There was a time when businesses launched websites without paying much attention to optimisation. At the time of writing, a quick Google search shows that there are 11.1 million websites registered in the UK alone! The Internet is a virtual jungle and your site can be forever lost if you don’t provide a clear map for the search engines to find and display to potential new clients. The likelihood of it appearing is based on the search queries made by customers and prospects which are relevant to your business.

What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

In its simplest form, SEO is the process of developing your website to:

• increase the chance of it appearing on search engine results pages (SERPs)
• influence how high up the SERPs it ranks in relation to other websites displayed on SERPs.

SEO is important as it helps to attract more clients to your business through being visible (and therefore raising awareness) and by encouraging the provision of a good online customer experience.

SEO can be split into two areas:

On-site SEO is activity you can influence within the framework of your website, and off-site SEO which involves activity and strategies beyond your website.

Both have the aim of making your site more visible and improving its SERPs ranking.

Read our extended guide to SEO

Google arrives at its list of most relevant sites based on algorithms that are constantly tweaked. But at its simplest, relevancy is determined by content, and by the number of credible sites that link to yours.

If your primary objective is to improve your local search rankings use this simple guide on how to get your business to the top of Google's local business listings.

Your 5-steps to SEO

1. Use good quality content on your website.

   Do not copy content directly from other websites.  Google can instantly spot this and may penalise your site as a result (by pushing it down the rankings). 

   Make your content relevant, valuable and rich in keywords and/or key phrases - you can talk to an experienced copywriter about how to do this effectively, if needing help.

   Talk to your web development team about how best to use tags.
   
   

2. Gain quality in-bound links to your site.

   Get other well-regarded sites to mention and link to your website.

   Start by creating social media accounts for your business that link to your site.

   Write a regular blog, which people can follow and link to.

   Having preferred partner information on your website can help give you lots of (reciprocal) inbound links.

   Request links from credible trade associations or local community websites.

   Run PR campaigns with local media, and gain links that way. Sponsor a local team or club? If their site is credible and generates lots of web traffic, get them to add a link to your site from theirs. 
   
   

3. Find a niche

   Finding a niche for your business will help your website to stand out.

   Use keywords to attract relevant online searchers.
   
   

4. Use a descriptive name

   Ideally give your website, and by extension your business, a name that describes what you do.

   So a cake maker will gain better SEO with CupcakeMaker.co.uk than with YummyThings.co.uk.

   Doing this will encourage Google to rate the site more highly – and make it easier for potential customers to find.

   Even better, if she called it JanesCupcakes.co.uk then she would also be helping to create her brand.
   
   

5. Now use Google Search Central to check the success of your work to date, and show you what other improvements you could make.

Watch our webinar on SEO for even more guidance.

Being realistic

Whatever you do, you need to be realistic about your chances of being listed on the first page for the most popular keywords.  The competition is huge, the marketing budget needed is almost as large and Google may still rank larger firms as being more relevant. 

Focus instead on achieving top ranking for your more niche localised services.  This should prove to be much easier to achieve.

Also boosting your natural ranking on Google is time consuming and will not happen overnight.  It may take a business between three and nine months for its SEO efforts to pay off in the shape of improved ranking (or longer if you use a new business name, as new websites are automatically given a lower rating by Google than established ones).

To counter this you could, in the short term at least, put some budget behind pay-per-click marketing in order to drive traffic to your site, while you wait for the natural-search ranking to catch up.

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This page content was reviewed in September 2024.