Imagine the internet as a shopping centre. You have a well put together store with helpful staff and reliable, quality goods for sale. Your online store has been set up as you’ve always intended it to look but people aren’t entering the store. It’s not because you haven’t made an effort or a great product; it’s because they can’t find you!
When we talk about SEO, we’re shining light on exactly what you want the customer to see, and making the journey as carefree as possible so people want to find out more and want to share your site with their friends and colleagues.
It isn’t only bringing customers into your store though. By giving a smooth experience on your site, you reduce the chance of users going back to Google and choosing the next competitor down. For example we make pages quick to load, we want answers at the click of a button and by having a well laid out site that’s easy to navigate with the correct links to keep readers reading, or shoppers buying. With the right frame of mind and persistent updates you can reach the top result for searches in your field whether locally or globally; where I come in is making those changes, keeping the site current and opening up the content to as many potential customers as possible whilst monitoring other business in the same area and suggesting improvements where you can provide a better service than your competitors.
Who am I?
I’m Toby, a Web Developer for several years until I found how fun SEO could be and decided to focus my efforts into the quality of a website rather than the quantity. It’s a constant competition to make the best websites and it has real monetary stakes for those at the top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). I’ve built and maintained websites for other companies, primarily either B2B (Business to business) or council sites, which require a high standard of Accessibility.
I initially started out as a graphic designer which led me into the frontend side of web design when I started coding. It doesn’t take long to find websites with poorly maintained frontend designs such as over stretched photos, spelling errors and almost entirely empty pages with only a few words that were started but never finished. I don’t believe these sites are like this because people were lazy, but because they didn’t know exactly what to write or how to lay things out, which if you’re running a business, there simply isn’t much time to sit down and work these things out.
But I don’t only work on the frontend, there are critical components to a websites health that require work on the backend or even where the average user would likely never look. For example page loading speed is very important to keep users interest and rank higher in the major web browsers scoring. An example of where the average user would never look are alt tags, short passages that should be associated with most of your images on a page (That are not purely decorative), describing the content of the image for people who may be visually impaired, this is critical in encouraging a wider range of users to visit and use your site.