Last updated on September 5th, 2019 at 11:24 am

This is a question that many website owners will probably answer with “that’s easy – it stands for Search Engine Optimisation”.  But I need you to think a little deeper than that.

When you say search engine optimisation just what exactly do you mean?  Again, the answer is probably “getting to the top of the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo”.  I would agree that that is normally the aim of any SEO professional but would like to ask you one further question.

What do you want to get to the top of the search engines for?  It is all very well saying that you want to be at the top of the search results but I truly believe that the mark of a good and successful SEO campaign is not measured by positions, or even by traffic (visitors to the site) but can be measured by clients or sales.  If you stop for a moment and think the idea of most SEO should be to get visitors to your site that are looking for the service or product that you provide – many of these are unlikely to have ever heard of you so will not be searching for you by name.  Once they are on the site it is the job of the page content to convince the visitor to contact you / sign up for a newsletter / buy your products or what ever it is your site is “selling”.  A good seo person should see the whole thing in its entirety and not just as a technical exercise in getting top results.

Imagine that you are a hotel in North Wales for example, you would surely be looking for visitors that are looking for a hotel to stay at in the area you are based in – there is very little point in being at the top of the results for “hotels”, “UK Hotels” or even “hotels in Wales” – you are based in North Wales after all.  The same would apply (although maybe slightly less so) if you are providing professional services such as accountancy or legal advice or if you are a firm providing cleaning services – many people prefer to look for these kinds of services in their immediate location.

You can even apply this rule to many online stores, for example if you sell craft materials such as Fimo polymer clay then you want to be found for the products you sell and not just “craft materials” – all you would end up doing if you ranked highly for this phrase for example is get visitors looking for items such as jewellery findings, wool, foam shapes, pens and pencils, card making supplies and so on.  Each of these visitors would then leave your site without buying anything from you if all you sell is polymer clay (and yes, there are specialist online stores like that out there in the great World Wide Web).

So don’t be surprised if you talk to an SEO professional who first asks what you want to be found for, then suggests that some of the phrases you are aiming at are wrong and finally makes suggestions about making changes to your site – after all, if they want to do a good job for you it may well be that they are going to suggest changes to make the visitor experience much smoother, meaning that you may actually make some sales or sign up clients from your site.  As an SEO professional myself I can happily point to clients who have done this (one for example has signed up 20 new clients in the past year as a result of the SEO and their website – and to me this is the mark of a successful campaign).  I would be interested in seeing what you think makes a successful SEO campaign, you can comment on this below 🙂

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