The top questions you should be asking yourself before investing in SEO

Building an online presence is more than simply having a website. You also have to ensure it is optimised for SEO (search engine optimisation).

Using SEO is the best way to ensure your website gets seen by people when they search for your business niche. However, it is important to understand what SEO is and if you are able to give it the investment it needs.

Here are the top questions you should be asking yourself before investing in SEO.

Do you need help with SEO?

Knowing how SEO works and using it on your website is key to its success. Not everyone will be able to use SEO correctly, so you may need to get someone to help you optimise your site correctly.

There are agencies that can offer an SEO consultant to help you with your website and give it the best chances of ranking highly in search engines like Google. They can also advise you on what additional content you may need to keep your ranking in good stead.

If you don’t have a website yet, then this will be the best time to use SEO as you can build in some components and optimise the site from the beginning.

What are you looking for from your website?

Every business wants to get more sales and drive up its profits. However, there are a few different ways to do this, so you need to know what you want before you start using your website.

It might be that you are looking to direct more traffic to your site to help people find your physical store and come in to make a purchase. This means telling people what you offer and where they can find you. It also means your target audience will be close to your stores.

If you want to make sales online, then you need to ensure you have a good online store where people can find what they want easily.

How many visitors can you get?

If you are a local business that is looking to bring in more customers or start making online sales, then you need to understand where your audience is and how many you can reasonably bring to your site.

The best way to find this information is through Google or your SEO consultant. You want to search for your business niche and see how many people are searching for that term. The more people that are searching for a particular term, the better the chances that your website will be seen – provided that the competition for that term is also low enough for you to get noticed. So, there is a ‘trade-off’ involved in this sense.

By focusing on the keywords with the most traffic and the lowest competition, you can start to rank for those words when people search for them.

Can you create additional content?

To have the best chance of ranking on Google consistently, you need to have content on your website. This can be in the form of blog posts, videos, or other types of content that will bring people back to your site.

You may find that you don’t have the time to sit and create content for your website, but there is another alternative. There are people who can create content for you and then you can post this to your website. They will cover a topic close to your niche, and the content will be optimised for SEO.

This service is usually provided by external content creation companies that will understand your niche and what is needed. It is important to factor this content creation into your marketing budget and see if it has the desired impact on your sales.

Does your website convert clicks into sales?

Good SEO will attract people to your website, but they then have to engage enough to buy a product or service from you. To do this, you need to see how well your website converts the clicks it receives into sales or enquiries.

One of the best ways to do this is to have a ‘call to action’ on every page of your website. It might be ‘Buy Here’, or ‘Enquire Here’ at certain points on the page where the ‘call to action’ can be easily seen by visitors.

You should also consider having a sign-up page where visitors can enter their email addresses to get a newsletter at frequent intervals. This will not only give you excellent email marketing data, but it will also allow you to follow up on visitors to your site in the hopes of making a sale.

Conclusion

No matter what type of website you are looking to build, SEO will still be an important part of the process.