Getting Your Website Found – SEO versus PPC or SEO & PPC
After many weeks of development, your website is ready to go live – great. You’re sitting and waiting for people to view your site but you’re getting no visitors. Your content is engaging and you have used high-quality images, plus the functionality is great, so why is no one coming to your site? The answer is simple: No one can see your website on their search results. You need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click Management) to move your website higher up users search result pages.
Search Engine Optimisation for your websites
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is a technique which helps search engines (such as Google) find and rank your website higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query, for example if a user typed ‘Barbers in Bristol’ Google will search through all the sites that contain the phrase ‘Barbers in Bristol’ and rank them on many variables, then display them in the search results. Having good SEO helps your site appear higher organically (free) than your competitors when users type in specific phrases into Google.
But how do I get good SEO?
There are many variables that search engines will pick up on and grade your website on, such as:
- Keywords – When a user enters a phrase into a search engine, it will go through and match it to the pages that contain that phrase (EG: Cheap ovens in Bristol). The search engine will rank your page on how many matches there are to the phrase used and rank it higher for the most matches. A good technique is to use phrases that you want to rank for in your page titles, content text and metadata. Including your business location is a good keyword to include. This can be the town, city, county or area your business trades in.
- Image Alt Tags – Originally, image alt tags were used for accessibility reasons, but now search engines use these similarly to the keywords; when a search phrase is used, the search engine will read the image alt tag and rank the page higher than competitors. Keeping your image alt tag clear, descriptive and concise for best results; describing the picture exactly for people with visual impairments will give you the best results.
- Anchor Text – Anchor text is the text that appears highlighted in a hypertext link that can be clicked to open a target web page. Linking text that is also a keyword phrase for your page will mean higher ranking on the search results; using ‘read more’ or ‘click here’ won’t improve your rankings if it is used repeatedly.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click is similar to SEO but allows you to purchase listings that appear at the top of organic search results. You will only be charged for when a user clicks on the link, however being first on the search results will mean more interested visitors coming to your site.
Using both PPC and SEO well will ensure that your website and it’s pages appears at the top of search results, such as Google, for your keywords. However, it isn’t always necessary to use PPC, for example when you have a limited amount of competition for your keywords, however, this is normally only the case if you have a niche product and have smaller searches anyway. Broadening your keywords will open up your market, so, therefore, increasing the number of competitors and a number of results that you will be battling with on the search result.
At Digital NRG we design specialist PPC campaigns and higher ranking SEO strategies around your goals, market and budget. Let us take the hard work of getting your website found, chosen and converting website visitors.
