This is a tough question and depends on a lot of factors. This could include your geographic location, your competition, the type of work you do and a lot more.

Let’s take the example below:

Paul is a sole trader, and he works as a window cleaner based here in Gloucester. He has a few local areas in which he already works and most of his work comes through word of mouth. Rather than contact a local Gloucester SEO Agency to help him climb up the Google ladder (instead of his own pardon the pun) he might well be better off doing local promotions in the paper, radio or through his client base. However, if he were looking to expand out into other surrounding towns or acquire business contracts he may well want to explore the benefits on online exposure.

Let’s look at another example:

Sandra runs a successful Cheltenham based IT company she already has a strong local base of customers but wants to expand, she has little to know brand awareness outside a 20-mile radius and wants to be seen for national terms. This would be where SEO could be a good idea

The long and short of it is most forms of marketing comes down to two factors:

• Will it reap a good ROI?
• Will it gain me additional exposure?

SEO is all about utilising the internet to help prospective customers find you rather than anyone else.

If you sell a very niche product and have been trading for years, the chances are probably most of your customers will already know you, but equally on the other side of the fence if it is that bespoke a niche, reaching a higher place on Google and other search engines could in fact get you even more of the work due to minimal competition.

A huge amount of businesses has heard the term SEO, and know it has something to do with the internet, and where you appear but on the whole that’s where it tends to stop.

The below information is a very simplified and shortened down version of what SEO is and is designed to give you an overview only.

To put it simply SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation

But what does SEO mean?

Well it means being found online for a term or set of terms (known as keywords). The internet relies on search engines to find the appropriate sites for the equally appropriate keywords and links the two things up. In doing so after your search will list numerous pages of listings in order of relevance from page 1 being the most appropriate.

A search engine is the tool you use to look up things on the internet – The most commonly known search engine of course being Google.

SEO is ensuring everything is correctly done (see points below) to ensure that your website is chosen over your competition when it comes to your keywords being searched.

If everything is performed correctly search engines will reward you with optimal spots online and your website should receive visitors.

SEO mainly comes down to two things:

1) Ensuring that you have a good website –

If your site is simple to navigate, has a clear message throughout, can be engaged with easily, and offers the viewer the information he/she requires often by supplying fresh, unique and modern content you will have given yourself a great chance of being shown.

Being able to access a site is equally important so making sure it can be found on whatever device you are using from a tablet to a smartphone right back to standard desktop computers is key, you may have heard the term mobile friendly being bandied about this is what that means.

How fast a page loads are important, for 2 reasons,

• Search engines reward for user experience, if you’re having to wait around to wait for a page of a website to load, the experience is not great and will result in potentially a drop in rankings and therefore traffic.
• Conversions – Let’s say you have an optimal position online and floods of traffic are coming in, how long is it before those potential customers lose interest due to having to wait for pages to turn and/or load and leave the site for someone else.

Ideally it would be almost instant page loading but that’s not always the case ideally you would like your pages to load in less than 5 seconds. Feel free to check your load speed here. (If you decide to check select Sweden as the Country to test from as it’s the closest.)

With millions of websites all competing for the same customers ensuring your website is as optimised as possible will make a great impact on your online success.

2) Promoting your website (Acquiring backlinks) –

Acquiring a link from another website that sends traffic from their site back to yours is similar to them vouching for you.

E.G in the same way that you may recommend a business to someone you know who has done a good job, a link is the same works in the same theory, its them vouching for your sites authority.

If you have links from websites that are highly regarded and relevant to your sites niche this can greatly increase your chances of securing a high level of visibility online.

Common mistakes made are using poorly built sites to promote you or having an acquaintance who equally has a site to do a swap and help each other, this more than often has the opposite effect (unless of course they are in your industry and are a well-established site that is) The video on our site called “What are some myths about SEO” will further explain this. Majestic is a tool we use regularly that scores your site based on the quality of all of the links that it has coming into it. If you would like to check how well your website scores feel free to click here to go there now for a look, the higher the trust flow score the better your current link score is. (Most sites score between 16 and 50)

Although the above is a just a snippet of what SEO is, I hope it has given you enough information to help make an informed decision about whether or not you feel SEO is the right marketing channel for your business.