What is SEO?
Learn the benefits and importance of Search Engine Optimization.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the practice of optimising content to be discovered and ranked in search engine queries. SEO’s job is to increase your visibility and help you be a well-known brand in your industry and market.
SEO is the opposite of SEA (Search Engine Advertising). When you’re implementing SEA, you’re paying for your content to be shown, as an ad, at the top of a search query. When you’re implementing SEO optimisation, your goal is to rank high in the search engine results organically.
The critical aspects of good search engine optimisation are: producing high-quality content, content optimisation, keyword research, and finally, building backlinks. And the most significant element these aspects can help you achieve is increased traffic to your website at no cost; free traffic.
The meaning of Search engine optimisation
To simplify the meaning of SEO, let’s use a metaphor. Imagine the local library that you go to when you’re searching for books. Imagine that the library is ten times more enormous and can hold millions of books.
On this day, you’re at the library to find books on how to start a business. You go to the most relevant aisle and start your search among millions of books.
A search engine is similar to a library. The difference is that you don’t have to do the work. You don’t have to search for a specific book on your topic in the enormous library, and you don’t have to decide which books are the best on the subject.
The search engine will do all the work for you. You type in your query in the search engine, and it will give you its top and most relevant results, almost like someone handing you five of the best books that are most relevant to your search.
The search engine’s organic results are not randomly selected. A search engine uses the best algorithm and technology to give you the best and most relevant results.
How SEO works
Let’s get into how SEO works. Let’s say that you like to bake and sell your products on your website. You write articles and recipes daily, articles and recipes about new baked goods. You want to increase your visibility so that more people can reach you and try out your baked goods. But just writing your articles will not give you the desired effect of search engine optimisation.
Instead, you can research what the most popular search queries are on baked goods. What are people typing into their search engine; what are they looking for? Once you have a list of keywords you know are being searched for continuously, you can write your articles based on those keywords.
Additionally, make sure that you write relevant content, don’t just stuff keywords into your articles, hoping that Google or any other search engine will rank you high on the list. Google, for example, is a brilliant search engine and will see through it. You want to sell your baked goods, so you don’t want to write articles about cars. Furthermore, don’t just write to fill up a page about baked goods; instead, plan your pieces and research what’s on-trend regarding baked goods and write beneficial articles based on that.
Relevant articles with high keywords volume will benefit your customers and visitors and ensure that you will be in the run to be one of the top-ranked pages in a search engine query.
Google’s search engine, as an example, has crawlers that check the performance on your website. Everything from how fast or slow your page loads to how valuable your content is. Writing a good piece of content that’s keyword optimised is a good starting point; however, you must make sure that the rest of your website is up to par. You want the customer to convert after reading your article.
Backlinks are another aspect to consider when discussing SEO. Besides keywords and relevancy, Google determines top-ranked pages based on authority. With authority, we mean how accurate your content is. One of the ways Google determines this is by investigating how many people have linked to your content. The more people link to your content (people who have high credibility and authority), the more it sends a signal to Google that your content is valuable and worth a read.
Google’s search engine monitors the behaviour of a user. If a certain page gets many visitors without being ranked at the top, Google will investigate its cause and rank it high if it agrees with the visitors.
The benefits of SEO
Search engine optimisation has many benefits — everything from increasing visitors on your website to improving your gross ads.
SEO is essential for marketing. Think of all the times you’re at home or on the bus, and you’ve searched for something on a search engine. Most of the time, we click on one of the top three ranked pages and browse the website for a few minutes before getting/purchasing what we were looking to buy.
- Organic traffic
All the traffic you can gain from SEO is free of charge. You don’t have to pay a dime, all you need to do is work on content optimisation, and the rest will follow.
- Quality traffic
What’s more, you will increase your traffic with quality traffic. You are not interrupting people with your content or bothering them. They are the ones looking for your content and the information you have to offer.
- SEO ranking
The goal of search engine optimisation is to rank high in search engine queries. Once you’ve managed to be one of the top-ranked pages, your traffic will stay consistent.
- Access
SEO enables you to reach audiences worldwide that you could not do before SEO. If you have an international website and you rank high on a search engine, the options are limitless, and so is your audience.
- Your SEO page will get more ranks than if you had a pay-per-click
Studies have shown that the top-ranked organic results get more clicks than a pay-per-click. The reason might be because people want organic results and not a page that has paid to be at the top. Perhaps people trust Google’s calculation on what’s the most valuable content to spend time on.
- Local SEO
You can implement local SEO if you own a physical shop in your town. With local SEO, you can target people who are close to your shop. For example, if you have a bakery where you bake all your baked goods, you can also implement local SEO so that people who search for cookies can see your page in the top rank.
- Slow but long time effects
You will not see yourself at the top of a search engine query immediately. SEO takes time – usually six months to a year. However, once you’re there, your impact will most likely last for several years. Of course, you need to follow trends and your market, so you’ll need to optimise, but besides that, once you’ve made it, you’ll stay at the top with the same dedication and determination.
Search engine optimisation is a great and cheap way to make your dream business come true. Have dedication and stay patient, and you’ll see the fruits of your labour.