SEO. The promised land. Rank high on Google, get heaps of traffic. It sounds great, and for most of us it also sounds like complete wizardry. I get it. It took me a good year to learn it properly.
How SEO works
It breaks down into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page is everything you do to the pages of your own website. Off-page is everything you do away from your site that still helps you rank. Let's take them one at a time.
Off-page SEO
Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile lives off your website, on the search results page itself. Search something like "flower delivery Auckland" and after the ads you get that box showing three businesses with a map and reviews. That's your Business Profile, and it's one of the best ways to bring local traffic to your business. Getting it right lifts your visibility and sends more people your way.
Backlinks
Next, backlinks, arguably the most important part of off-page SEO. A backlink is simply a link from another website to yours. If I write something on my site and link across to yours, that's a backlink for you.
The more high-quality backlinks you earn, the better, and you generally want to grow that number steadily. Build them too fast and Google gets suspicious. Earn 10, 20 or 30 a month consistently and you're fine. Reach out to business directories and to other sites in your industry writing about similar things, and ask them to link to your pages or feature your content.
What off-page SEO does for you
Building links steadily builds your trust with Google. It signals that you're relevant and credible, because if other people are linking to you, your content is clearly helping them. The more people consume and engage with it, the more you get rewarded. That's off-page SEO in a nutshell: a content strategy, good content, backlinks pointing to it, and a well-optimised Business Profile you actually post on.
On-page SEO
Headers
On-page starts with your header tags: H1, H2, H3 and so on. Those different heading sizes you see on a blog aren't just styling. A bigger heading tells Google "this is the most important thing here", the next size down says "this is second most important", and so on. Getting your headers right is a big part of on-page SEO.
Content
Then there's the content itself. You need enough on the page to properly solve someone's problem or answer their question, and it needs to include the right keywords. Since people are proactively searching, your content has to mention what they're actually looking for. Write enough of it, cover the topic well, and keep it optimised.
Technical on-page factors
A few technical things feed into on-page SEO too. Here are a couple of the important ones.
Broken links
Broken links are links you've created that no longer work. They hurt the experience and they're worth fixing.
Speed
Then there's speed: how quickly your site loads and how fast people can start engaging with it. This is really about user experience, and it keeps getting more important. If your site is slow or awkward to use, Google will penalise you for it.
Pulling it together
On-page SEO is about optimising your website itself: making it fast, relevant and easy for people to understand and engage with. Off-page is about building trust. Relevance and trust, that's the whole thing.
There's a bit of wizardry to it, sure, but once you break it down it's far less scary than it looks. A great place to start is a simple 90-day plan to roll it out step by step.