What is SEO and why is it important in Malta?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about increasing the quality and quantity of user traffic a website receives from organic search results. Basically, SEO is every effort you make towards your website ranking at the top of Google Search results for relevant search terms. For most businesses in Malta SEO is normally something they’ve heard of, but haven’t looked into properly, or brushed it off as an unnecessary marketing expense that they can do without. This results in a huge amount of missed opportunities. Here’s why.

Think about the way you research and purchase a product. We’re willing to bet that most of the time, your journey starts with a Google search. You’re either researching the product type, a specific brand or perhaps you already know what you want. You might just be looking for a website that delivers to your country. 

With that in mind, think about just how many purchasing journeys in your industry are started each day. How many of those is your business missing out on because your website isn’t optimised for SEO, and not appearing at the top of search results?

Another reason that for businesses in Malta SEO is a must is because of international competition. More and more businesses are looking overseas for customers thanks to the boom in eCommerce and the shift to remote work. This means that many businesses are less limited by geographic locations and can offer their services more broadly. This is where SEO efforts & Google Search results become essential. If you can rank well against all your competitors, including international ones, you’re guaranteeing that a large number of potential customers will find you organically.

SEO Services by Switch

At Switch, we understand that your website’s performance can make or break your company’s goals in a number of ways. While we can help you build a beautiful website, it would essentially be worthless without a steady stream of high-quality traffic. That’s where our SEO services come in.

Optimising your website to attract high-intent users from search is one of the first things we suggest. A large percentage of business leaders underestimate the power of SEO in Malta. And in doing so, miss one of the most effective ways of generating leads.

We get this done through a specific process that’s tailored to each of our clients. In the following paragraphs, we’ll take you through what the steps we take usually are. We’ll talk about why each step is so important, and what sets us apart from others in the field. You can also learn more about the importance of SEO in a little more detail if that’s what you’re looking for. Especially about how it can affect your brand’s trust & authority.

If you’re ready to talk about how to introduce SEO into your business, click here and let’s get the ball rolling. Otherwise, keep reading!

How Switch handles SEO in Malta

Context

Understanding the Industry

Before even looking at your website, we study the context of your business and its place within your industry. This is where we will need the majority of your input. At the end of the day, you know your industry and business better than anyone. During the process of onboarding a new client, we also set our research team loose. Their task is to gather every shred of information they can from all the sources available.

Audience Identification

One cannot really understand an industry without also analysing the market that it serves in-depth. Audiences can range from an entire country’s worth of purchasers to a handful of individuals responsible for purchases within organisations. Each audience that we identify always requires a unique approach, as they always differ in their behaviour and interests. Accurately understanding what attracts the right audience is already half the SEO content battle won.

Competitor Analysis

As part of our research, we deep-dive into all marketing being done by all local & international competitors in your industry. This usually results in an understanding of audiences that are currently already being targeted. Along with those that are currently left out and might be worth communicating to. When appropriate, we also analyse overseas players in the industry for further industry insights.

Website Technical Audit

Consistently high-ranking websites are created and optimised in a very particular way. This allows Search Engines like Google to easily scan them to understand their structure and content. The result of this scan judges whether they’re high-quality enough to rank well on search result pages. If your website was not built with SEO in mind, it may be lacking in certain key technical SEO areas, stifling performance.

We’ll perform an in-depth analysis of your website, then highlight and prioritise changes that would greatly improve SEO performance. Suggested adjustments can be related to any of the following:

• Indexing errors
• Low-quality content
• Incorrect Robots.txt usage
• Mobile page issues
• Structured data errors
• Inaccurate metadata
• No internal link optimisation
• Lack of https security
• Slow page speed
• Duplicate content
• Broken links

Content Strategy & Production

Keyword Research

With a strong foundation of research and knowledge of the industry, we can now begin our keyword research. Using cutting-edge industry tools, we determine which attainable keywords are most relevant to your business. These will also depend on what resources we have at our disposal. This is where our creativity and industry knowledge shines.

Attempting to rank for the most obvious industry keywords is a tempting idea, however, it’s usually an extremely expensive endeavour. Many-a-time there are other keyword opportunities hiding beneath the surface. These would allow us to capture specific parts of the market with significantly less effort and required resources. Capturing ancillary keywords gives a website just starting to optimise for SEO the chance to begin collecting useful traffic, while also building its authority through great content.

Effective, Long-lasting Content

Putting all the research and technical jargon aside, you still need excellent content to be able to attract your target audience. At Switch, we are a multidisciplinary team of writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, video specialists, and audio dabblers. We’re happy to push ideas around and see how they grow and flourish as each mind adds something to the story. 

With a broad and eclectic set of sources of inspiration and an unusual way of connecting the dots, we’re known for creating work that’s beautifully innovative.

Authority & Link Building

Ranking well in competitive keyword landscapes also depends on the number of times other websites have linked to yours. We call these backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more authority you have in Google’s mind. And the more highly you’ll rank for a given keyword. Google also takes into account other factors, such as your social media presence and online conversations about your brand.

Building quality backlinks and authority is extremely important, but it’s also a complicated process. One of the most challenging but effective ways of building backlinks is to create content that other websites want to link to. The more authority the website that has linked to you has, the more valuable the link.

Through our content strategy and keyword research, we’ll identify the absolute best opportunities available to build these links. With time and effort, ranking for more and more competitive and valuable keywords will become easier.

Optimisation & Reporting

Just like any other marketing campaign, reporting and analysis of results is an essential part of the process. Here’s how:

• Keeping constant track of our progress on each individual keyword we’re attempting to rank for.
• Monitoring the performance of each piece of content we produce, along with what the competition is actively doing.
• Using a combination of our years of experience and the industry tools available to us.

Through an extensive set-up process, we’ll also make sure to be constantly analysing the behaviour of the traffic we’re drawing. This way, we make sure we’re pulling in the intended audience. At the end of the day, getting huge amounts of traffic is useless if nobody is converting into paying clients. Regardless of the results, we will always aim to boost the conversion rate of all the traffic we send to your website through a live content strategy and constant keyword research.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Matching user intent to useful content.

The whole point of a search engine is simple. It takes what people are searching for, scours the internet for it, then provides the closest matches. That may be the mother of all oversimplifications, but that’s the basic gist. This happens really quickly, and it happens literally billions of times per day.

If you want a little more detail on how search engines (mostly Google) have gotten this done over the years, take a look at this video by Google themselves.

With all that context in mind, SEO is basically the act of making it as likely as possible for a search engine to pick your website when someone searches a term that’s relevant to your business.

Quality Traffic

Digital marketing efforts are often measured in clicks. Your marketing team might give you a report on a particular campaign and hail it a success because it generated so many of them. 

But this begs the question – how many of those clicks were actually worth anything?

The click is only the midway point of the journey towards a conversion. If your campaigns generate 1,000s of clicks, but 95% of those clicking users never got past your homepage, how successful are they?

This is the most obvious reason for investing in SEO, and, in turn, investing in traffic from organic search results. Think about your own behaviour. If you’ve Googled something and clicked on a result you found interesting, you’re going to give a decent look at that website. Especially if the site has what you’re looking for.

Trust & Awareness

If a website ranks at the top of Google search results for a relevant query, that result alone provides it with some level of authority and credibility. You’re much more likely to trust a website that occupies the spot usually kept by Wikipedia. Then, if that website ranked #1, the user clicked, then had a positive experience, a relationship has been formed. Even if it’s the first time that particular user is interacting with that brand.

If SEO is properly implemented on a website, it will achieve high rankings on a number of relevant industry keywords. Then, it can enjoy a flow of organic traffic and leads without having spent a single cent on paid digital advertising.

As we’re explaining above, it’s obviously not something that can be achieved at the drop of a hat. It requires technical knowledge, a sound strategy, the means to produce great content, and a little bit of grit.

Does your business need SEO services?

If you have (or need) a website which will generate leads/purchases with the right traffic sent to it, then you definitely need SEO services. If you had to take potential leads and spread them out on a scale from cold to hot, the majority of leads that are generated through SEO are definitely on the hot end due to their intent. And what business doesn’t need more hot leads?

For businesses that want to be ahead of the curve in Malta SEO is a no-brainer. That’s because of a combination of competition from overseas markets, along with the apathetic approach to SEO that many local businesses suffer from. If you’re ready to take the next step and are looking for a guide, click here.

Free SEO Audit

Still unsure whether your website needs an SEO strategy? Why not start with finding out where your website stands from a technical SEO point of view? Just fill in the form below to get a free, no-strings-attached audit of your site, sent straight to your email.

SEO Trends in 2022

If you want to read about the very latest trends dominating SEO in 2022, and how they will affect your SEO efforts in Malta, click below.

Further Reading

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, here’s a list of articles we’ve put together at Switch on the subject. These are based on our decades of experience, and include tried and tested tips & suggestions. We hope you find them useful.

Planning 2022: SEO

Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Tips to Get Started

Why Writing for SEO in 2021 is Bad SEO Advice

Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out.

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

The post SEO Malta: A Complete Guide appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Aligning the customer buying cycle with SEO

In everything you do, whether it’s SEO, content marketing or any other type of web marketing, make sure that you understand how the customer’s buying cycle fits in. Just to refresh your memory a little bit, the buying cycle is split up into 4 different stages; attention, interest, desire and action. You can use the acronym AIDA to help you remember the sequence. There are other variations that incorporate other stages, such as the loyalty stage at the end of the cycle. Below is a diagram that shows the different stages:

 

The attention stage

This is the initial step that every consumer makes before buying a product or service. Usually at this stage the consumer searches for a product by using a generic keyword such as ‘black car’. The consumer is quite unsure about the different models and prices available. At this stage the consumer is made aware of the different options available.
Keywords that fall under this category are quite high in terms of search engine traffic and since the consumer is not yet ready to buy, it won’t be worth focusing your SEO strategy on these keywords. This is because it is quite difficult to rank for these keywords due to high competition, and if you had to rank for these keywords there’s a very slim chance that you’ll get a return.

The interest and desire stages

The consumer is now searching for keywords such as “black car reviews” or “compare black cars”. At these stages the consumer is still not ready to buy, however he might be susceptible to marketing messages related to the benefits of a particular model. By now, he has gathered enough information and has a clear picture on what he really wants to buy. It is important to include some of these keywords in your SEO campaign so that when the consumer is looking for different alternatives, your product will be one of the available options. However it is important to understand that it will take more time to rank for these keywords since a lot of your competitors might also target them.

The action stage

The last stage of the buying cycle is when the consumer is ready to take an action and is finally interested to make the actual purchase.  The consumer is now searching for keywords that are specific, such as “Ford Fiesta 2012 model” or “mini cooper 2013”. You definitely have to include these types of keywords since there is a better chance that you will get a return. This is because at this stage your website visitors already know what they want to purchase. So now it’s a question of whether your product is better than your competitor’s, and whether it is at the right price that the consumer is willing to pay for.

Keyword Research

If you want to get a return out of SEO, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on highly targeted keywords. What I mean by this is that you need to focus on keywords that will attract customers that are at the final stages of the buying cycle discussed above. In terms of potential traffic, it will be much lower than if you had to target generic keywords and you might think that it won’t be worth all the effort. However, since we’re interested in increasing our sales figures by using SEO, our best bet would be to attract customers that are ready to buy.
You will find these types of keywords by using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner. This is a tool that you can find in your Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one yet, you can go here to create one for yourself. As soon as you log into your account you will see something like the screenshot below:

 
Now go to Tools and click on Keyword Planner as shown below:

When you’re in the Keyword Planner section choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas,” it is found under “What would you like to do?” Now start entering some keywords related to your product. Let’s say that we sell Ford Fiesta cars, the form will look something like this:

For this purpose leave the other fields empty. Your next step would be to choose the countries and languages that you’d like to target; all found under ‘Targeting’. When you’re ready with the form click on ‘Get Ideas’. Now choose the ‘Keyword Ideas’ so that the tool will give you a list of keywords with the average monthly search traffic next to each one of them. In other words, this is the number of times that visitors have searched for that particular keyword in Google. As you can see from the list, the more specific the keyword is, the less traffic it generates. Now the question would be, which keywords should you choose? The next section will explain how you will find those keywords that will give you a bigger return.

Finding the Right Keywords for your SEO Campaign

The most common method of choosing keywords for your SEO campaign is by selecting those keywords from the list that you’ve managed to compile in the keyword research phase. Usually you’d choose those keywords that are highly specific to your product.
However there’s a much better way to do it. You can allocate a small budget, not more than $1000, and spend it on Google Adwords. The idea here would be to choose a couple of highly targeted keywords that you’ve found in the research phase and test them on a PPC (pay per click) campaign. Run the campaign for a couple of months let’s say 2 to 3 months. Then spot those keywords that converted, and use them in your SEO campaign. With this method, you’ll save a lot of money on SEO because you will only focus on keywords that are going to get you the money.

Conclusion

As a CMO, make sure that you share your ideas and intentions with your web marketing agency. You have to show them that you know all about the whole process of how SEO works, and that you’re not only interested in getting traffic, you also want to get a return out of it. I’m mentioning this because a lot of agencies out there will simply focus on getting you ranked highly in Google for particular keywords, and that’s it. They will tell you that they are going to get you massive traffic, and of course you’d think that traffic implies money. Although this might sound good to you, it will never get you the desired return. This is mainly because the visitors that you’re attracting are either not interested enough, or not ready to buy your products yet!

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