Many find the concept of SEO quite overwhelming, which is understandable as more often than not it hasn’t been explained correctly. It’s sometimes described with an excessive amount of buzzwords, jargon and to put it bluntly – waffle, which is a tactical strategy employed by some agencies to completely baffle their clients. SEO is by no means straightforward, but a true expert can explain what it involves clearly and concisely to any audience. 

So who better to explain it than the foremost expert SEO agency in Hampshire? Geek Unique. We’ve split the SEO process into three phases – The Simple Formula For Success With SEO. But before we start, it’s important that we explain what SEO is and its purpose. 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. A search engine scours the internet to provide answers to your questions, for instance Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. When you ask a search engine a question like “Local SEO services near me” – the search engine will provide you with a list of results based on the relevancy to your question, so if you’re in Southampton it will show you SEO agencies in Southampton. However, the list is in ranked order, which means the most relevant website will be at the top – the prime position. 

Now if you are an SEO agency in Southampton like us, you want to be at the top for that particular search term – so you optimize your website in order to achieve that ranking. In a nutshell, SEO is a method of improving the quantity and quality of website traffic (visitors) to your website by enhancing where you appear on search engines. 

It’s a technical process but as SEO gurus we’re here to explain how it can be achieved. There’s a lot more to it than cramming lots of keywords into a page, which is an outdated method that now results in your website ranking lower.

To fully optimize your website to its fullest potential there are three crucial phases.

Phase 1 – Keyword Research

In order to attract a bigger audience to your business website, you need to have a good understanding of who your target audience is. Consider their needs, wants and their desired outcome from visiting your website – are they looking to buy a product? Enquire about a service? Or do they simply need information. 

Once you’ve established who your audience is, the next step is keyword research. What keywords are relevant to your business? Perhaps you sell vintage clothes – what are your top selling items? For instance ‘vintage jeans’ could be a keyword that has lots of potential for your business. Researching your keywords thoroughly is a vital component in any SEO campaign. You could be selling a highly sought after product or service, but your website isn’t optimised for those specific keywords so you aren’t being recognised for it, and subsequently you’re missing out on great opportunities. We use the very best software to analyse our clients keywords, the search volumes and their competition. Keyword research is crucial.

Phase 2 – Website Optimisation

Once your keywords have been established, the next step is to optimize your website to include them. Keywords can be included in product pages, booking forms and other important landing pages. 

Your keywords should be included in your meta tags and meta description too. Meta tags are small snippets of text that explain a page’s content – they don’t appear on the page and are kept within the page’s source code. Meta tags are read by search engines so it’s important that they include the keywords you want to rank for. Now, the meta description is the blurb visible underneath your website pages on the search engine results page – it provides a brief summary of the page content so users can assess if the page is relevant to them. 

Once these elements are updated we then move on to internal links, this involves linking pages to each other with descriptive anchor text. An example would be linking your product page to a testimonials page to show customer feedback. By linking these pages together you are showing the search engines which pages are important. Search engines analyse your website through bots, these bots crawl your website and index the content. The more pages you link, the more pages the bots can crawl – this information is then fed back to search engines. If the search engine has a comprehensive understanding of your website, it’s more likely that you will be ranking for relevant keywords. Deep breath, only one more step to go. 

Phase 3 – Creating Copy and Building Backlinks

You can boost your relevancy for specific keywords and search terms by creating engaging and helpful copy for your audience. Blog posts aren’t just for personal websites, they can be used to boost business websites and provide interesting insights into specific topics that you specialise in. 

Careful keyword distribution is key, the last thing you want to do is ram a blog full of keywords – it looks spammy and will be treated as such by the search engine demigods. Engaging content will set you apart from your competitors and keep your audience coming back for more, furthermore they may share it which is hugely beneficial when it comes to increasing your rankings. Now if you like the sound of captivating content but simply don’t have the time to create it, we can help you with our specialist copywriting services. 

Once you have a couple of riveting reads on your website, you’ll need backlinks to build some traction. Backlinks are when one website links to another, the more backlinks you have the higher your website’s authority is ranked on that topic. There are several different methods of building backlinks, you can use online directories, guest blogs, press releases or forums – the options are endless. But be careful, bad quality backlinks will lower your website ranking – bad quality links are links that come from websites that are deemed as untrustworthy. Backlinks can be formed by creating blogs with really interesting content, people will share and link to your content from their own websites, which ultimately will increase traffic to your website! 

Simply follow these three steps and you will have the perfect recipe for SEO success. 

Now if this all sounds like far too much work, why not leave it to the leading SEO agency in Hampshire. Our local SEO services take websites from zero to hero in a matter of months. The Geek Unique SEO process covers every aspect of website optimization, freeing up your time to concentrate on other aspects of the business whilst being kept in the loop with how your website is performing.