sEO marketing

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and SEO Marketing basically means making your website more attractive to search engines.

By understanding what search engines (notably Google) value in a website, you stand a better chance of being listed higher up in relevant searches for your business. Greater visibility on a search engine, leads to more potential sales.

The main areas to understand are on-page, off-page and technical. 

Why is SEO important?

How much your website is seen by customers (organically, not through advertising) is influenced by search engines. 

Whenever you type something into a Google query box, Google decides what websites get shown on p1, p2, p100 etc.

Google decides this after it has gone through the process of crawling the entire web, indexing and ranking websites and deciding which ones are best to show.

Whether your website traffic suffers tumbleweed, or whether you get thousands of visitors a day, is down to many factors, including SEO Marketing. 

What are the benefits of SEO Marketing?

In a nutshell, the benefits are free, organic traffic to your website from your target customers.

The benefits are more often felt in the medium to long term, but if you build the foundations, you will reap the rewards. 

Making your website more attractive to search engines means being more strategic with copywriting, content creation and website structures. It also means delving into the world of keywords, key phrases and links.

It requires being strategic, methodical and then patiently crossing fingers (search engines are not always predictable). 

SEO is probably one of the least understood and most difficult-to-learn marketing concepts for business owners. However, it is also one of the most powerful.

I have witnessed the benefits of getting a client onto page 1 of Google for targeted key search phrases and slowly moving them up the ranks.

Update: SEO is evolving (because search is changing with AI)

Search isn’t just a list of website links anymore. AI summaries are increasingly answering questions directly in the results, which can change how (and whether) people click through to websites.

What this means for small business owners

• You might see fewer clicks even when your visibility improves
• It’s not only about rankings now – it’s also about being clearly understood and trusted as a real, reputable business
• Generic, “same as everyone else” content is easier to ignore. Clear, helpful and genuinely human content stands out
• You may hear terms like AEO / AI SEO / AIEO – the simple point is: the goalposts have moved

The good news: you don’t need to keep up with every change. I do – and I’ll make sure your SEO approach stays current, commercial and focused on the outcomes that matter.

So what is SEM then?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is largely seen as the combined work of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA). 

Not sure where to start? Get in touch, and I’ll map out the quickest, most sensible next steps for your business.