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Search Engine Optimisation Melbourne: Why It Matters!

28 Aug

We’re going to save us all a lot of time and just say it upfront: yes, SEO works. It dramatically boosts your visibility and can help your business generate loads of new sales.

There, hopefully that settles it!

Yes, you absolutely need SEO – even if you aren’t fully on-board with the idea, we can 100% guarantee that all your major competitors are using SEO techniques to get out ahead of you.

Why should they be the only ones using search engine optimisation Melbourne?

If you want to give them a run for their money, you’ll need to use SEO as well.

Unless this is literally the first time you’ve ever heard those three letters being used together, you’re no doubt aware that SEO has the power to dramatically boost your visibility – and therefore, the amount of business you receive.

You can understand that – what you don’t understand is the “how”.

Luckily, this quick refresher has you covered.

seo boosts visibility

Let’s start with the basics: what is search engine optimisation?

SEO is all about one thing: optimising your web pages so that they’re the pages that search engines like Google show when people search for something related to your business.

One thing that Google is incredibly good at is automating its systems. Instead of a thousands-strong team of people scouring the internet for results, Google uses a computer program that automatically scours the web and presents the most useful result.

The purpose of SEO is to turn your website into that result.

Think of it as “gaming the system”. We set up your website and webpages with all the stuff Google looks for, more-or-less tricking it into displaying your website over your competitors.

Great, but how does this translate to visibility?

Simple: more and more people than ever are looking towards Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo) for information before they commit to a purchase.

Maybe they’re just shopping around, or maybe they’re looking for more detailed info before they commit to spending their hard-earned cash. Either way, they’re going online for this type of info.

SEO makes your web pages appear higher up for as many possible searches as possible.

Take us for example. We don’t want the only searches we pop up for to be “iformat” – no, we want to pop up for as many searches as possible, as high as possible so that as many people who are Googling things like “search engine optimisation Melbourne” see us.

The more people see your site, the more of them click. And the more who click, the more calls you’ll get.

That’s pretty much the crux of it!

There’s a reason that we in the business like to say “the best place to hide a body is the second page of Google’s results page”.

Not just any old searches, either: increasing your visibility for the searches that matter to you

Traditional advertising is a scattergun approach – it broadcasts your message to a huge number of people, sure… however, only a small percentage of them are going to be in the market.

By contrast, with SEO, the leads come to you. By definition, this means that you’re going to get a much larger percentage of “warm” leads!

Of course, this assumes that your website ranks for stuff that’s actually relevant to you.

For example, say you run a shoe store. If you’re popping up on Google searches for car repairs in a completely different part of the city, how is that supposed to help you? You’re visible, sure – however, that visibility is useless from a practical standpoint.

A good SEO strategy applies a focused approach rather than a scattergun approach. It focuses on increasing your visibility for the searches that matter to you.

That’s why every SEO project we take on begins with a lengthy meeting with you. We need to get down to the heart of what it is that you do and what makes you unique if we’re to figure out which searches and keywords to use in your SEO strategy.

It’s all about identifying a niche and creating content around it. Some of the things we might take into account include:

  • Your service areas/the areas you operate in
  • Industries you service or customers you target
  • Your immediate surroundings
  • The products and service categories (and subcategories)
  • Unique features and attributes

Once we’ve found all of this, we create content optimised around all of this information.

Each one is different, which is why it’s so important that we lay the right groundwork by figuring all of these details out.

It’s what allows us to create such individualised SEO strategies, and therefore get you better results!

SEO can be a slow, sustained process

We all want fast results – unfortunately, 9 times out of 10 that’s not how SEO works.

A lot of our clients expect to see overnight results, and think that their website is going to rocket to the top of search results pages almost immediately.

While there are some situations where this can happen, most of the time it takes a considerable amount of time, with progress happening gradually.

We aren’t saying this to discourage you – rather, it’s to ensure that you know what you’re getting into before you sign on the dotted line.

Now for the meat and potatoes: how does SEO work in practice?

Essentially, it’s all about 2 things:

  1. Building credibility for your website and its webpages
  2. Giving internet users the answers to the questions they’re asking

And key to both of these things is a focus on creating a steady stream of high-quality, useful and original content.

While some people get lucky and strike gold with only a small amount of content (maybe they’ve found a very specific niche to compete – and dominate – in), for most websites, a constant content stream is essential.

Content = credibility

When ranking results on search pages, search engines look at a lot of different factors to determine whether or not the websites it’s pulling information from are credible.

While the exact system Google uses to determine a site’s credibility is a trade secret, there’s one thing everybody in the industry agrees on: good content is a huge part of it.

Google has some pretty advanced systems that crawl webpages. They’re able to tell if your content is:

  • Full of typos
  • Uses a lot of copy+pasted material
  • Is plagiarised from other sites

What’s more, good content also encourages people to share it organically, whether it’s to people who have similar questions or because they find it interesting, full stop.

And when Google sees people sharing a page, it comes to the conclusion that obviously this page is credible, which means they should be ranking it higher.

Of course, for either of these things to happen, you need content in the first place!

Good content answers people’s questions

When people type something in Google, they’re looking for specific answers, services or products. Maybe they’re looking up DIY techniques, seeking the answers to a question or trying to find an item that they can use.

What Google does is connect people to the answers they want.

Content marketing Melbourne ensures that your website has content for Google to present in the first place. A good content strategy focuses on understanding what your customers are Googling, and creating content around that.

That can include:

  • Tutorials
  • Advice and FAQs
  • Product guides
  • Explainers about your service
  • Behind-the-scenes articles

By creating content tailored to what customers are actually looking for, you’re increasing the chances of your site popping up when they start looking.

SEO is an going process

So you’ve put in the hard yards and gotten to the first page for a whole bunch of different (and valuable) searches. You’ve even cracked the top 3 spots for a couple of them!

A lot of people take that as a sign that the work is done, and that they can afford to slow down.

But what of your competitors?

Ten years ago, SEO was your secret weapon. Now, everyone knows about it – and more importantly, everyone’s doing it.

While you may have slowed down, your competition hasn’t – they’re still tweaking their websites and creating optimised content.

Here’s the thing: search engines like Google never stop. While you might ease off on your SEO and content activities, Google’s continuing to scan pages and evaluate search results, and might choose to promote competitors who are still going through with their SEO.

In some ways, SEO is a lot like losing weight – while you can afford to ease off during the maintenance phase, you can’t get away with stopping entirely!

seo agency melbourne

Search engine optimisation in Melbourne that gets results

If you’re interested in dominating SEO in Melbourne, we’re the team to call

So now you know how SEO works – now all you need to do is find an SEO agency in Melbourne that you can trust to get results for you.

Our SEO specialists do great work, ensuring that your website is bringing in:

  • More leads
  • More traffic
  • More sales

By ensuring that we’re optimising your site for searches and keywords that matter, we’re able to provide SEO campaigns that offer actual results.

Find out how our SEO agency in Melbourne can help you out – we would love to hear from you. You can get in contact with us on 1300 88 64 50 or message us online!