SEO
Anatolia Digital provides an SEO support with long term effects with expert approach.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important features of a website. It makes the website discoverable to people who didn't even know your brand name before. It matches people's needs with the services you provide and help each party meet with each other. Given its importance, there are many companies promising to provide good SEO and it gets harder and harder to understand which one to trust. In this article we will provide some useful information and objective metrics that you can test any website with.
Let's help you understand what SEO is. As the name suggests, it's optimizing your website for search engines. Let's say your company is selling shoes. You'd want your website to show up on top when people search for shoes so they can come to your website and buy your shoes. If there is only one such company in the world, this would be an easy task. In your website, you'd tell search engine scanners that this is a website selling shoes, then it would show your website on top next time somebody searches shoes. However, when there are thousands of companies selling shoes, which is often the case for any service or product, then it becomes a quite challenging task. Just saying this website is selling shoes wouldn't be enough.
The Cheap Way
Here's what most SEO companies do: they own hundreds or thousands of websites that are doing either nothing or close to nothing but link other websites.
These are called farms. Most of the time, they would copy content from other websites such as news etc. and would put links to your website somewhere in that content.
This is done because search engines think a website is useful if there are other websites referring to it. This is called a backlink.
To summarize, they would create a lot of links to your website to make search engines think that your website is very useful.
In the short term, this will look great since this will indeed bring your website high in the ranks.
However, today's search engines have guards against such behaviors; when they detect fake backlinks, they would start penalizing the website.
To compansate with this, those companies would continuously create new fake websites to backlink to yours and they would fund their backlink farms with your money.
Sooner or later, this will become unsustainable and your website will start losing visibility so all your investments will vanish for a short term gain.
The Right Way
The right way to do is to go through the SEO guidelines published by search engines such as Google, Bing etc. and bring the website to the
standards mentioned in those guidelines.
This is also the hard way since some of those requirements take a lot of time to achieve.
However, any investment done here is a long term investment and it will pay back more and more later since you do the change once and it stays there.
Google for example has some tools for you to test any website and see what are missing for a better SEO.
See web.dev or search for Lighthouse to test any website.
There are 4 main categories search engines look for: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
Performance is about how fast your website is. Accessibility is about how usable it is from different surfaces especially for mobile.
There are some best practices defined by the best developers that every website should follow.
Finally, a website should declare what it is about to the search engine.
When it's done the right way you will notice your website going higher and higher in search results over time.
This process takes about 6 months minimum to see a significant impact.
The Advanced Way
When you have thousands of competitors, some number of those will go through the same list and complete every single item.
You would still need a differentiator to separate yourself from the others.
This is when things get interesting.
At the heart of the issue everything will point to how much value your website provides to its users, how happy your customers are,
how good you leverage advanced tooling, how you create a healthy feedback cycle with those tools and your improvements and eventually
how well you market your website.
This is both a technically and non-technically advanced challenge.
First goal is to make sure people immediately find your website useful for the service or the product they were searching for.
In other words, the page they are landing should be relevant to their searches and they should immediately see it so they won't leave.
Then, people who visit your website for a service/product you provide would stay or come back to your website for that business.
You need to convince your visitors that your website is the best place for that business.
If this is an experience company, website should for example show testimonials; or if this is a new company, it should show incentives
try a new company like you: say better price, flexibility, better support etc.
Then you need to continuously check how your users are behaving within your website to understand what they are trying to do.
You need to check bad and good keywords leading to your website; then you need to emphasize the good ones and stop supporting the bad ones.
You might discover a new pivot you haven't thought about before. See, SEO isn't only about showing what you do, sometimes it's about changing what you do.
This is just a high level summary how a good SEO should work. By working with us, we make sure you get best out of your website.
