What is the Search Engine Optimization
If you have been slightly involved with the creation of maintenance of a website in the recent past, or been a part of an organization which operates largely around the content that it posts on the website, you must have certainly come across the term “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO.
To give a context to those who are entirely uninitiated and have never worked in a capacity which involved the use of SEO - “I think we need to improve the SEO of our website to get more visitors” - is a common phrase in digital/content marketing lingo.
In today’s internet-driven world, we have become hugely dependent on Google and other Search Engines (like Bing and Yahoo) for finding the information that we need. We get access to the information in an instant and that too for free!
It’s obvious that business owners would want their websites to rank higher as it would result in free organic traffic which in turn means more leads and sales. Having understood that, how does one manage to rank at the top for keywords relevant to their niche or domain?
That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes into the picture. Search Engine Optimization is a system generated in a web search design, that helps gaining more traffic to the website. Not just that, it also helps in the substantial growth of that website, making it rank higher in the search engine.
Simply said, SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility when people search for items or services related to your business on search engines. The more visibility your sites have in search results, the more likely they are to attract attention from potential and existing clients.
How SEO works?
SEO for a website works according to the rules set by the search engines. For instance, Google, the master of all search engines, has certain rules that the websites need to follow in order to rank well. And when these websites follow the rules, they can easily rank on the first page of Google for a particular keyword, getting in front of the customers when they need them.
SEO is divided into on-page and off-page SEO activities and while you apply the on-page techniques on your website, the off-page ones are performed on some other websites to gain valuable backlinks that help in improving the ranks. In a nutshell, it’s just about following the rules set by the search engines.
On-page Optimization
This is the process of making changes to your website’s content, formatting and structure. These changes will make your site more appealing to users and search engines alike.
Keyword Research
You should conduct keyword research before developing content. This will help you find the keywords that are most relevant for your product or service.
Off-page Optimization
This refers to all of the things outside of your website that can help boost your online presence, such as linking out to other websites and creating backlinks.
Search engines include software programs called Crawlers that visit each website in the world wide web periodically and crawl through the content on each webpage present on that particular website. The software programs then index the information that they find on each page against the Keywords or Phrases that finds on that page.
How can one's content be located in Google since there are a lot of people writing about the same topics? Here accelerates the need for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO works as a measurement to define a particular web content’s probability of getting noticed on the search engine. It has specific criteria that needs to be fulfilled in order to get a good rank in any web search engine.
Is SEO important to your website?
Why do you need this? Do you ever go further than the second or third page on Google’s result page? No? That's your answer right there.
The higher your website and content ranks on search engine result page (SERP), the more people will click on it. Accordingly, the more sales or conversions you will likely get. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Benefits of SEO
Better Work Experience
When we do search engine optimization, it means our website is beautifully designed with very less buff time. When the user gets what he was looking for and it is easy for the user to use and navigate through your website, that means you succeeded many of your competitors and all this is posing with SEO.
Search Engine Ranking
With SEO, you can achieve your ultimate goal of being online which is getting the top rank on the search engine result page. Visibility of your websites on the search engine result page is all that matters and we do all the hard work to be visible on the top.
Build Trust
Most users trust only the top-ranking websites. So, when you do proper optimization, you are automatically attracting users and building trust to use your product or service.
Few ways how SEO can benefit your website
SEO helps improve your website’s speed and responsiveness to make it more appealing to smartphone users.
SEO boosts your website’s organic visibility and thereby attracts quality website traffic.
As SEO efforts are expansive, they reach out to a wider target audience.
As SEO improves your search engine rankings, it also helps make your website more credible and trustworthy.
SEO is an effective means for low-cost lead generation. Compared to other marketing tactics, SEO can generate quality leads at a lesser cost for your website.
SEO helps deliver a better user experience by making your website content more relevant and informative. When images and videos are added to your landing pages, the UX quality of your website is automatically enhanced.
SEO helps deliver a better user experience by making your website content more relevant and informative. When images and videos are added to your landing pages, the UX quality of your website is automatically enhanced.
SEO is a long-term and sustainable digital marketing strategy. You can enjoy its benefits in the long run.
It may take a while for SEO strategies to deliver results but once they do, the ROI is pretty impressive.
Conclusion
Once you start implementing SEO on your website, how would you know whether you are getting the desired results or not? It’s important to use a tracker and monitor a few metrics weekly. These metrics include SEO score, average daily traffic on websites (especially the organic search traffic), average session duration, number of backlinks, Domain and page authority, website loading time, and bounce rate.
The truth is, sufficient knowledge in this field will allow you to qualify the right person or company to do SEO for your business. Now that you know the basics of SEO, we urge you to learn more about it. Only then you will be able to choose the right person to employ SEO for you and help your business grow without wasting your time or money.
Finally, remember that SEO is never complete, even if your strategy has been fully applied. You may need to switch approaches halfway through an SEO campaign, play a long game, and wait for results. With a good SEO foundation in place – and a little patience – the benefits of your SEO strategy should become noticeable, resulting in a better client experience and more conversions for your business.
