You’ve probably heard of the acronym SEO(Search Engine Optimization), and you know that it’s one of the most fundamental things you can do to get and keep your business online. But what’s really behind this magic word? Does SEO really work and how does it work?
In this post, I will explain what SEO is and what it is for, what the basics of SEO are, and how they can help you increase the traffic to your website by 23 times.
For example, let’s take sowood.ee as an example of an e-shop, and for a period of one year.
Extract from Google Analytics between 19 January 2020 and 19 January 2021:
19. jaanuar 2020 päevane külastajate arv 15 / nelja nädala külastajate arve 472
19. jaanuar 2021 päevane külastajate arv 346 / nelja nädala külastajate arv 6083
Ühe aastaga on kodulehe külastajate arv kasvanud vastavalt 2206 % ja 977 %
I’ll show you how I did it and how you can do the same to boost your website traffic.
What exactly does SEO mean?
Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is the process of increasing the visibility of a website in search engine results.
For example, you want to buy a new desk, but there’s nothing suitable in the usual furniture shop. So you turn to the Internet to look for information on wooden tables. Let’s say you use the Google search engine. For example, if you Google “oak table”, the pages that Google displays above are optimised for the keyword you enter (“oak table”).
Why is it so important to rank first in search results?
Who wouldn’t want to be featured on the front page of Google 🙂 ? The higher Google displays your page, the more visitors your page gets.
75% internetis surfajatest ei jõua kunagi otingumootoris esimesest lehest kaugemale.
How to get to the front page?
There are two ways to get on the front page: advertising and organic visibility.
From the image, we can see that the first result is advertising, which means that the company pays when a browse clicks on its page. The more popular keywords are also in contention for the top spots in advertising – even if you pay, your ad may not be shown on the first page and a potential customer may not even reach your site.
Relying only on advertising, you may end up paying large sums of money every month and still not getting any results.
Those websites and e-shops that don’t have an “Advertising” tag will come up organically in search engines, and that’s where SEO comes in.
So – getting to the front page is no mystery 🙂 It requires either a lot of money or a lot of hard work or both!
What steps to take on the SEO journey?
Analysis
In order to find out where your website stands in terms of SEO, what steps to take next and which keywords to choose, you need to use an SEO tool. There are many of them online. Just google “SEO tool” and find the one that suits you 🙂 🙂 To find out what the best SEO tool is for you, check out the different options available.
I use Moz.com for my first analysis. Moz shows you what’s happening on your own site and you can also analyse your competitors there.
First of all, it’s worth taking a look at what SEO mistakes and recommendations Moz highlights.
For example, search engines don’t like missing or invalid H1 tags, missing meta descriptions, repetitive content or duplicate titles. Page speed also has an impact on SEO, so make sure your website isn’t too slow.
Find the keyword(s) to optimise the page for
Once the initial analysis has been done, the keywords need to be identified. Keywords are the words that best describe the content you want to find on the page and that you want to come up with in the search engine (e.g. “oak table”).
You probably already know or have an idea of what a keyword could be on one or other of your pages. But don’t jump in head first – keywords need to be analysed too.
Ask yourself:
What words do people use online? Which ones are used by my target audience? What questions do they ask?
You can use Google Keyword Planner to help you with keyword analysis. You can access it if you are a Google Ads user.
Keyword Planner gives you quite a lot of information about keywords. Enter a keyword, select language and country and the result will show you how much Google is displaying that keyword, how many people are looking at the keyword, whether it’s popular and also give you keyword recommendations. Read more about Google Keyword Planner and how to use it here.
If you don’t have a Google Ads user, there are other tools to help you analyse your keywords. For example, you can find a list of free tools here.
Moz.com, mentioned earlier, also analyses keywords and makes recommendations.
All landing page subpages and, in the case of an e-shop, product pages must be optimised for the keyword.
Many websites get the majority of their traffic from content or product pages and it is therefore important to optimise each page for one specific keyword. Target accurately and bring more of the right traffic to the page.
In the case of SoWood, I also went through all the product pages and optimised them for one specific keyword. For example, if there were two oak dining tables for sale, one product sheet was optimised for the keyword “oak dining table” and the other for “oak dining table”.
Avoid vague keywords such as “Dining table Adeele” or “Dining table Karolin”. It is unlikely that anyone will search for a dining table called Adeele on Google.
Making an e-shop – read more!
Use one unique, specific keyword on each page!
If you have an e-shop, optimise each product page for a keyword. Add each product to a separate page. An alternative would be to make a single table from which the customer can select the products they like, but this is not a good solution in SEO terms.
Table of products (https://www.estinwood.ee/tisleri-materjalid-laoseis) versus each product clickable (https://www.sowood.ee/puidu-muuk/)
Write keyword-optimised texts on each (product) page and blog about it.
When it comes to SEO, the time spent on a website plays a big role. The longer a visitor stays on your page, the more trustworthy your page becomes in Google’s eyes, and the higher Google will rank your page.
If a visitor closes a page immediately after opening it, the search engine will not find the page for that keyword.
How can you keep a customer on the site as long as possible?
Provide the website visitor with interesting, valuable text and images that answer any questions they may have.
When writing a product description and blog, remember – the more expensive the product or the more competition, the more effort you have to put into the copy. Using visuals makes the content more interesting. If possible, give the customer some added value, e.g. a free video tutorial.
At the end of a blog post, it’s a good idea to use a CTA(call to action) that invites people to buy your product or contact you.
Optimise all photos
Optimised photos bring traffic to the page. SoWood.ee gets 10% of its traffic from images.
Don’t just leave a name for the image, no one is looking for IMG_115152 on the internet.
Before uploading the image to your website, give it a name that includes a keyword and describes as accurately as possible what you see in the image.
Add a meta description to each page
A meta description is a ~150-character description of a webpage displayed in search engine results. It must contain a keyword and briefly convey the content of the page. Make it as interesting as possible so that people want to click on it!
To sum up
Let’s briefly summarise what sowood.ee products did to help them stand out on the search engine front page a few months later.
First – keyword analysis.
Let’s take the keyword and the sample product “Unserved oak plank”.
1. I added the product
2. I added a title
3. I added the URLI
4. I added a product text
5. I added a meta description
6. Optimize the images
And about half a year later, Sowood comes up organically first in a Google search engine with both “oak slope” and “unedged oak slope”:
It should be mentioned that the above points are not the whole truth about SEO. It is a foundation from which to start and on which to build a successful optimisation.
Don’t neglect SEO! Do it regularly
Now that queries are coming in every day and business is booming, SEO must not be forgotten.
In SoWood, I track a weekly graph showing how keywords are doing.
I regularly work on products, updating the range and the texts on the website. Google really likes it when website content is updated and new products are added.
SEO is worth investing your energy in. It’s the most cost-effective way to get your business up and running.
It takes a while at first, but in the end you can’t get the work done.
If you have any questions about SEO or are looking for a partner to help you on this long journey to the top of the search engines, we’re here to help! Read more about what we offer on our link service page.
Contact us for a free SEO consultation!
