Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of strategically optimising your website to help it rank higher in search results. It helps build long-term equity for your brand. A good ranking and a favourable placement help elevate your brand’s profile. With this, this can really help your business in being able to grow its sales. It can also be a great way for a business to be able to diversify into new markets and sell new services too. Best of all, it is kind of free in a way, it is very much about time and effort spent above all else.
Your business really does need it
If you aren’t already doing some SEO marketing for your business, you really do need to start doing so right now. Since search engines have existed, SEO marketing has been the primary driver of traffic to websites and the key to online success. Now that more and more people are using the internet to buy products and discover new companies, SEO is helping companies be discovered and increase their customer base by improving the amount of organic traffic and therefore customers that arrive at their websites.
How Google works
Google has a set of rules that it follows to rank websites, these rules are called an algorithm. Google (and other search engines) businesses are based on providing the right information to their customers who use their search engines to find information and answer questions on the internet. The more successful that they are at doing this, the more customers use their search engines.
Google is by far the most successful search engine, the reason that it is so successful is because it not only wants to provide the most relevant information or websites in its search engine results pages (SERP’s) but it also wants to provide the best websites in terms of customer experience. Put simply, if you are searching on a mobile device not only does it want to give you the most relevant answer to your query but, it also wants to you to have the best experience so it provides the most relevant mobile optimised answer to a users query.
How SEO as a process works
SEO consists of multiple strategies, actions, and best practices, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines—which is why it’s called “search engine optimization.” There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of anything you can control on your own website to improve your rankings. This refers to things like site speed, keyword presence, header text, and so on.
On the other hand, off-page SEO consists of anything done on other websites that may influence your rankings. Generally, this only refers to links. It takes time, knowledge of SEO, and successful implementation of the desired on- and off-page SEO factors to optimize your website for high rankings in search engines. If the collective power of your site or an individual page’s SEO is more powerful than all others, with regards to a specific query, you’ll rank #1.
Ranking factors
Because SEO involves so many ranking factors, you can think of the #1 site as winning a triathlon of sorts. In a real triathlon, the winner of the running portion is not necessarily the winner of the entire race – and so it is the same with SEO. The site with the most links, the most pages, or the most visitors is not necessarily the #1 site. Their overall performance determines who comes out on top.
Search engines without SEO
Without SEO, it’s hard to say how we would ever find websites, businesses, or the information we seek on a daily basis. The search engine results would be too easy to manipulate, and as users, we would have to look much longer and harder to find valuable sites instead of the ones simply manipulating the results to get to the first page. Basically, SEO is important because it ensures that typical people don’t have to search for more than a few seconds to find the information or products they want. It establishes a sort of “natural order” online that would be missing without it.
Overall
No matter what your situation is, if you have a website for your company, SEO is important. Whether your business is new or old, struggling or successful, small or large, SEO is crucial to your online success. In fact, even if you are the only one in your industry, SEO is still important.
