Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important marketing strategies available to businesses. To ensure your business can stay competitive, it’s critical that you understand the importance of SEO online marketing, what it is, and how you can work with SEO to your company’s advantage.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and it means exactly that: finding ways to optimize or increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic (non-paid) search engine results.
When people enter keywords associated with your product or service via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, they receive a list of websites with relevant content. The more your pages, including news and blog stories, are seen to provide the answers to customers’ questions, the higher they will rank with search engines. Higher rankings result in more exposure to potential customers and more traffic to your site.
The reality is that 95% of people don’t go beyond the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so getting a higher ranking is your goal. Ideally you want the top #1 position, but being in the top three results is amazing and gets half the clicks of SERPs. Even if you aren’t in the top three, you should still aim for the top 10-12, which means you will be on the first page and benefit from increased organic traffic.
Since Google dominates over 90% of SEO traffic worldwide, most people focus on Google, but it’s a good idea to see what search engines your audience is using. For example, Baidu is a big search engine in China and Yandex is big in Russia.
Why do you need to focus on SEO?
Customers no longer want to be sold a product or service through ads. They want to work with trusted brands. Realizing this, most SEO best practises are about improving the relevancy and intent of your content to achieve 1st page status. Search engines have been around long enough that people associate the ‘better’ credible businesses found on the first or second SERP. If you have a #1 ranking, that puts you at the top of the page unless there’s a promoted result (which is an ad) or an answer box above it.
Also, unlike a 30-second ad or digital banner campaign, SEO delivers long-term, ongoing marketing that increases your visibility over time, leading to a higher result ranking, which leads to a greater ROI on marketing efforts.
How does SEO work?
This is where you expect talk of illicit algorithms and complex secrets, right? Wrong. The basics of how Google search works is actually quite simple. Crawlers (also known as ‘search bots’ or ‘spiders’) scroll through websites looking for content, headings and links that provide them with an idea of what the page is about. Once on your site, they take all your content and put it into an index, which is a huge catalog of trillions of web pages. This indexed info is what they use with their fancy algorithms to determine what position your website page will show up when someone searches relevant queries.
Site speed, great content and your site security are all taken into consideration in the algorithm – the exact formula changes often based on what google thinks best serves its users. When someone searches a term in their search engine, Google shows the most relevant results based on the search term and their indexed catalog.
What does Google Search Quality Ratings care about?
We couldn’t write about SEO without mentioning that the quality of your content is an important part of the search process. To determine the ‘quality’ of your content Google search looks at:
- How expert, authoritative, and trustworthy the content is.
- Content quality and quantity, especially looking for consistently of content postings.
- Site information, including who’s responsible for the site & how long it has existed.
- Website reputation, such as how many inbound links to your site.
- User experience- Are you answering viewers inquiries and providing valuable information in an easy format?
These guidelines help Google decide which results are most relevant, useful and trustworthy. The most relevant results appear first in SERPs, with less relevant results shown later.
Remember, when you implement an SEO strategy, your focus is helping Google’s spiders to crawl and understand your content better. You’re also telling Google your content is relevant to certain queries based on your keywords, so your web pages show up in the right search results.
Want to learn more about SEO? Check out 5 ways SEO can help you grow your business.
