SEO Wollongong—Search Engine Optimisation

Talk to IT Wollongong if you want the SEO Wollongong businesses need to get ahead!

How do you give your website the best chance of reaching more people who want what you sell? The easiest and most cost-effective way is with SEO—Search Engine Optimisation.

IT Wollongong is an SEO agency with a strong track record of boosting the online presence of local businesses. We use a full range of SEO techniques to help you rank high on the first page for relevant, popular Google search terms. Whether you’re from the Illawarra or beyond, we can make your website work harder and smarter for you!

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SEO lets your customers know you are open for business!

Rank high in relevant search results

On the modern web, people looking for a product or service will likely use Google to search for it. Therefore, your website has a much greater chance of receiving visitors if it appears regularly in relevant Google search results.

Also, visitors heavily favour websites that appear highest on the search results pages. Ideally, your website should rank within the top three positions for relevant and popular search phrases. If your website isn’t appearing regularly in important search results, you’re missing a big chance to improve your profitability and take your business to the next level.

Of course, you don’t just want more traffic—you want visitors who intend to buy what you offer. When you have an SEO specialist like IT Wollongong on your side, you can expect not only increased website visits, but more relevant visitors. With more and more qualified traffic, you can count on increased sales and profitability.

The SEO Wollongong Deserves: Our Packages

IT Wollongong offers a range of SEO plans to suit the size and budget of your business. All of our packages are month-by-month with no lock-in contracts to limit your options.

  • Our standard SEO packages start at $320 per month.
  • For businesses on tight budgets, we also offer a DIY package for just $80 per month.

Compared with other forms of marketing, these relatively low prices make SEO an attractive and affordable plan for small businesses. See our range of SEO packages for more information.

Illustration Helping to Visualise Search Engine Optimisation
Visualising Search Engine Optimisation concepts

What do IT Wollongong SEO services involve?

The core goal of an SEO campaign is to raise the volume of qualified traffic a website receives. However, every website will have its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, an SEO campaign will involve a range of tactical activities depending on your individual website.

Keeping all possible techniques in mind, IT Wollongong directs its activities to achieve the greatest return on investment for you. To help you understand what we do, we have outlined some of our commonly-used techniques below.

Keyword research—know what your customers are looking for

A crucial component of any SEO strategy is identifying of the most important keywords or search phrases to target.

Most useful keywords or search terms relate directly to the products and services the business offers for sale. In particular, they match the language your target audience would typically use when they look for that product or service. (This may or may not include a brand name.)

Generally, the best terms also have a high search volume, which means people use them often in web searches. Looking at search volume helps us understand how people try to find what your business sells.

Another aspect of keyword research is identifying which phrases suggest buying intent. For example, the search phrase “SEO services in Wollongong” suggests the user is looking to hire an SEO company based in Wollongong. On the other hand, a search term like “SEO tips” does not carry signals of buying intent. Rather, it implies the user is only looking for information.

Relevant terms with high search volumes and strong signals of buying intent are generally the most useful to target. Read our article, A keyword research strategy, to learn more about how we find useful keywords to target.

Web content—Copy writing, polish and guidance

After we identify target keywords, we recommend updates to the content of your website. Content, particularly text content, plays a huge role in SEO success. Our goal is to preserve the character of your existing content, while making sure it excels in key SEO qualities:

  • Relevant to the keywords chosen, and thus to visitors searching for those keywords
  • Offers value to the visitor, such as by answering a question or solving a problem
  • Unique and distinct from similar content online
  • Easy to read and understand
  • Engaging for visitors, who are likely to go elsewhere if bored

Typically, this means updating the information that’s already present on the site. Where your site is light on information, we will recommend adding new pages or sections as needed. If you have multiple pages that are similar, we might also recommend you combine them into one strong page, rather than letting them compete for attention.

As you might guess, text is the foundation of your content when optimising a website for search engines. Other media—such as images, audio and video—are useful for supporting the text, but don’t provide the same core value. Search engines have certainly become smarter about multimedia content, but they still understand the web primarily through text. Therefore, text should always be the primary focus of page content, with other media to highlight and illustrate the information.

Whether we are producing content on your behalf or working in collaboration with you, IT Wollongong will shape your site’s content to meet the needs of both visitors and search engines. Read The importance of high-quality content for SEO for more about how we design high-quality, high-ranking SEO web content.

UX and UI—Improving the human user experience

Good user experience (UX) is a central pillar of modern SEO. It’s easy to understand—nobody likes to spend their time on a website that’s slow, broken or unintuitive. But even beyond the basics, just about any improvement to user experience has the potential to increase traffic.

When visitors have a good experience on your website, they build a positive first impression of your business. As all marketers know, first impressions are hugely important for the selling process!

A good first impression doesn’t just assist in a purchase—it also has the potential to prompt a social media recommendation. This is a big benefit to your business, since it means a naturally-occurring link back to your site.

Google also looks for strong UX when it evaluates your website; after all, its reputation may suffer if it consistently sends people to pages where they have a poor experience. Because of this, UX is one of many factors Google considers when it assigns a page’s rank in search results.

User experience depends on many factors, some more obvious than others. Some aspects we consider include loading speed, ease of navigation/menu organisation, accessibility, content structure, and compatibility with various devices. Our best practice SEO includes assessing all relevant UX factors and improving them where necessary.

The local SEO Wollongong businesses need

For businesses who target a particular location, appearing in Google’s local search results (or “map pack”) has become increasingly important. Creating a listing on various local business directories—such as Google My Business, True Local, Local Search, Yellow Pages and Yelp—helps establish your credentials as a trusted local business. You must also ensure that the info on these “citation sites” is accurate and kept up-to-date.

Citation sites also help establish your trustworthiness, because they provide an independent channel for public feedback. Because they are likely to receive poor reviews, shonky businesses are reluctant to expose themselves to feedback that’s outside their control. Conversely, inviting genuine feedback shows that you are an authentic business who is confident in your service.

Public ratings are valuable for web users choosing which businesses to approach. Obviously, good reviews are desirable—however, even if your service is great, it can be hard to motivate people to give positive reviews. This difficulty leads some SEO agencies to to create fake reviews in an attempt to boost business ratings, a practice we strictly do not employ.

Beyond the obvious ethical concerns, fake reviews are much easier to detect than you might expect! Reviews that don’t seem genuine can have a worse effect than negative reviews, as customers immediately find your business suspicious. Google also has ways to detect fake reviews, and may penalise your local search rankings if it suspects foul play.

A more honest tactic is to actively request reviews from happy customers. However, IT Wollongong still recommends a cautious approach; even with genuine intentions, gathering many reviews quickly (such as by a promotion) can appear unnatural to Google, and may suggest questionable business practices.

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Get an SEO-first website that works for your local business

Off-page SEO—Link earning, rather than link building

Another factor Google considers, is how many inbound links a page receives from other websites. When other sites link to your page, it shows that they consider your content valuable, worthy of their visitors’ attention. That makes inbound links a sign of popularity and trust—a sign which Google is watching for. Therefore, pages with many inbound links tend to rank higher than those with few.

However, knowing the value of inbound links has led some website owners and SEO agencies to gather them through underhanded means. For example, you might have seen social media accounts which seem to do nothing but spam random links. Blog comment sections are another common target. Some agencies even make whole websites for link spam, all because they can sell the opportunity for a backlink.

This may have been effective once upon a time, but fortunately that’s no longer the case. Google has developed highly sophisticated tools to judge the real value of inbound links, and may actively punish sites that appear to use dodgy link-building tactics.

For long-term results, cheating to gain inbound links isn’t going to cut it. Links must be earned rather than purchased; they are useful only if the pages providing them have merit.

Obviously, IT Wollongong does not engage in dodgy link-building schemes. However, we might suggest reaching out to request links from sites that have a genuine reason to connect their visitors with your content. If you have relevant information on your site, receiving a link in this way is definitely an opportunity worth pursuing.

The most important rule to remember is that to get links, you should publish content worth linking. Whether you request links or not, providing high-quality, uniquely valuable content is the most likely way to earn genuine inbound links.

SEO Reporting—Performance tracking and analysis

Typically, SEO is an ongoing process with no quick fixes; that’s why it’s so important to track how your page’s rank changes over time. By mapping optimisation efforts to performance, we keep our SEO activities on track and make sure we’re seeing the desired outcomes.

SEO is a complex exercise, and targets can move without warning. The constant updating of search engine algorithms sometimes leads to both unforeseen outcomes, and new opportunities. Performance tracking allows an SEO specialist to better understand what the search engines want, and also lets us undo any changes that lead to unwanted results.

Analysing data is also an important aspect of performance tracking. Critical thinking is key when we must determine whether a change in performance is due to algorithmic changes, recent SEO activities, or some underlying factor. The better we understand the data, the faster we can respond to any emergent issues.

IT Wollongong uses various methods to track search performance, and perform data analysis. This lest us maintain high online visibility, and make ongoing gains in relevant search results with a lasting impact.

Business people checking SEO performance analysis
Keeping the strategy on track with SEO reporting

Technical SEO—Find areas for improvement with an SEO audit

Technical knowledge also forms an important part of the complete SEO picture. There are countless technical aspects of your webpage that can impact your ranking for better or worse, especially in terms of performance. Here are just some of the technical aspects we typically work on:

  • Creating 301 redirects when you need to move or delete pages
  • Cleaning up HTML markup and CSS files to reduce page loading time
  • Finding and correcting JavaScript errors
  • Implementing caching, compression, and other techniques to speed up page performance
  • Optimising server-level configuration
  • Adding schema markup to help search engines identify your business
  • Adding canonical URLs to avoid the appearance of repeated content
  • Updating code to follow best-practice guidelines

We pride ourselves on our technical SEO—in fact, we guarantee the performance of websites we develop. Our full technical expertise is available to you when you opt for SEO with IT Wollongong.

Web design and development that puts performance first

For best results, a website should be designed with SEO factors firmly in mind. Unfortunately, many websites aren’t! This can result in long page load times, poor user experience, pages that break on mobile or tablet devices, and the absence of important features that support SEO activities. Sometimes, the design of a website is so poor that fixing its problems would take more work than creating a new site from scratch.

In this case, we usually recommend a complete redesign. With our understanding of performance-first web design, we can create a rock solid foundation with maximum SEO potential. If you are attached to your existing design, we can even rebuild while preserving the existing appearance. You might not even notice the difference, until you see the improvement in performance!

Check out the rest of our site if you’d like to learn more about our web design philosophy.

Proud to be an ethical SEO Company

The style of SEO conducted by IT Wollongong is ‘best practice’, ‘white hat’ and ethical. We are fully transparent about what we do, and clearly explain anything our clients ask about. In our view, communicating what we are doing and why, is essential to the overall success of any SEO strategy.

For SEO Wollongong can be proud of, contact us today!

If you are impressed with our approach to search engine optimisation, don’t delay! Consult Steve Perrett on (02) 4227 6630 to find out how IT Wollongong can implement an SEO campaign to boost qualified traffic to your website.

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The satisfaction of SEO success!
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