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.

Or it takes the right moment at the right time with the right word. 

With Google, both apply. 

‘Just Google It’

It started with social media. Originally, ‘googling’ was coined for the Google Friends network, when Google was still a cached webpage on Stanford’s systems. Larry Page signed off with the phrase ‘have fun, and keep Googling!’, and nearly a quarter of a century later, we use ‘google’ instead of ‘look it up’, instead of ‘search engine’, and instead of ‘find out yourself’. 

Similar to Skype (or now, Facetime) and Hoover, Google has ourobouros’d itself: it is not longer referring to a search engine but to a way of thinking, and by extension, to the way we think about things through Google. 

And that way of thinking has changed us, from how we shop to how we find things. 

Googling It: The Beginning

The interesting thing about Google is that it has been mythologised as the first search engine. 

It wasn’t. Google wasn’t even the second or third: it hit roughly 8 years after the first search engine went online, and ten years after the invention of the Internet. 

What Google did better than any of the earlier search engines was ranking. AskJeeves and AltaVista were much bigger search engines at the time, but they delivered web page results according to relevance. Those results didn’t always have what you were looking for: they were just the first results that used the most keywords to what you were looking for. 

But people don’t always look for exactly what they type. 

Sometimes, they look for an answer that can’t be put into words. Not exactly. Not how they need it to be. 

So what Google did was change the way they delivered search results. Instead of basing how pages ranked depending on relevance, they ranked pages by popularity – by how many people had visited those pages, spent time on those pages, what they took away from those pages. 

The early Internet of the 90s wasn’t an organised font of knowledge, as it is now. It was a collection of pages, loosely collated into something forming a database. Before Google, finding what you were looking for was as much luck as it was curation, sometimes more. 

Changing the way they delivered search results was a small thing. 

It was enough to change us. 

How Google Changed the World

People have always been curious. They’ve always wanted to know things, no matter how irrelevant to their lives those kinds of things are; it’s the thrill of knowing that draws. 

Google makes it easier to know. You don’t need to skim past a lot of other data to look something up. If you ask Google, ‘what’s the best Italian restaurant in Malta?’, it’ll give you links to the definitively best Italian restaurants in Malta.

That immediacy is what elevated Google from a search engine to a verb. 

Google gives us the answers, fast and accurate. We don’t need to think for ourselves anymore, not really – why troubleshoot a problem when Google can tell you exactly what to do? 

For retail, this has been the biggest challenge and the biggest benefit. 

Retail pages that rank highly enough on Google reap the benefits of being first-to-mind. They also need to work hard to stay updated and active, otherwise other pages will elbow their way in. Balancing that popularity could – and is – a full time job in itself. 

The Problem with Google

The fundamental problem with Google is that it filters our information. Whatever is most attractive to Google is what you get. 

Some might consider that biased. 

It’s really just inevitable. 

Google made it easier for us to find the information we’re looking for. To be able to do that, there has to be a ranking system in place. Without those metrics, the web is just a library with no index, and you’re armed with a pencil, a notebook, and half an hour to find your way around. 

But Google is also a human product. It isn’t infallible. False and fraudulent claims are common. Your page could just get lost in the mire, drowned out by louder pages offering semi-realistic goals. Now that Google had introduced its fact check feature, this is a rarer occurrence, but it’s still something to keep in mind. Some pages are just louder than others. 

Getting Around with Google

You need to learn to game the system. 

That means SEO. It means keeping your page on Google updated. It means working with Google updates, not against them. It means voice search. It means search, in general. 

Google is an excellent tool for any business to use. Whether or not you’re using it well enough to get the results you want is what you need to think about. 

Here’s five tips to help you figure out if what you’re doing works: 

1. Use Google Analytics. They’re available for free to everyone, and they’re the best non-secret secret about ranking well on Google. People tend to forget they exist, which is a shame: used properly, Google Analytics can increase your conversion rates substantially. 
2. Register with Google My Business. Especially important if you’re starting a new business, Google My Business can help make sure that people can find your business by adding a location pin. It integrates with Google Maps, making it easier for your consumers to find you when they’re on the cusp of making a purchase decision. 
3. Optimise your site’s speed. Google ranks by popularity. Part of that popularity is determined by site speed. Using a speedy hosting service and minimising the amount of HTTPS requests on your website will help your site load faster, which means people won’t click out of that website before it’s finished loading. Considering 29% of mobile users will switch to another site if it loads slowly, it’s beneficial to have a quick-loading site for more than one reason.
4. Use keywords. Research what keywords are relevant to your business. Make sure those keywords feature in headings, page titles, and URLs. People who are looking for something will use specific keywords for a reason; use that reason. 
5. Stay updated with Google. Maybe it’s overkill, but if you know what’s going to happen, you can stay ahead of the curve. Google updates their policies and algorithms often enough that you can definitely count on at least one throwing you a curveball. The way to mitigate it is to monitor Google – closely. And often.

Recently there’s been discussions about cutting down Google’s monopoly on information. 

It’s unlikely to go forward. 

Google, as a business is too big and too entrenched in day to day life to actually fail, but it could change rapidly to avoid the criticism levelled at it by companies, governments, and the population. When that happens, much like the death of the cookie, the way we look up information will change too. 

Stay aware. 

Or, if you’re busy, hire a watchdog to stay aware for you. 

That works too. 

The post How Google Changed The Way We Do Things appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

A noun, a verb, a culture… a way of life?
“Google is God” is what one marketing expert once said, and he may have been right.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and explore some of the milestones which made Google what it is today.

Memory lane starts here

• www.google.com was registered as a domain on September the 15th 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The term google is a play on words with the word googol which is the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry and Sergey wanted to create a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web – and it worked!
• The first Google doodle was the image of the burning man incorporated into the logo. This was because Larry and Sergey were off to the Burning Man Festival and wanted to let people know where they were. This was in August 1998, the same time when Andy Bechtolsheim, co founder of Sun wrote a $100,000 cheque to Google Inc. – a company which didn’t exist yet.
• Google filed for incorporation on September 4th 1998 and deposited Andy Bechtolsheim’s cheque. They worked out of a garage and hired their first employee – Craig Silverstein.
• In May 2000 Google won its First Webby Awards – Technical Achievement and People’s Choice.
• In October 2000 Google AdWords was launched with 350 customers. It promised to allow keyword targeting, performance feedback, and online activation with a credit card.
• July 2001 Google Images is launched providing access to 250 million images.
• In December 2001 Google released it’s first zeitgeist – showing what terms people had searched for throughout the year.
• Google AdWords got a major overhaul in February 2002, it now included cost per click pricing.
• Google AdSense is launched in March 2003 – allowing business owners to access Google’s network of advertisers.
• Google Print was launched in December 2003. It’s now known as Google Books and is a collection of more than 20 million scanned books.
• In April 2004 Gmail was launched, offering 1 GB of storage. It now has over 425 million users.
• Google Analytics is released in November 2005 – allowing marketers to effectively analyse their campaigns.
• In 2006 Google released a variety of apps such as Google Calendar, Google Trends, Google Translate, and Google Wallet. Google also acquires YouTube.
• Android is announced in November 2007
• September 2008 – Google Chrome is announced – by 2013 Chrome boasts more than 750 million users.
• In September 2010 Google Instant is launched – showing search results as you type.
• TrueView is launched in December 2010– ads on YouTube now allow you to skip the ad after 5 seconds if you feel it’s not relevant. This helped marketers analyse their adverts and made them work harder and getting people’s attention.
• Two-step verification is launched in February 2011– providing added security to Google accounts.
• April 2012– Google Drive is launched, simplifying the lives of many by allowing users to share, store, and edit information in a cloud based system.
• Google Now makes an appearance in June 2012 – giving you information before you’ve even asked for it!
• October 2014 – Inbox for Gmail is launched allowing you to focus on the emails that really matter.

And what about 2015?

Well, with Google you never know. One thing is certain – Google has had a huge impact on most people’s lives in one way or the other, and this won’t stop any time soon.
We like to think Google has improved life for the better by connecting more people and allowing for better dissemination of information. What’s your take on this?

The post G is for Google appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I was set thinking about this while I was having a conversation with a friend recently who was complaining about the quality of search results and the way search engine optimisation works. Her point (which is a valid one, to be fair) was that the giants in the industry (for example eBay and Amazon) always get first places in search results for products they carry.

In order to learn how to search better you need to understand how search engines work and how people try to find ways of gaming the system in order to get better results.
The first and most obvious issue to keep in mind is that search engines only have one aim in mind: Delivering the most relevant results to whoever is searching. They might make all their money from advertisers, but at the end of the day the only reason people keep coming back to the Googles of this world is because they find what they need most of the times they search.
This means that something like Google will do all it can to sort out relevant content and to use a massively complex set of criteria in order to choose which content should be rated higher.
It was all simple enough when Google sorted its search results based on an internet which was not geared towards its sorting methods. However, once people realised that Google’s ranking meant a lot to the traffic you were receiving, people started analysing them in order to find ways to boost their placing in searches. From then on, it’s been a constant cat and mouse chase with Google improving their algorithms in order to filter out cheaters and keep on delivering the most relevant content on a regular basis.

There are thousands of factors that affect search engine rankings, but I’ve picked on one for the intents and purposes of this article: linking.

Links & SEO

Traditional SEO companies found ways to trip the system in their favour. Website publishers caught on to this and started cashing in on it. At first, Google used to determine your relevance based on the number of links to your site. This made sense at the time, because it was assumed that people linking to your site are a “vote of confidence”. This tactic was discovered and people started putting up links left, right and centre to boost their search engine rankings.

Google tweaked this to check the text in the hyperlink to try improving the system, but this was not enough. Next, it started checking the number of outgoing links on the page and splitting scoring based on that (so a site with 2 outgoing links only gave 50% weight to each of the sites linked from it). It then started checking the quality of the sites linking in to your site and giving you more scoring based on that. Finally, and in its most drastic clampdown yet, it decided to start penalising all low quality links pointing into a site. This meant that the “old” method of submitting links was basically not only not helping your rankings, but getting you penalised.

When traditional SEO companies tell you that they are working on submitting your site to build links, they will lead you to believe that they can bring your score up by simply increasing the number of links into your site. But the truth is simple: You do not want to game the system because you do not want to be in a system that can be gamed.

Search engines should improve, search engines should be doing their job better in the future, and history has shown that any time the large search engines have found someone trying to “cheat” their way up to the top, the fall was long and fast. Just ask RapGenius. Google caught them cheating and they lost around 80% of their traffic overnight. OK, they did get their traffic back after apologising publicly and rectifying their errors, but they were super quick to react and had enough clout to carry it off. Not everyone has major VC backup.

The bottom line

If you want to be found in search engines, there are things that you can do. It is not a lost cause, on the contrary, it is a very exciting time to be in the game. The equation is very simple, the more likeable your site is, the more chances you have of being noticed by search engines. There are thousands of technical factors to work on, and we do encourage you to make sure that all of them are bang on. Once you’ve sorted this out, work on a two-pronged strategy that will see you winning search engines over:

• Build a site with content, resources and tools that people want to link to, talk about, refer to and rave about.
• Work on a guest posting strategy that sees you building a slow and steady stream of natural inbound and outbound links.

At Switch we specialize in doing this as one of our services, learn more about this here: https://switch.com.mt/seo-malta/

But that’s enough for now. We’ll stop at the what. We’ll go into how to do these in future blog posts.

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