What is SEO and why is it important?

What we’ll tech you:

• What is SEO?

• What is search engine crawling?

• Tips to help Google crawl your site easier

• What to do if you don’t have time for any of this malarky 

Let’s start with the basics…

What is SEO? You’ve probably heard this term thrown around and like many others you probably don’t understand what it truly means. It’s simple. SEO is about improving your website so that search engines will rank your site at the top of their search findings. 

Don’t make Google climb over obstacles to crawl through your site.

Since when did Google grow arms and legs? Don’t worry it didn’t! What we mean by crawling is Googles way of going through your site to understand what it’s about and how to rank it. Essentially, it sends out little robots (known as the crawlers) to digest the content on the website. It’ll digest everything from images, videos, PDF’s, graphics and of course copywriting. This also isn’t a one time thing, Google will do this periodically to look for new information and content on your site (this is why it’s important to constantly upload new content). So, now that we know what crawling is and why it’s important let’s get into the basics of how we can make it easy for Google to crawl the site. 

1. Include Keywords

You can choose the words that your site appears for by strategically adding them throughout your content. You can decide on these words yourself, but it’s usually best to select them by using a keyword tool such as Semrush.

2. Optimise your site for the latest devices

Your site is valued from an SEO standpoint if it is formatted differently for phones, tablets and desktop to make it easily to navigate depending on the device. Makes it more appropriate.

3. Effective site structure

If your site is easy to navigate from a structure point of view, this will help your optimisation. Your pages should be easy to find and only a few clicks away from your home page.

4. Submit your sitemap to Google

Using an XML sitemap can help Google to find your pages. This is essentially a map of your website which tells Google what your pages are and where to find them so that it can then crawl. Here’s a tutorial on how to do this:

5. Improve your website's speed

By using Google’s Lighthouse feature you can see the scored your website achieves in terms of performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. Depending on your scores you can identify bottlenecks that your site may have which are slowing it down and then fix them accordingly.

So, why is all of this so important?

Well I’m glad you asked. To be blunt there’s no point in having a website if it won’t rank on Google because, well, no one will see it! So, making sure that Google can analyse your website is vital to get your website to be shown to your customers. 

How can we help you with SEO?

As you can probably guess SEO is something that needs to be kept up with constantly. To give your website the exposure to Google that it deserves, you should be uploading new content, optimising your features and monitoring your analytics to then adapt constantly. We understand that as busy business owner this is yet another set of tasks to add to your already never ending list. This is why we offer Sunrise Support which offers a few different monthly packages that can take care of the SEO for you.