Search engine marketing: tips on how to carry out a correct SEO

Do you want to increase the visibility of your SME's website? The most effective way is to appear among the first results of search engines on the Internet, especially Google, which is used by 92.08% of people.

You can achieve this position in two ways: SEO and SEM. The main difference is that SEM involves paying the search engine to get that position with an advertisement, while SEO does not involve paying because you are in charge of optimising it. Also, SEM results are more immediate, whereas SEO is medium/long term.

Read on because we are going to tell you about the importance of SEO and some points you should take care of so that your SME appears among the first search results.

What is SEO and why is it important?

SEO is the optimisation of your own resources so that the search engine identifies your website as a relevant platform, placing it at the top of the ranking, giving it both more visibility and importance. In addition, SEO helps you to have an optimal and efficient platform for your users at a low cost.

Be aware of Google's algorithm preferences and maximise your SEO results.

Google's algorithm

The algorithm that has been in place since 2012 is Google Penguin, which is focused on penalising spam and low-quality links. Google adds updates from time to time. The latest one, which will be fully implemented in August 2021, will reinforce the importance of user experience on the web and the engagement it promotes, among others.

Below are some of the requirements you need to meet in order for Google to highlight your website.

1. Basic keys for Google to find your website.

Google must find your website first to analyse it. For this to happen, it is important to make sure that your website has proper access, that you have a sitemap file of your page (a diagram of how the different sections are connected, providing information about the contents found on the page: image, video, text...) and that your website is marked as dofollow (links in the code of your web page that Google recognises as valid) so that Google can crawl it.

Google also needs to understand your web content. Try to write content accurately to generate valuable information, use precise and well-referenced titles and descriptions, and create a clear hierarchy of concepts on the page. It is important that your page can be crawled by bots and pointing out advertising links so that Google does not analyse them as content.

2. Tips to optimise your content and be more relevant.

You must think about your customers’ needs when creating and managing your website. Therefore, you should create valuable and unique content that allows you to stand out and attract users.

Using keywords is a valuable resource. It is important that you use different keywords on each page of your website to differentiate them correctly.  Use Google Trends to find out the most used words and discover other interesting words.

We recommend that you analyse the words that your customers use to find your products or services, so that you can make combinations of these generic words to appear at the top of the results. 

There are behaviours that Google penalises. In order to avoid this, do not publish content that is automatically generated, copied from other pages or duplicated in several sections within your website. Also, do not participate in linking schemes, such as paying another site to link to yours or entering into mention agreements (I link to your site, and you link to mine).

3. Aspects that encourage users to visit your website.

There are some keys that will help you increase the number of visits to your SME's website. Introduce viable links to other active pages and optimise the loading time of your website. You can find out how fast it loads on Page Speed Insights or Webpagetest.org.

Your website should have a responsive design, i.e., it should adapt to any device. To find out if your website is mobile friendly, you can do a mobile optimisation test.

Although Google is the most used search engine, make sure that your page can be accessed from the different search engines and protect your website's connections with https.

As we have seen, SEO is an essential tool to boost your SME's visibility on search engines. It is important to know your current SEO to improve it. Some tools you can use to get this information are Website Grader, Nibble Silktide and Woorank.

If you take care of all the aspects we have mentioned and focus on publishing quality content on a regular basis, you will see how your website will gradually climb up the rankings. Remember that it is not a sprint, SEO is a long-distance race, but the result is worth it.