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.

Local SEO is the process of optimising your brand’s presence on search engines to get more attention from those who are geographically close. You might wonder, what’s the difference between Local SEO in Malta and just, regular SEO? Malta is so small, Local SEO is just regular SEO, right? Wrong. The difference lies in the way the efforts manifest themselves on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

For example, I’m writing this blog in Swieqi. The below are the results from a “restaurants near me” search I just did on my laptop. (That search term gets around 500 searches per month in Malta, by the way.)

You’ll undoubtedly notice that the majority of the space isn’t taken up by the standard search results – the two at the very bottom. Rather, the page is dominated by the section above, called the Google Snack Pack. It takes your exact location, then finds the top 3 local business listings most relevant to your query, and displays their info to you, along with a helpful map to show their exact locations. 

On mobile, it’s a similar story.

And that’s important. Around 40% of all search results in Malta over the last 12 months have originated from mobile devices.

These Snack Pack results pop up every single time there’s a “near me” search, and also whenever there’s a Service in Location search, such as “plumber in Birkirkara”, “coffee shop in Sliema”, or even simply “supermarket malta”. Don’t ignore it – a study has shown that these results claim 33% of all SERP clicks.

Does your business need Local SEO in Malta?

If you sell absolutely anything in a physical shop, or provide a service in a moderately competitive local market, then absolutely, yes. If your business relies on B2B leads, especially in a growing remote-working market, then local SEO might not be as important. 

Local SEO is absolutely essential during touristic high seasons too. Statistics show us that more searches happen on desktop overall, but you can be sure that the overwhelming majority of tourists aren’t lugging their laptop around to search for restaurants.

What can you do to get started?

The quickest way to get up and running would obviously be to secure the services of SEO specialists with knowledge of the local market. That said, here are 3 things you can do right now that will start giving you results relatively quickly.

Get yourself onto Google My Business

This is probably the most important step you can take to get started with local SEO. The direct benefits of having a well-optimised Google My Business account fair outweigh the effort required to create it. The most obvious gains being visibility on the snack pack results, along with visibility on Google Maps. If someone searches for your brand name directly, a Knowledge panel will show up on the SERP with the exact information you provide on your My Business account.

It will even allow Google to confidently provide specific information about your business, for even more ease of use for the searcher.

Setting up your brand’s profile on Google My Business is a relatively simple process. Get it done today.

Understand what people are searching for

Having a comprehensive list of search terms that your business would be relevant for is important. These search terms will allow you to make basic optimisations to your website to give you the best possible chance to appear in common search results. 

The most basic way to get an idea of what people search for in your industry is to take a look at Google’s auto-complete suggestions.

Another way of quickly building basic keywords is to brainstorm all possible Services in Location terms we mentioned earlier.

Here’s an easy tool to get you started if you don’t know where to begin.

With these keywords in hand, take a good hard look at all of your brand’s online touchpoints. Are most of the search terms covered in the content of your website? Do the service categories you chose on Google My Business adequately represent all the search possibilities?

Get your online presence in sync

Many businesses in Malta have a few or all of the following:

• Website
• Facebook Page
• Instagram Page
• LinkedIn Page
• Business listings (yellow, findit, etc.)
• Google My Business
• TripAdvisor (or industry equivalent)
• Official business directories

All of these platforms contain basic information about the business such as name, contact details, location, website, etc. The more of these ‘citations’ as they’re known, the more confidently Google will serve that information on the SERP. If you have multiple citations that contradict each other, that’s going to do more harm than good. Every once in a while, make sure you audit every possible presence your business has online to make sure all the information is still relevant.

Is there more?

Yes. A lot more.

But by completing these first 3 steps, you already give your business a fighting chance. If your particular industry is relatively saturated, these efforts are probably not enough. 

You’ll likely need to restructure your website to take advantage of the benefits of technical and On-Page SEO. Your current website might not be mobile-friendly. Your business might benefit from creating excellent content that might build traffic to your site. Building backlinks from high-authority sites is what you might need to get over the hump.

All that said, these first 3 steps are essential. If you want to take your Local SEO efforts to the next level, you know where to find us.

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