Put simply, SEO is a process that forms part of a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimising a website to make it more visible in search engine results pages (i.e. in Google search results) with the goal of driving organic traffic to the website. Organic traffic is driven to a website from clicks on these search results.

Organic traffic is natural in the sense that it is earned rather than paid for, but to be successful, you still need to invest a lot of time and resource in SEO. Search engines have got better at identifying the intent of search queries which makes choosing the right keywords to drive traffic even more important.

Because organic traffic is not paid for, once an SEO strategy takes effect and visibility increases, a website will see growth in this channel. More visibility = more traffic = more potential customers = more potential revenue.

But it’s not just about getting ANY traffic to a website. If it’s not good quality traffic, there is no value in it. So don’t ever pay anyone who claims that they can deliver thousands of visitors to your website overnight!

Yes, your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimization offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click.

When you run PPC ads, you'll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, it takes investment into skills and resources to rank a website on the SERPs

If you're able to rank your website at the top of the search engines, you'll benefit from a stream of traffic that won't have click costs associated with it, and that won't stop when ads are turned off. Rank organically, and you'll enjoy 24/7 visibility.

But let's also remember that organic search is responsible for an average of 53% of total site traffic. If you're ignoring SEO, your competitors are enjoying this traffic. Most businesses cannot ignore the importance of SEO. No matter what type of company you are, whether you're a local business, sell online, or are a global enterprise, you need to be paying attention to your SEO strategy.

Off page SEO primarily focuses on links.

Links are important for SEO, and probably always will be as they act as a signal that people are finding content interesting enough to vouch for by linking to it.

Amplifying content also falls under off page SEO. This means promoting content through other channels to encourage influencers, peers, publishers, or customers to share your content, or write about your content, with a link back to your site.

All links are not created equal. And good links are not easy to come by.

On-page SEO relates to any action taken on the website itself to improve performance. This includes:

Using optimised content that contains target keywords (including meta, headers, images)

Making sure that the site is accessible (can be crawled and indexed by

search engines) and can be easily navigated by users

Using internal links (in menus, body copy, and breadcrumbs to aid navigation)

Ensuring that a website loads quickly

Keeping crawl errors to a minimum

Having a site that is optimised for mobile

Not having duplicate (same content on more than one page), or thin content (low word count), or making sure these pages cannot be accessed and indexed by search engines Using clean, descriptive, static URLs with a structure that follows the same structure as the site.

SEO-friendly content doesn't mean keyword-stuffed content, far from it.

The reality is that SEO needs to be an essential part of the content creation process if you want your content to perform well organically. So then, how do you create SEO-friendly content?

You start with keyword research to help you understand the terms people are searching for, determine search intent, the right format, and get your on-page SEO right.

A question that's always asked is whether a business should invest in SEO, PPC, or both. It's the age-old SEO vs. PPC debate.

In an ideal world, a business should balance multiple marketing channels to avoid a reliance on any single source of traffic (and conversions). But, especially for smaller businesses, budget is often a challenge, and resources must be allocated efficiently. Funds aren't endless.

Even in this instance, it's essential to balance a long-term SEO strategy with a small but targeted PPC campaign.

We certainly don’t think so. SEO has certainly evolved, and continues to do so. Providing the Internet doesn’t become irrelevant, SEO will be around for a long time.