What is SEO?

Search Engines are more than just a website you use to answer life’s burning questions, or what colour is a polar bears fur?
Whether you are using Google, Yahoo, Bing or Duck Duck Go, a number of factors determine what search results are shown in response to your search query.
Search engines are working all the time, using crawlers or bots to trawl the Internet for every piece of information it can find. This information is then reported back to the search engine for indexing. From here the search algorithm is then run against the search index and your search result is then displayed.
A search engines algorithm has many factors to consider in order to determine how relevant that information is to your search. There are hundreds of factors that are used such as keyword and content readability, trust and quality of links directed to your domain, Social Metrics and how quickly your page loads. With each piece of the puzzle having a differing weight on the results.
The main takeaway here is there is not one single or dominant factor. SEO needs a wholistic approach.

Content, and quality content. Without this you will fighting a loosing battle before you have even started.
Technical SEO is now more critical than ever. If the crawlers are having issues indexing your site or it doesn’t respond quickly you can expect to be ranked lower. Slow page speed and User Experience are now some of the key factors to ensuring your site is working efficiently as possible.
Links are probably one of the most important. I don’t mean links from anywhere, we are talking about high quality links from high quality domains. Backlinks purchased from Fiverr or other purveyors of Black Hat SEO will have you in breach of Google’s guidelines and should be avoided at all costs. Whilst you might get a quick boost in your sites rankings you risk damaging your domain and being down ranked or worst, black listed.
• Quality of traffic – “apple” vs “Apple”
• Quantity of traffic
• Organic Results – The best traffic is the one you don’t have to pay for!

• 4-12 months, Google even tells you this!
o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSvFxV_M04&t=99s
• Highly competitive keywords may take 2-3 years

Anyone that tells you they can get you to rank first in a short amount of time cannot guarantee results as it is out of their control in the end of the day what Google decides to do with the information.

This lack of Google rank could be due to:
• Poor keyword research and targeting
• Google wants to provide helpful, meaningful content.

This varies from industry to industry and with SEO not a one time task, expect to pay from $500 per month upwards into the thousands depending on requirements such as blogging/article content, analysis and updates.

Some basic elements to consider:
o Slow page speed/servers
o Poor site structure
o Duplicate content
o Broken links, re-direct chains
o Crawling, indexing and rendering

• SEO only needs to be done once.
• Google Ads will help my rankings
o No, no and no. It can be valuable if used correctly and in some cases can be part of your strategy.