies

The 9-step SEO strategies have been proven successful for small/medium businesses.

Step 1: Full SEO audit & analysis
Step 2: Keyword research
Step 3: Google Search Console setup
Step 4: Google Analytics setup
Step 5: Google My Business integration
Step 6: On-page SEO
Step 7: Off-page SEO
Step 8: Lead generation
Step 9: Reporting & review

Step 1: Full SEO audit & analysis

A complete audit of your website on SEO. This gives us an idea of what serious SEO work needs to be done in order to get your website on Google’s first page.

Step 2: Keyword research

Keywords must be carefully selected according on your money products or services. A combination based on search intent, search volume, and SEO ranking difficulty should be chosen to optimize the results of your SEO project.

Step 3: Google Search Console setup

Google Search Console is a “must-use” SEO tool that provides your website’s SEO & technical data based on Google’s official feedback.

Step 4: Google Analytics setup

Setup of Google Analytics as a web analytics tool on your website is highly recommended. Benefits when using Google Analytics include finding out:

Which websites and/or search engines have brought you visitors?
Where visitors have come from?
What pages your visitors have looked at on your website?
What actions visitors have done on your website?

Step 5: Google My Business integration

Set up Google My Business (GMB) so your customers can know the exact location of your business with a physical address i.e. office, store, warehouse, etc.

Let people see the user review results (including star ratings) of your business.

Step 6: On-page SEO

On-page SEO optimization is the base of SEO which includes all the work that is to implement on your web pages, and on the server side of your website.

Step 7: Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO optimization includes all the work without touching your website. Google & other search engines use signals from other websites across the Internet. The signals include backlinks, social media posts & shares, online reviews, etc contribute towards the ranking factors of your website.

Step 8: Lead generation

The strategy in lead generation consists of two phases.

Phase one is to build your business leads by getting the contact information (such as name, emails, phone number) of the visitors who are interested in your products or services.
Phase two is to set up an automatic follow-up plan.

Step 9: Reporting & review

Data including keyword ranking, SEO traffic, etc are analyzed and reviewed periodically. This will ensure the progress of the SEO project is heading to the right direction.

SEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why could I take the website’s ranking to 1st page of Google organic results?
How can SEO give your business more visibility on the Internet?
Why is SEO important for your business?
How can you generate business leads through SEO?
Can you do SEO for your website on your own?
Your website is getting visitors, but no sales. Why?
What is on-page SEO? And what elements you will have to focus on for on-page SEO?
What are some of the important SEO ranking factors?
What are the most common SEO problems that are found on many websites?
What are the core principles when starting with a SEO strategy?
What is local SEO?
What are the benefits of local SEO?
What are the search engines you should focus on when doing SEO in United Kingdom?
What are the important aspects in Google webmaster guidelines?
What are the important aspects in Bing webmaster guidelines?

Why could I take the website’s ranking to 1st page of Google organic results?

I have implemented the 9-step SEO strategies.

The strategies proved to have worked for the SEO projects that I have managed.

How can SEO give your business more visibility on the Internet?

When the pages of your website rank higher up in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP), your pages get more opportunities to be seen by people who search on Google.

When your website gets higher ranking for keywords with higher search volume on Google, your business gets even higher visibility on the web.

Why is SEO important for your business?

More than 80% of online sales started with a keyword search on search engines.

Your competitors could be doing great on search engines – More than 50% of their website visitors coming through search engines.

How can you generate business leads through SEO?

To get business leads, your target audience must visit your website, and leave their contact information with you.

Before people can visit your website, your website needs to get sufficient visibility on Google and/or other search engines such as Yahoo/Bing.

Even when you have successfully got your target audience to land on your website, you will need a feature to collect their contact information.

On your web pages, you will first include a web form for visitors to fill in their personal and contact information.

For example, a web form with the objective for visitors to subscribe newsletter from you can collect information such as name of the visitors, email address, phone number, etc.

Can you do SEO for your website on your own?

Technically, it is possible for you to implement SEO tactics on your website on your own.

You will need to have access to your website server and CMS (such as WordPress, if your website is developed with WordPress).

When you follow some SEO checklist or SEO best practices which you have downloaded from another SEO expert’s website, you may be able to implement some basic SEO work.

The basic SEO work may include updating your page title or meta description with keyword-rich text. Refer to mobile SEO best practices.

Some of your web page may even rank higher because of the changes you have made. But you will not have the experience to figure out why certain pages could not improve organic search rankings on Google/Yahoo.

Your website is getting visitors, but no sales. Why?

Many UK small business websites struggle to get enough traffic (i.e. visitors), because they have not properly implemented SEO for their websites.

When your website is getting traffic (i.e. visitors), you are already one step ahead of your competitors.

Now it is time to figure out what may have not been correctly implemented on your website or landing pages, which could have prevented your website to grow sales.

There are many reasons that your visitors don’t leave their contact information (e.g. name, email address, phone number) on your website.

The first reason is that your visitors may have come through keywords that do not lead them directly for sales. i.e. Your website may be ranking well for the wrong keywords. I have a thorough system to identify the right keywords for you which will fix this problem.

The second reason is that your website’s sales conversion funnel is too confusing for visitors to follow. I have fixed and re-built many website conversion funnels over the years.

The third reason is that some of your important web pages may take too long to load. Most people can’t wait and they would have left your website altogether. I will identify the pages that have been causing problems, and will help you improve the loading speed of the pages

I could always figure out the problems for not getting sales, because of the work I have implemented with data analytics. Right from the beginning of a SEO project, I would set up / configure all the necessary data analytics tools for your website.

What is on-page SEO? And what elements you will have to focus on for on-page SEO?

On-page SEO involves optimization of your website for both search engine algorithms and user experience.

To optimize on-page SEO in terms of search engine algorithms and user experience, you will have to focus on your website’s structure, your website’s coding, and the content quality of your website.

What are some of the important SEO ranking factors?

Some of the most important SEO ranking factors include mobile responsive, page loading speed, page title, content quality, backlinks, etc.

Mobile responsive: Google has been using mobile-first indexing for websites. This means you must ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices.

Page loading speed: You must ensure your website (including all your most important pages) can load quickly for your site visitors. The best practices nowadays is to try getting your pages to load within 3-4 seconds.

Page title: Every page on your website has a title tag where you can include text/keywords. You should always include the most appropriate keyword in your page title tag for each page. Make sure each title tag is unique for each page. When including your keyword, it is even better to place the keyword towards the start of the title tag.

Content quality: Do not focus to create content only for the search engines. You must focus on creating content that give answers to people’s problems which is one part of what high quality content is about. A piece of content covering a broad topic is not a problem, but the topic should have sufficient depth in it.

Backlinks: Backlinks refer to the hyperlinks that are created on other people’s websites, but the hyperlinks are actually pointing to your web pages. Backlinks/hyperlinks may be found on guest blog articles, social media profile pages, web directories, local services & classifieds sites, local news pages, your business partner websites, etc. Backlinks are votes or citations that Google has been using to determine the PageRank of a web page.

What are the most common SEO problems that are found on many websites?

The most common SEO problems include:

Not applying a high level SEO strategy
Having technical SEO errors on the website
Not having a good site structure
Not having a professionally designed website
Not having content that are useful to users and search engines
Having a website that are image intensive i.e. This causes slow loading of web pages
Not having a link building strategy

What are the core principles when starting with a SEO strategy?

The three core principles in a good SEO strategy involves:

Content Creation: Create quality content that is useful and/or can solve people’s issues.

Technical SEO: Get your website structure and coding correctly implemented.

Link Building: Get other people’s sites to link back to your website. The best and most relevant backlinks are from sites of the same industry or niche to your business.

What is local SEO?

When UK local SEO is applied, it means for the same keyword search, a UK locally based business should be prioritized to rank higher than a business that is not located in United Kingdom.

Local SEO is when people perform keyword searches in your local area / district / city / region / country, Google displays additional information about your business e.g. office location (with physical address & phone number) on Google Maps and/or user reviews of your business.

Your business should participate in local search by setting up your business information through Google My Business (GMB), which is a Google service.

What are the benefits of local SEO?

Through Local SEO, your business information (including street address, office telephone number, email address, etc) can show up in Google’s SERP and/or Google Maps. Additionally, user reviews can be displayed within Google Maps or organic search results (if you have received any reviews from users).

Having an office presence and positive user reviews (with 5-star rating) give your audience and/or potential customers the trust they need when deciding to buy from your business.

What are the search engines you should focus on when doing SEO in United Kingdom?

Google, as always, is the number one most used search engine in UK.

What are the important aspects in Google webmaster guidelines?

Create web pages (with content) that are primarily for users, but not only for search engines.
You must manage user expectation. Do not trick the users to come onto your website, and then immediately have them found out the content on your web page is not what they have expected.
Stop applying tricks that are only intended for cheating your web pages into higher Google organic search rankings.
Provide content that is unique, valuable, and engaging.
Do not use automatically generated content.
Do not become a copycat. Avoid creating a lot of web pages that have extremely little original content.
Avoid participating in link farms or link schemes.
Do not use hidden text or hidden links.
Avoid using doorway pages or cloaking.

What are the important aspects in Bing webmaster guidelines?

Bing is the search engine that powers the search results of Yahoo. All the results you see on Yahoo are provided by Bing.
With Yahoo/Bing, you should keep your page titles clear and relevant.
Use hyperlinks on your web pages as normal hyperlinks. i.e. Avoid creating links with JavaScript, Flash, or Silverlight.
Create page URLs that are short, descriptive, and keyword rich. Avoid using non-letter character in your URLs.
Avoid cloaking, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content.