SEO

Technical foundations

These are the things the website itself has to get right: pages that load quickly, work well on phones, are served securely with an SSL certificate, have clean page addresses and a sensible title and description on every page, and come with a sitemap so that search engines can find everything. They are the part that is hardest to bolt on afterwards, so they are built in from the start.

Content

Search engines reward pages that answer what people are actually asking. For an online shop that means product descriptions written for your customers, not the supplier’s text pasted onto every competitor’s site, plus guides and explanations for the questions buyers have before they are ready to buy. A glossary like this one is a small example.

Links and reputation

Links from other reputable websites, such as suppliers, trade bodies, local directories and the press, act like recommendations. A few good ones beat many poor ones, and bought links can do real harm.

How long it takes

A new or newly rebuilt site usually takes several months to settle into its results, and SEO is never quite finished, because competitors and search engines keep changing. Be wary of anyone who promises a guaranteed first place: nobody controls the results. Traffic is only half the story, too: your conversion rate decides how many of those visitors become customers.