SEO Petersfield

SEO or search engine optimisation can help Petersfield businesses attract more traffic to their websites.

How does SEO work?

Google crawls the web analysing and indexing any pages it finds. It analyses each page's contents and works out what the page is about, it then puts the pages details in its index. So when someone visits Google and performs a search, Google will checks its index for pages that best match that search. It returns the results on what're referred to as the Search Engine Results Pages, often abbreviated to SERPs. The results are ordered by relevance. The most relevant result first, and least relevant last.

So for any Petersfield business looking to use SEO as part of their marketing strategy you need to think about how to make your pages relevant, or more relevant. The pages of your Petersfield businesses website have to perform two duties.

1. Provide useful, relevant information to users.
2. Attract traffic from the search engines by targeting users "search terms".

1. Providing Relevant Content.

So what is relevant content? Well most searches fall into one of four categories, this is often referred to as user intent.

a. Navigational.

Our users intent here is a specific website, but they don't know the exact url. An example search navigational would be "bbc". The users intent here is to get to bbc's website.

b. Informational.

The next kind of search is informational. Here the user is looking for background information about a particular subject. An example search might be "what is seo". Here the user isn't looking for any particular website, just background information about SEO.

c. Commercial.

Here our user is looking for particular products and services, perhaps comparing between between suitable products or services. An example search could be "seo in petersfield". Here the user is looking for an SEO service located in the Petersfield area.

d. Transactional.

Our users intent is now to make a purchase, download a file, use a contact form, or perform some other "transaction". An example of a transactional search could be "best price for seo in petersfield".

For each of these "intents" our user is looking for different kinds of information, and your Petersfield businesses website has to provide it. You could be providing articles and free downloads in the informational stage, at the commercial stage you should make it easy to see the benefits of your products or services, and at the transactional stage you need to make sure its easy for your users to perform whatever it is you need them to do, whether that's making a purchase, using a contact form, clicking a link etc.

Ideally you want your website to provide all these types of information, and to make it easy to users to flow from one stage to the next. A user might initially only be looking for background information about a subject, with a search like "what is search engine optimisation", but your website should be gently guiding them towards commercial (demonstrating how your products and services can solve their problem), and on towards the tranactional.

Attracting traffic to your Petersfield website.

You'll have noticed that the users search, search terms, in the above examples are all different;

"bbc"
"what is seo".
"seo in petersfield"
"best price for seo in petersfield"

Of course the kind of searches that people might do for your business, products or services will be different. Google provides tools for you to see just how many people are searching for these "terms". Generally the shorter the "term" the more people will be using it. So more people will search for "what is seo" than "best price for seo in Petersfield".

So lets look at the search term "best price for seo in petersfield". You'll notice that this terms also includes "seo in petersfield", so by targeting the first term we're also targeting the second one at the same time. So hopefully our page will be discovered by users searching for both terms.

Lets take this webpage as an example. The term we're targetting here is "seo petersfield". The title of this page is "SEO Petersfield", an exact match, so Google can be pretty sure what our page is about. If our title was something else, not at all related to "seo petersfield" then the page wouldn't be indexed so highly for that term.

So within the text we've also mentioned "seo petersfield", so Google is in no douby what our page is about, we've also used other related terms which Google is clever enough to work out as related; search, engine, search engine, optimisation etc.