What is SEO, and How Can It Help My Perth-Based Business?

Local businesses in Perth benefit a lot from the dynamic, vibrant, and diverse feel of the city. However, in such environments, competition is stiff but healthy. As such, if you own a local café or run a multinational organisation in the city, you need to be creative and strategic to win the local market.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an effective way to establish authority, dominance, and value in Perth. It allows you to position your business on top of major search engines like Google. 

Most of your potential customers use the internet to find solutions similar to what you are offering. SEO helps them find your business easily by increasing your online visibility. Let’s start by learning more about SEO and what it can do for you.

What is SEO?

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that aims to improve your website’s visibility across search engines. 

Search engines use a lot of factors to rank web content. One of these factors is keywords, which most SEO specialists use to improve the ranking. However, there is more to ranking than keywords. We will learn more about this when discussing the different types of SEO.

The Objective of SEO

The primary goal of SEO is to increase the website’s ranking on search engines like Google. To do this, you will need to use specific strategies like keyword optimisation to increase the relevance of your web content. 

When your website ranks high, other things follow almost automatically. For instance, a website with a high ranking will have high traffic. Now, taking advantage of this traffic, you can use other marketing tactics to improve conversions.

SEO can increase the trust and credibility of your business. If your website consistently ranks high for specific keywords, it will signal to potential customers that you have authority in a certain niche. Therefore, these prospects are more likely to trust your products or services. 

How SEO Works

Search engines like Google crawl your website to look for markers or signals that help them rank it accordingly. 

Ranking happens in three steps;

• Crawling: This is the first step that search engines take when you publish content on or off the site. It is an automated step.
• Indexing: In this step, search engines analyse the content and store it in a database based on its content and value. 
• Ranking: When a user performs a query, the search engine analyses the stored content and determines which of them are most relevant to the query. 

SEO helps your Perth business get seen by the right and intended audience. In other words, it drives qualified traffic to your website. 

Types of SEO

There are four main aspects that contribute to a website’s ranking. These aspects give us four types of SEO: on-page, off-page, local SEO, and technical. Let’s discuss them.

On-page SEO

This refers to all the activities that contribute to optimising the website content for ranking on search engines. It entails everything from optimising header tags, title tags, images, and content. On-page SEO also entails keyword integration to ensure that the content is optimised for search queries.

Off-page SEO

Here, you focus on optimising all other content that’s not on the website, but it’s linked to it or your business. Think of it as a way to build your site’s visibility indirectly. Tactics used here include

• Backlink building: This involves getting other businesses to link to your business. 
• Social media mentions: Getting tagged by certain social media accounts can improve your SEO.
• Building social media presence: Creating and managing social media accounts on various platforms can improve your search engine rankings.

Local SEO

With local SEO, you are focusing on all activities that will increase your visibility in the local market. At first, to get localised content, you had to include terms like “near me” in the search query. Now, the local search algorithm is much more evolved, and it knows how to understand context.

Therefore, if you search for a specific service or product and the search engine has access to your location, it will show the local results. Therefore, you need to ensure that if you run a local business, you include triggers to signal to search engines.

Technical SEO

Before your content appears on search results, it has to be crawled, indexed, and stored in the correct database. Technical SEO focuses on ensuring this happens. For your website to be indexed, its content has to follow the E-E-A-T guidelines and have the correct XML sitemap, among others.

How to Know if You Need SEO for Your Business

SEO is an important strategy for business. However, not every business should focus on it as a primary undertaking. So, how do you know if and when you need it? You perform an SEO audit.

Essentially, an SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of the current optimisation status of your website. It identifies the strengths and areas of weaknesses that you can focus on to improve its ranking.

This audit should be carried out when;

• There’s a drop in website traffic.
• There’s low conversion.
• Google rankings have dropped.

The best way to approach an SEO audit is to have a professional SEO expert to do it for you. However, if you have the tools and the expertise, you can do it yourself. Just make sure you follow the recommended checklist.

The SEO audit will be able to gather numbers about bounce rates, keyword optimisation, traffic sources, and so on. This is valuable information because it helps you discover the specific areas to optimise for better ranking.

Factors that Influence SEO

Stuffing your website with keywords and expecting it to rank might actually lead to penalties by search algorithms. For instance, if you stuff keywords on your website for ranking, Google will penalise you for spam.

There are over 200 Google ranking factors. We will focus on some of the primary factors.

Quality of the Content

Content plays a key role in the ranking of your website. Remember, your website is supposed to rank based on search queries. 

The E-E-A-T framework dictates that each content you publish must communicate experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Therefore, if you want search algorithms to categorise your content as high quality, you need to incorporate these elements into your content. 

Therefore, if you want to rank for specific products or services in Perth, ensure that you are publishing high-quality content.

Keyword Usage

You might underuse or overuse keywords in your content, and all that will have an effect on your website’s ranking. Keywords signal to the search engine indexer what the main topic of your content is. Then, the algorithm uses this topic to rank your content based on search intent and its relevance.

If you want keyword usage to contribute to your site’s ranking, you need to match the keyword used with the searcher’s intent. For instance, if you have an informational keyword, you need to ensure the content informs the searcher. The same applies to transactional and commercial search intents.

Site’s User Experience

Factors like high bounce rates indicate to Google that your website has a poor user experience. This can happen if your website is poorly designed, has low-quality content, or both. 

If you want your website to rank higher, you need to ensure that the content is high-quality, your site is optimised for mobile, and it’s aesthetically pleasing. This increases the chances of potential customers sticking around much longer. The longer the visitors stay, the better your chances of ranking higher.

Backlinks

If another website links to yours, Google sees this as a vote of confidence. You increase your chances of getting backlinks by positioning yourself as a top resource for other websites. 

However, not all backlinks count. If you don’t get the majority of backlinks from high-authority sites, you risk losing credibility to search engines. The same applies to getting backlinks from spammy and irrelevant websites. To go around this, ensure you get a few backlinks from high-authority websites.

SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Ahrefs conducted a study and found that 96% of websites on the internet do not get any organic traffic. In this research, they discovered some of the common mistakes that contribute to this large number. Let’s discuss them.

• Not conducting keyword research: Keyword research helps you identify the topics that your target audience is searching for. If you don’t create content based on these keywords, your content will not get discovered.
• Not allowing indexability by Google: If you want Google to rank your website, you need to enable it to be indexed. Find out if you have added a non-index tag on your website and remove it.
• Not matching content to a search intent: Failing to base your content on a specific search intent is like not conducting keyword research. Your audience wants content that answers their questions.
• Failing to organise content: Topic clustering is an essential practice in SEO that helps you group topics. This helps search engine crawlers know which content to index. 
• Not following an SEO strategy: An SEO strategy helps you have a concrete plan on how to increase the visibility of your website. If you don’t have a strategy, your content creation, keyword research, and SEO management will be based on guesswork.

SEO Strategies for Perth Businesses 

The first step to winning with SEO is having a robust strategy that guides all your ranking efforts in Perth. Given that Perth is a highly competitive landscape, this should be a no-brainer. 

It’s always recommended to create a strategy customised for your business because every Perth business is unique. To do this, you will need to start with a thorough SEO audit and identify areas where you need to focus on.

With an understanding of the current state of your business, you can now move to planning out the types of SEO to focus on and so on. Here are a few strategies that should work for your Perth business.

Claiming and Optimising Your Google Business Profile (GBP)

Google has practically created a free tool that you can use to increase your business’s visibility on the local market. As long as you have a Google account, you can easily claim your GBP and optimise it for local SEO.

The benefit of a GBP is that it signals to web users the exact location of your business. The NAP (name, address, and phone) features on GBP help you include specific contact information so that searchers can find them without having to come to your website. 

Don’t stop there. Ensure that you create posts for your GBP and keep the NAP information current. Also, keep track of your Google reviews and respond to them because Google reviews contribute to SEO.

Creating High-quality Content 

Nothing beats top-quality content in SEO. As a business owner in Perth, you need to create content that is optimized for SEO. That includes content based on keywords with high search volume. Your content also needs to be based on search intent. 

If you are targeting the local market, you can create the following types of content;

• Service area pages.
• Local landing pages.
• Local directories.
• Location-based case studies. 

Optimise Your Website for Mobile

Mobile responsiveness is an important strategy, especially for Perth. This is because a large majority of Perth residents are connected to the internet. And, most internet users use their phones for almost everything.

Therefore, ensure that your website is optimized to appear well on all devices, including tablets and phones. This increases your chances of getting mobile traffic from users.

Take Control of Your Website Ranking

SEO provides you with the best chance of ranking high on Google. Given the numerous benefits this has to your Perth business, you should be pursuing the strategies we have outlined here. Ensure you are factoring in what affects SEO and understanding the types of SEO and which ones are favourable for you.

The above is a DIY approach. While it works, it might be ineffective, especially if you don’t have the experience and expertise required. In that case, we are here to help. Our experienced SEO team creates winning SEO strategies tailored to your business and helps you increase web traffic and, ultimately, sales. Contact us now.