Read More

Unfortunately, there’s no “one size fits all” approach to SEO. Concentrating on either technical SEO or the content will help bring for traffic, and the trick is finding the balance which is right for your site. There is some overlap between the two areas of SEO, but if you’re confused about what each means, here’s our explanation.

Content Marketing or Content SEO

This is about the experience of users on your website, and how the site is perceived by the Google search algorithm. Content SEO covers issues such as:

• The name of your URL, which should ideally reflect what your company is about
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions – the small paragraph of text displayed on a search results page encouraging the user to click through
• Headlines and titles – these break up content and should try to tie the user into the site and content
• Body content – any article should both engage and inform.
• Hyperlinks – you can use links within your content to encourage users to explore other areas of your site.
• Layout – pages should flow well, and be clearly and attractively laid out.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO on the other hand is more about the programming of the website, with an aim or maximising usability and helping the Google search engine discover your page. There are lots of things you can look at to help with this process, some of which include:

• The robots.txt – this is what the Googlebot engine looks for when indexing new websites. Always ensure that this is working properly.
• Sitemaps – if you have a large website with lots of different URLs, then make sure you have a sitemap to help the Googlebot work out what pages are available.
• Crawling – this is about making sure your pages link together properly, and that they can be indexed and ranked properly.
• Performance – sites which load slowly are poorly ranked as Google knows that users don’t want to wait around.

What to concentrate on?

Although the simple answer is that you need to do everything, few companies have a bottomless pit of marketing money. In order to work out how to balance your marketing spend between content and technical look at:

• What your competitors are doing – if they have better and more thorough content than you do, they are going to rank higher.
• How your SEO rankings compare with competitors – if you’re already ahead, then you may not have to spend money immediately.
• The speed of your site – are there any particular pages which are slow to load, or is it an overall site issue?
• Your Google search console report – this page will show any errors and issues which Google has already identified with your site. This is a good starting point for quick fixes.

Create a Plan

Whatever you decide should be your SEO approach, planning is always key. It’s very easy to spend lots of money on SEO without having a clear idea about what you are trying to achieve, and how to measure success or failure.