What is ethical SEO? A practical guide for business owners

SEO

Have you ever tried to find something online and been frustrated that you couldn’t? I know I have.

The reason that happened was that the website that did have the right information or product on was badly “optimised” for search engines.

Basically, the search engine couldn’t find the right information for you.

Frustrating, no?!

Search Engine Optimisation (also known as the helpfully short and snappy acronym SEO) is the practice that would have allowed that website to be discoverable to search engines.  

Now, you may know this already. But did you know that there are different ways of practising SEO? Just like in many aspects of life, you can do SEO in a way that follows the “rules” and in a way where you don’t!

So, in this article, we are not just going to break down what SEO is in general. But we are also going to dive into the murky waters of marketing ethics. We are going to define “ethical SEO” and explain why it is necessary for long-term sustainable growth.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving your website so it will be properly understood by search engines and ranked in their organic search results. 

All the activities that are undertaken when you are optimising your website can be grouped into three areas:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

On-page SEO refers to all the activities that take place on your website pages. Examples include adding keywords to your content or writing meta descriptions (more on this below!). 

Off-page SEO refers to all the activities that take place away from your website. For example, building links from third-party websites to your site is classed as off-page SEO.

Technical SEO refers to any activities that look to improve how a website functions, such as improving loading time. 

What is ethical SEO?

A lot of people would define ethical SEO (or “white hat SEO“) as the practice of sticking as closely to search engine guidelines as possible. This means:

• Writing genuinely helpful, high-quality content that aims to answer the user’s question.
• Building off-page authority through relationships.
• Ensuring websites are fast, easy to crawl by search engine bots and work well on mobile devices.

But we think ethical SEO also bleeds over into how you treat the clients that you work with.

Ethical SEO practitioners will ensure that clients:

• Know how SEO is being practised (the nuts and bolts of the process).
• Know how links are being built.
• Have access to all the analytics and data.
• Be upfront about how long growth may take.

What is black hat SEO?

Whilst white hat SEOs will stick to the guidelines, black hat practitioners will use tricks to jump up the rankings. These tricks can include things like:

• Hiding keywords on pages by colouring them the same as the background of the webpage.
• Buying links from “link farms”.
• Using bots to “fake” traffic on reports.

We go into a full rundown of all the practices associated with black hat SEO, from the clever to the nasty, here: What is white hat and black hat SEO?

Why is SEO (in general) important?

SEO matters because if your website isn’t optimised, you could be missing out on loads of leads (and sales) for your business. 

This is because so many consumers use search engines to find goods and services they require. In fact, the latest data shows that 

• 49% of consumers use search engines to find products, 
• 77% of consumers use Google to search for a local business, 
• 60% of consumers with Smartphones contact a business directly through Google’s search results.  

If your website isn’t optimised for search, then it won’t even appear in the search results. If it’s not listed, then potential clients can’t find you. If they can’t find you, they can’t buy from you. It’s that simple. 

Performing SEO activities helps to send the right messages to search engines, helping them rank your website for relevant search terms. This allows the right users to find you, and hopefully generate enquiries. 

Why is it important to do SEO ethically?

Making sure that your SEO is ethical is incredibly important. Most SEOs will point to the damage black hat SEO can do to your search engine visibility as the main negative impact.

Although black hat techniques may give you a big boost in rankings initially, over time, Google quickly wises up, and you (at best) will see a drop in rankings and (at worst) have your website manually de-indexed. De-indexation is when Google manually removes your website from its database, meaning your website will not appear in the search results.

In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that there could be as many as 1 million websites that are deindexed by Google following any particular core update.

Investing in black hat SEO is a massive risk for your business. If you’re used to loads of enquiries coming through your website and it is suddenly removed from Google, the financial impact can be catastrophic.

But, I’d like to argue that one of the biggest, long-term impacts can also be the damage to your brand.

Black hat SEO often produces very poor quality content, which can leave users feeling decidedly underwhelmed when they’re on your website. What’s the point of getting users on your website if they are unimpressed with your brand and leave?

Ethical SEO emphasises the creation of quality content that sounds like you, accurately conveys your offer, and sets you apart from your competitors. Ethical SEO builds a brand, not just visibility.

Will my website be automatically optimised for search engines?

Now, to an extent, yes. Search engines aim to crawl and rank all websites. 

But this doesn’t always happen. 

And, even if your website is discovered and indexed by search engines, you might not be getting the right visitors to your website. 

That’s because most web developers won’t complete SEO activities, such as adding keywords to your website copy, to ensure that your website is sending the right messages to search engines. Instead, they will focus on the design (the “look”) and build (the “mechanics and functionality”) of your website. 

The best way to ensure your website is sending the right “messages” to search engines is to get an SEO practitioner to analyse your website and perform on-page optimisation. 

How do search engines decide who gets listed in the top spot?

When you search for something, you’ll normally get presented with a results page that looks like this:

You might be forgiven for thinking that most users click on the ads at the top, but you’d be wrong. 65% of Google searchers, click on organic search results as opposed to paid ads. 

And where you appear on those results can impact how many visitors your website gets. 

Rank position	Average click-through rate
1	39.8%
2	18.7%
3	10.2%
4	7.2%
5	5.1%
6	4.4%
7	3.0%
8	2.1%
9	1.9%
10	1.6%

If you’re positioned first in the list of organic results, then the click-through rate could be twice that of the website positioned at position two. 

So, fighting for the top spot (or at least the top 3) is well worth it. Think of how many more visitors (and potential leads) you might get!

How do search engines decide where to rank your website?

In my youth, we didn’t have an established internet (yes, I am that old)! If I wanted to research something (that wasn’t in the Yellow Pages), I headed to the library. 

Imagine search engines like Google are a kind of gigantic, global library index. When you type in a search, the results that are returned are not random. Google uses a series of algorithms to try to return the most relevant and useful information for the terms you searched for. 

Now, search engines guard the ranking criteria their algorithms use closely. They don’t want people gaming the system. After all, if they return poor results, then users will switch to a competitor search engine.  

But, over the years, they’ve released a few bits of information, and SEO specialists have also conducted experiments to uncover as much as they can. 

Here are some of the criteria that we know search engines use when determining where to rank website pages in their search results:

1. High-quality Content
2. Backlinks
3. Search Intent and Content Relevance
4. Website Loading Speed
5. Mobile Friendliness
6. Domain Authority
7. Keyword Optimisation
8. Website Structure
9. Website Security
10. On-page Experience

Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness

Sitting alongside the ranking factors that determine where a webpage is ranked in the search results is E-E-A-T. This is a system that is used by Google to determine the quality of the content that is being ranked. It’s not a ranking factor in itself.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. 

1. Experience: The webpage being displayed has been written/crafted by individuals who have direct, hands-on experience with the subject matter. So, a blog article about commercial cleaning should sit on a commercial cleaning company’s website, not a forklift truck driver’s website. 
2. Expertise: The website being displayed should demonstrate a depth of knowledge by presenting thorough, accurate information backed by the qualifications of its authors. So, a commercial cleaning company will probably link to the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) guidelines somewhere on their site, as cleaning companies should operate within these guidelines. You would also expect to see websites bristling with high-quality blog content on a range of topics associated with cleaning. 
3. Authoritativeness: The website being displayed would be recognised as an authority on this topic by others. This would be demonstrated when third-party websites link to the website in question. 
4. Trustworthiness: The previous three qualities can be summed up by this one signal – the website being displayed is the most trustworthy source of information for the user’s query. 

Ethical SEO seeks to create content that answers real questions, optimising pages so they are easy for search engines and users to understand, and building authority through trust rather than shortcuts. To be explicit, it aims to create content that demonstrates E-E-A-T.

What ethical activities help us rank websites well online?

Once you know the ranking criteria and how Google measures the quality of website content, you can work to build your website in such a way that search engines approve of it and rank the pages well in the search results. 

As we have already mentioned, we group these activities into three areas:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

Let’s have a look at some of these key activities. 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves SEO elements on a site that you can control. This is about getting those Google crawlers to understand what your website is all about. 

1. Keyword research

The foundation of all SEO, keyword research is pivotal for figuring out how to optimise your website. 

Keywords are the terms that users type into search engines to find products and services. They can be all lengths, from a single word to a phrase or even a question. 

Keywords should run through all the content on your site, whether that be landing pages or a blog. Keywords help to tell search engines what each page of your website is about.  

2. Publishing high-quality content

To demonstrate that you have expertise in your area, you need to publish high-quality content frequently. The content should answer questions that your users and potential leads may have, as well as act as a resource bank for reference. 

The more information you have about your product or service, the better. Put yourself in your client’s shoes…what do they need to know? 

But it’s also essential that this information is laid out in a user-friendly and accessible way. Use facts and figures where appropriate. Diagrams, videos and other visual aids are also great. 

The content should be readable too. Make sure you use headings and bullet points to make it easier to skim read.  

Content is king! Good quality and up-to-date content will also support your off-page SEO efforts, as other users will find it, like it and link to it. 

Freshness is also of high importance. Google’s bots are constantly crawling the internet and will rank websites with new and up-to-date content much more highly than those that have remained the same for months.

Find an introduction to content marketing here.

3. Internal linking 

This is the process of linking different pieces of content together within your website. This helps users navigate your website and helps search engines understand what you specialise in. 

4. Writing accurate metadata

Metadata means “data about data”. Each page of your website should have data that tells search engines about the information it contains. 

When you see a webpage ranked in the search results, it will normally have a title and description. It should help you – the user – understand what the page is about. It should also match the intent behind the search result that you typed in. 

So, if you’ve searched for “What is dye penetrant inspection?” You should get a list of blog posts with variations of that keyword in their title and meta description. You shouldn’t get a list of service pages advertising dye penetrant inspection as a service, as the intent behind your search is information gathering. 

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO includes any activity that helps build mentions of your website somewhere other than on your own website. This is far harder to control and achieve than on-page SEO. 

But making sure your off-page SEO complements your on-page SEO is essential as it builds your website’s authority in the eyes of Google. 

So, what activities come under this area?

1. Backlink building 

This is the most important activity as it directly affects your authority.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They’re like votes of confidence from one site to another, and they really matter to search engines. 

They expose your site to a much larger audience and also help to boost that all-important authority. Searchers who click on a link to your site from another site are signalling to search engines that you have content worth looking at. This, in turn, helps boost your site in the search engine rankings. 

But beware, not all links are equal. Google is smarter than ever before, and if you try black hat techniques like buying links from other websites en masse, Google will likely recognise this and penalise you in its rankings as a result.  

Links can be made in a variety of ways, including:

• Placing guest blogs on websites related to your niche.
• Adding your company to online directories.
• Reaching out and recommending your content to resource pages.
• Creating content that other websites want to link to (e.g. reports on original data).

Technical SEO 

Technical SEO is really important. Search engines do not want to present users with information that is on websites that are slow to load, difficult to navigate or visibly shake when you’re looking at the page. 

According to a 2017 SEMrush study, over 80% of websites examined had 404 broken link errors, and more than 70% had duplicate content. It also estimates that 23% of websites have an inadequate loading speed. 

So, what activities come under “technical SEO”? Here are just some:

1. Checking the website is optimised for speed. 

50% of users will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, so the load speed of your website is crucial. A web developer might be needed to help an SEO specialist improve the loading speed of your website, or you might need to rebuild the site. 

2. Ensuring it’s mobile-friendly. 

Around half of all searches are now done on a mobile phone, so if your site is not optimised for mobile use, then you are potentially losing out on a huge proportion of available traffic. 

Some of these things (like speed, mobile usability, code optimisation, etc.) fall under the heading of Technical SEO. 

Again, a B2B digital marketing agency would work with a web developer to ensure this happens. 

3. Ensuring the website is properly indexed. 

Google (the biggest search engine in the world) has lots of free programs that make it easier to help the search engine rank your website content properly. Google Search Console (GSC) is one such program, and it can be used to help Google understand your website structure and content. 

SEO agencies can submit “sitemaps” of your website (e.g. maps of the structure) to GSC as well as URLs that might not be indexed properly. This can help ensure all your content is appearing online. 

So how does all this come together? 

Right now, you might be thinking that this all sounds very time-consuming. Not to mention technical! You have a business to run, how on earth can you optimise your website for search engines with everything else you have to do? 

This is where creating a robust, cohesive SEO campaign is important.

What is an SEO Campaign?

An SEO campaign is all about boosting your website’s visibility on search engines like Google. Think of it as a strategic push to get more people to visit your site by showing up higher in search results. The main goal is to pull in more organic traffic (that’s the free, natural traffic you get from search results) without paying for ads. 

An SEO campaign runs on a continuous cycle and typically includes:

• Content creation (e.g. website copy, blogs, email campaigns, lead magnets).
• Strategy.
• Keyword research.
• Technical SEO as required.
• Backlink building.
• Tracking.
• Monthly reporting.

A good ethical search engine optimisation campaign approach starts with understanding your audience.

What are they looking for? What problems are they trying to solve? What information would help them make a confident decision?

From there, SEO becomes less about chasing rankings at all costs and more about creating helpful, relevant pages that match search intent. That could mean improving service pages, writing genuinely useful blog content, making your website easier to navigate, or ensuring your technical SEO gives every page the best chance of being found.

The second step in any solid SEO campaign is keyword research. This means figuring out what words or phrases people type into search engines when they’re looking for the stuff your website offers. 

Once you know these keywords, you can tailor your site’s content to match these searches. The campaign also includes making sure your website is easy for search engines to read and navigate. This could mean tweaking the layout, improving headings, and optimising images.

Building high-quality backlinks is another big piece of the SEO puzzle. The more reputable sites you have linking to yours, the better your site looks to search engines. A campaign involves reaching out to other websites with the aim of building links (ethically!)

Finally, an SEO campaign isn’t a one-and-done deal. It needs constant attention and tweaking. You’ll want to keep an eye on how well your site ranks and how much traffic you’re pulling in, then adjust your strategies as needed. This ongoing effort helps you keep up with changes in search engine rules and keeps your site in the race for those top spots in search results.

Any agency worth your time should benchmark your website’s performance at the start of the campaign and then diligently track the progress of the campaign using data from your website. Campaigns should be continuously refined based on evidence. 

Ethical SEO: Time-consuming, but effective

Ultimately, ethical SEO should leave your website better than it found it. Better for your audience, better for search engines, and better for your business. It may not promise overnight results, but it does build a stronger foundation for lasting visibility, better-quality traffic and a brand people are more likely to trust.

Good SEO takes time. Anyone who claims to have a magic shortcut that will get you to the top of a search engine’s organic rankings is just flat-out lying to you. But with a strong campaign in place, based on thorough keyword research, you can generate content that moves your website up the rankings. 

When done right, SEO can really put your site in the spotlight, help you connect with more people, and grow your business over time. It’s a game-changer for staying visible and relevant in the crowded online world.