What is SEO? Exploring Search Engine Optimisation

Improve search visibility, build equity and drive genuine leads.

authentic digital are a Premier Google Partner and SEMRush Certified SEO services company in Auckland, NZ, with 10+ years experience in delivering superior results with integrity and transparency.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of improving traffic to your website through organic, unpaid listings on search engine results pages (SERP).

Search engine results pages often feature ads at the very top, followed by regular or organic search results. While search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) is about bidding for placement in the ads, SEO focuses on ranking as high as possible in organic results.

The goal of SEO is to increase both the quantity and quality of traffic: That means more people are visiting your website, and a greater share of those people are relevant traffic.

The benefits of SEO

While Google does not publish official statistics, an estimated 40,000 Google searches are processed every second.

Search is one of the primary ways all users traverse the internet, whether they’re looking for an answer to a query (informational search), searching for specific products (transactional search) or making their way to a specific website (navigational search).

Increase Quality Traffic & Trust

In order for potential customers to find your business, it’s crucial to not only be present among the search engine results. Data suggests that the top three organic Google results receive 75% of all clicks. Most searchers prefer to click organic results over paid ads.

There is of course still loads of tangible value in PPC, but SEO can go a long way to supporting your PPC efforts and generating trust and credibility. If customers see your website in relevant organic search results, they are more likely to trust your PPC ads.

SEO increases both the quantity and quality of visits to your website, helping to generate real leads.

Get Value from your Content

Your website may have great content, but that doesn’t mean much if no one can find it. As Google continuously works to improve its search results for users, the rules and factors that allow a piece of content to rank well change rapidly.

SEO ensures the content you’ve invested time and money into can deliver value to your customers and drive leads, sales and trust. We use a variety of tools to identify gaps in your content coverage, track trends in the market and assess the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Maintain your SEO Rankings

If you’re redesigning your website or migrating to a new platform, it’s important to keep SEO in mind. Your hard-earned search engine rankings can take a hit after a redesign if SEO hasn’t been part of your strategy. While developers can help with aesthetics and functions, SEO professionals will ensure your website doesn’t lose its valuable placements.

Compete in eCommerce

eCommerce is an increasingly competitive landscape, and your success hinges on your ability to compete in search. Customers are searching every day for the products they want and if your competitors appear before you, then that’s a sale immediately lost. When your business takes place online, using SEO to attract new and returning customers is vital.

Read more: SEO for eCommerce

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google or Bing use an algorithm to determine what pages to show for a given query. An algorithm is essentially a complex set of rules outlining hundreds or thousands of different factors that determine the ranking of pages on the SERP. While the individual factors that affect SEO are vast, they can be narrowed down to a few key aspects:

Keyword Research

Keyword research is not a ranking factor, but it is the foundation of a lot of SEO. Before most SEO activity can take place, keyword research is crucial to understand what keywords are the most valuable and the most competitive. Through keyword research, you can better understand the business landscape and identify strengths, gaps and opportunities, thereby enabling more targeted, intelligent SEO activity.

Content

For your website to appear on SERPs, it must have content. Content can be anything from a blog post, whitepaper, product page, video, or other, that answers a search query or provides value to a user. It might inform, entertain or enable a transaction. Most importantly, content should serve a purpose that aligns with the search intent and queries of your customers.

Read more: Content Marketing

Links

Links to your content from other websites and social media create a strong link profile, telling Google that your content is reputable and relevant. A strategy that incorporates internal and external links enables the algorithm to crawl your website and measure its relevance, quality and trustworthiness.

Structure

Page structure and HTML architecture achieve two things: Keywords in your website’s HTML code help to inform the algorithm of what your website is about, and user-friendly websites encourage desirable user behaviour. The speed of your page, its mobile-friendliness and how easy it is for Google to index it will all affect ranking.

Trust

Trust informs the algorithm your website is safe and reputable. Trust is created through authority in your domain and content, your bounce rate, and the age of your website. Therefore, the key to building trust is creating consistent, high-quality content that is both search optimised and gives people a reason to share it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg — the individual factors that influence your SERP rank are varied and vast. Tackling your rankings requires an understanding of on-page, off-page and technical SEO. That’s what authentic digital brings to the table.

What are the 3 Types of SEO?

If your website is a hot air balloon, SEO makes up the parts of the balloon that keeps it afloat. There are three main types of SEO, each of which helps your website drive business outcomes.

On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the navigator of your hot air balloon. The metadata, links and on-page tags on your website don’t necessarily grow your search equity, but help to focus that equity under the most relevant keywords. With strong on-page SEO, your content is better aligned with the search intent of potential customers, ultimately leading to more, higher-quality traffic and sales.

Content & Backlinks

Sometimes called off-page SEO, backlinks and content create the fire that drives your hot air balloon upwards. Off-page SEO focuses on building equity and authority by generating links back to your content through social media shares, guest blogging or other off-site strategies.

Technical SEO

At the backend of SEO, technical SEO makes up the sandbags of the hot air balloon. These are the elements that can hold your website back, hindering your search rankings. Technical SEO is focused on ensuring the structure of your website enables the algorithm to crawl and index easily and accurately. This includes developing an XML sitemap, optimising for mobile, adding breadcrumb menus and much more.

Why choose authentic digital for NZ SEO services?

We're Experts in All Types of SEO

Technical SEO is the most complicated and therefore often overlooked type of SEO. However, to be truly successful online you need to tackle all three types of SEO: Technical, On-Page and Off-Page. At authentic digital, we specialise in all three and keep up to date with Google’s constantly shifting algorithm and rules.

We make technical SEO a priority because, without it, great content can so easily be held back from achieving high SERP rankings. By bringing down the barriers of technical SEO, we create opportunities for great content to shine brighter.

We're Premier Google Partners & SEMRush Certified

The way to win in SEO is managing, prioritising, and organising the work to get the highest impact. There’s a tremendous amount of information to be processed in order to prioritise and analyse the best route to success, and that requires heavy-lifting software.

That’s why we use SEMRush, the world-leading SEO and content platform, selected by 8 of the top 10 online retailers. All of our staff are SEMRush certified professionals, and authentic digital is recognised as a Premier Google Partner, with a track record of maximising campaign success for our clients.

We Give You the Competitive Edge

Using SEMRush, we provide a detailed competitive analysis to surface unknown competitors and instantly understand what your competitors are doing to rank on Google. By understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, we can develop a highly competitive SEO game plan accordingly.

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