Search engine optimisation is the practice of optimising your website content and digital PR strategy to ensure you are primed to be positioned well within search engine results pages (SERPs). It is an ongoing practice that blends technical and creative skills and requires an overarching strategy that addresses any issues preventing you from ranking well.

Search engine optimisation is a specialist skill that is honed over years with proper training and hands-on experience. There are many parts to a successful SEO campaign that all require different skill sets:

• Technical SEO – requires a deep understanding of how websites function, how to set up certain SEO functions within the code of your website or with relevant plugins and how to fix broken scripts and functionality that are likely to be impacting on your website’s performance. In addition, technical SEO experts provide strategic oversight of how to make your website faster, easier to interact with and more engaging – essential steps for improving its performance in the SERPs and its chances of converting visitors into leads
• On page SEO – requires specialist copywriting skills, a deep understanding of writing for the web and the ability to produce engaging, highly converting content that solves specific user needs rather than just being on the page for the sake of it
• Off page SEO – requires an outreach system, an innate understanding of how to make your website an attractive partnership prospect for targets, and the ability to gain highly relevant links without breaking best practice guidelines on how to do so

A good SEO strategy will zero in on the most urgent fixes and improvements for your on-site content and technical website structure, while identifying great digital PR opportunities that will boost your website’s profile.

Depending on your budget and priorities, it may not be appropriate to begin with all three elements at once – if your website desperately needs a technical overhaul or content improvements, it’s best to complete these before building links and driving traffic to pages that are unlikely to convert visitors into sales leads.

Depending on the quality of your website, the size of your budget and the strength of your competition, it could take anywhere from one month to twelve months in order to see significant improvements in your organic traffic and to gain more sales and leads from SEO as a channel.

We are unable to define up front exactly when you will hit your KPIs, but in general we find that clients with larger SEO budgets typically see results within 3-6 months, and smaller campaigns are most effective within 12-24 months.

PPC, or Pay Per Click Advertising, is a great way to quickly gain top positions in search engine results pages, by bidding on placements. However, while it can be a highly effective way of quickly reaching more people and gaining leads and sales, PPC can be expensive and typically has lower conversion rates than well-qualified organic traffic.

We would always recommend a blended online advertising approach that includes both PPC and SEO, so that you can quickly gain traffic via PPC, and then capitalise on organic visitors over time as the results of your SEO campaign kick in.