The simple answer to this question is yes it really does! However, it takes a lot of commitment, knowledge, and time to get it right. Good SEO is certainly not something that can be achieved with just a few hours work and you really do need to know what you’re doing to get it right.
Initial research is key to determine the best key phrases to focus on to generate the most amount of traffic, and most importantly, increase the likelihood of conversions. There are many online tools available that let you analyse a vast amount of analytical data for each keyword, including search volume, intent, and keyword difficultly. This will help determine what keywords are likely to rank well.
Once you have narrowed down your keyword focus, it’s time to get to work to ensure your website starts to rank well for these keywords. This is where the hard work really begins as there are many tasks that need to be completed to ensure you have covered all the factors that search engines look at when determining the ranking score of a website. Metadata, well written content and headings, internal/external links, usability, blogging, the website structure, and the speed of the site are just some of the on-site tasks that need to be addressed when optimising a site. And the work doesn’t stop there, as there are many off-site tasks that need to be addressed too – most importantly, obtaining good quality back-links. Many people mistakenly believe that the more back-links you have, the better. Getting a large quantity of back-links from poor ranking sites can be detrimental to a site’s overall ranking. What’s important is getting a back-links from good quality sources that already rank very highly on search engines.
Social media is also important when it comes to the general marketing of your site. It’s true to say that having a good social media presence may not necessarily have much weighing on your overall ranking on search engines, but it can help push traffic to your site and, if managed correctly, can provide a good following of people who may well be interested in the products and services provided by your business in the future.
If you do a search on Google for ‘HGV Medicals in Nottingham’, ‘Taxi Medicals in Nottingham’ and ‘Motorsport Medicals in Nottingham’ you will see that Midland Medical Group should be displayed quite highly on page one of the results. This represents a website that has been optimised for these keywords through completing the tasks discussed above. The same is also true is do a search for ‘Web Design in Bourne’ or ‘Care Jobs in Staffordshire’ – these are sites that have also been optimised to rank well for these keywords.