At GWS, our key online marketing priority is to help businesses become organically visible across the search engines and web.

How does Google rank sites?

Search engines rank the authority of a website according to many different factors, such as backlink number and authority, citations, regularly updated content, high levels of onsite engagement.

Increasingly, social media is becoming more important for the visibility of a website (such as Twitter and Facebook) and we highly recommend businesses who want an online presence to engage socially in some way if they are not already doing so.

Search engines want to show visitors the best results, and have developed sophisticated ways to favour high quality websites: They can no longer be tricked by black hat short cuts such as spam submissions and commenting, keyword stuffing and incomprehensible repetition of phrases or content onsite. Even if some of these methods are currently under Google’s radar, it is not worth the risk – Google will eventually catch up.

The algorithms that search engines use to process information principally assess relevance based on the content that humans (not computers) will see on a page and engage with as well as the links that searchers will follow to a page.

Organic - Lower costs, more traffic

If your site can rank well in organic search, this provides a much lower medium-term cost when compared to the alternative paid options such as Adwords and other platforms for sponsored advertising.

Organic search is also likely to provide more relevant traffic and a higher click-through rate - people tend to trust the standard search results much more than those that are the result of sponsored or paid-advertising. Furthermore, securing a high ranks in the search engines can dramatically improve the perceived importance and credibility of your company. Essentially, it is a level playing field and there is no reason why smaller and medium sized businesses cannot compete with larger rivals if their services and products are good.

PPC – When to Consider Paid Advertising

GWS believe that Organic SEO is almost always a better investment than paid advertising in the medium term but sometimes PPC (Pay Per Click) needs to be run alongside it to ensure your site gets instant visibility in the short term. For more information on this, please refer to our page on Pay Per Click advertising.