First of all - what is SEO? Well, there's SEO, and there's SEM, and it's important to understand the difference.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines want to provide the best results for user queries. SEO is about making your website easy for search engines to find, understand and index, so you can be included in their best results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is Search Engine Marketing. This is about purchasing ad space so your website will appear in relevant search results.

   The goal should be to get SEO right, then boost SEO with effective, planned and cost-effective SEM as required.

Today, it's pretty easy to build a quick, cheap website using one of the many website builders out there. The downside to a cheap website is, it often isn't planned with SEO in mind, and this can end up costing your business a lot of money in the long run.

Here's an analogy - "It's like hanging the Mona Lisa in a locked room". Your website may LOOK magnificent, but it also needs to WORK for you - people need to be able to find it. So it's important to make sure the SEO is set up properly right from the beginning.

What can you do to set up SEO? For starters, each page should be appropriately tagged for search engine indexing. Then, ensure URLs are Search Engine Friendly (SEF), install an SSL certificate, ensure the site is mobile-optimised, and it has a Site Map. Once you add a Google Business Profile listing and a few other bits and pieces, you're well on the way to good SEO.

   If your website is well designed, you're ALREADY doing SEO!

Both SEO and SEM are important components of your marketing strategy.

Once your website's SEO is performing - your site has been successfully indexed and can be found on Google/Bing - then it's a good time to start discussing SEM. Click here for more information, or contact us to discuss your requirements.

Why do you need SEO? Check out our blog for more information about SEO.