Why your creative or purpose-led business needs SEO

Image: Jess Bailey via Unsplash

Are you one of the 96%?

A recent Ahrefs survey revealed that over 96% of websites get ABSOLUTELY ZERO traffic from Google.

So when people are typing queries into Google, 96% of websites aren't being returned as options to click on.

Have you checked your website traffic lately? Hopefully you are seeing some clicks from Google and aren't a member of the 96 club, but if you're not getting many visitors from organic traffic, it's time to get your SEO on.

What is search engine optimisation?

If you're not familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO), here's a quick 101 on what it is. (If you know this, feel free to skip!)

SEO is the process by which you set up your website to make it as simple as possible for Google and other search engines to find, crawl and index your content. If Google can do all three of these things, it can then return your website as an option when people are searching for things.

SEO is split into on-page (what people can see on your site when they visit) and back-end (the stuff only Google looks at).

Why does my creative or purpose-led business website need SEO?

Google is the world's largest search engine by far: nearly 82% of desktop searhes are done via Google. If your website isn't search engine optimised, you're really hampering your organic traffic.

AI searches via tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity are definitely becoming more popular, but optimising your website for Google and more traditional search engines will also help with being found on these tools.

If you run paid ads, you may think that lets you off the hook when it comes to SEO. Stats, however, show that 53% of website traffic comes from organic search, compared with just 15% from paid search. So you do need to harness the power of SEO and, more importantly, it's completely free to do so. You may as well optimise the heck out of your site because you really have nothing to lose.

If you've got a great social media following you may think you don't need to worry about SEO because people are coming directly from your Instagram or Facebook or whatever. But with traffic from social media not being that high either (there are some interesting stats in this report), you may find yourself spending loads of time creating posts or Reels that don't drive much traffic and that essentially disappear from view after 48 hours.

SEO, however, is free to implement, and a little goes a really long way. A well-optimised website is always on, and always ready to answer the queries people are typing into Google, whether that's "fertility nutritionist in Bristol", "online moonology" or "sales strategies for purpose-driven businesses" (all real life examples of sites I've worked on!).

Six ways you can boost your SEO right now

Looking at SEO from an on-page point of view (i.e. what your visitors can see when they visit), here are some simple things you can sort out today.

• Google loves content that's E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Words on your website needs to show that you're an expert in your field who knows what they're talking about, and that your content is trustworthy. To do this, you need a minimum amount of copy on each page, especially the home page (research suggests 400-600 is a good range).

• Backlinks also really help the E-E-A-T criteria, because they tell Google that your site is legitimate enough to be referenced by other websites.

• Make sure your website has keywords that spell out the product or service you're offering, who you offer it to and where you offer it.

• Structure your website pages properly with header tags. You should have one H1 tag per page, which acts like the title of your page and tells Google what it's all about. Make sure your H1 contains those sweet keywords to further help Google categorise your site. Then use your H2, H3s, H4s etc to structure the rest of your content and show Google what it's all about.

• Don't neglect your page titles and meta descriptions. Make sure they sum up the content of the pages and include keywords that match your on-page ones.

• Blog, blog then blog some more. This survey shows that websites with a blog get 57% more visitors, 67 more leads, earn 97% more inbound links and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t. Google loves fresh content that it can crawl and index, and blogging is the easiest way to do this. Blogs also answer questions that people are asking and showcase your authority on a subject, two more things that Google really loves.

Creative and purpose-led SEO support

Worried that you're in the 96 club and need some support to get your SEO on track? Book in a free, no-obligation chat and we can talk about how my creative copywriting and website audits can make your business more visible on Google.