You might have heard SEO is excellent for the business’s visibility many times, but what is it? Let us discuss what is Search Engine Optimization?, its types, and importance for business growth.
- What is SEO?
- How does SEO work?
- Important terms in SEO
- Types of SEO
- How is SEO important for business growth?
- Conclusion
What is SEO?
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It means optimizing the website, which can attract higher rankings for the search engine organic results. It is not incorrect to say that SEO is a vital digital marketing tool that creates more opportunities for the business and helps in converting prospects into customers. Let us understand this with the help of this scenario.
Suppose you are a business owner and you have created your website. What would be the best way to bring visitors to your website? The answer is ranking on Google. This means you need to optimize your websites to get the chance to rank on higher positions on the search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing are some significant platforms/search engines used by people to search for anything. The web pages on these search engines are displayed on the basis of relevancy and context.
How does SEO work?
Bots are used by search engines like Google and Bing to crawl the web, moving from site to site, collecting information about those sites, and indexing them. Consider the index to be a big library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to assist you in finding exactly what you’re looking for. Then, using hundreds of ranking criteria or signals, algorithms examine sites in the index to decide the order in which they should show in search results for a given query.
The SEO factors which work can be viewed as proxies for user experience aspects. It’s how search bots determine how well a website or web page can provide the searcher with the information they’re looking for. You can’t buy search engines to gain higher organic search ranks, unlike paid search ads. Therefore, SEO takes a lot of time and consistent efforts.
There are a number of different factors that go into how search engines rank websites, and SEO practitioners spend a lot of time trying to understand and influence these factors. However, the most important factor is always going to be the quality of your website’s content. If your website’s content is relevant and useful, you are more likely to rank higher in search results.
In addition to content, there are a number of other factors that can influence your website’s ranking in search results. These include things like the structure of your website, the way your website is coded, and the overall user experience. However, content is still the most important factor, so if you want to improve your website’s SEO, start by making sure your content is the best it can be. You can also enhance your knowledge with the help of a free SEO course.
Here are a few of the important SEO ranking factors:
- Secure Website
- Crawlability
- Loading Speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Content
- User Experience
- Internal and External Links
- Domain Age
- User Engagement
- Relevant Keywords
Important terms in SEO
SEO has some crucial elements, including Keywords, Content, Off-page SEO, Local SEO, and Search Engine Marketing. These elements determine the ranks of web pages on search engines. Let us read about these elements in brief.
- Keywords: Keywords are the words or phrases used by the users to find the results of their queries. Keywords are very crucial for making your content compelling. Keywords should be very wisely chosen, well researched and carefully used in the content to be uploaded on the websites.
- Content: Content is that significant element which helps in engaging the audience. The content helps in building the relationship with the audience who visit the website. For example, a beauty product website might publish many blogs about beauty tutorials; most bought beauty products or anything about which users generally search. This will help the brand in building up the prospects. The content should be engaging, relevant and shareable.
Also Read: Which is the best strategy: Content or SEO marketing?
- Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO involves all the external practices and optimization, which are done to rank the page on search engines. It includes link building, social media and brand mentions.
- Local SEO: Local SEO is Search Engine Optimization for businesses, which have a physical location. Local SEO is all about optimizing the website to drive people to your store/ shop. For example, if you are in the market and just thought of getting your watch repaired, googling “watch repair service” will show you the nearest stores to you in the local Search Engine Result Pages. You can create local landing pages or use a store locator on the website so that people can easily find out your store through your website.
- Search Engine Marketing: SEM is usually the business’s paid marketing efforts to appear on the Search Engine Result Pages. It includes social media paid ads, Google ads, native ads and display ads. It is not a part of SEO, but still, it holds importance in reaching targeted audiences.
Get introduced to Search Engine Marketing with this SEM course online
Types of SEO
There are three main types of SEO that helps in a well-grounded organic search. These are:
- On-Page SEO: On-Page SEO involves optimizing the web pages so that they can rank higher on the search engines. The On-Page ranking factors include the content on the page, Title tag and URL.
- Off-Page SEO: Off-Page SEO includes optimizing the content beyond the website of the business so that it can rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages. It can be done using backlinks, guest blogging, brand mentions, influencer marketing, and social media marketing.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO is the optimization of website and server to make it faster, more comfortable to crawl and understandable. This can be considered as part of On-Page SEO.
How is SEO important for business growth?
SEO offers real value for modern business. It provides traffic to your websites, which delivers leads and sales. For instance, if you have optimized your page for the “vegan food” keyword, a user will find you if he/she is actually searching for “vegan food”.
The beauty of SEO is that it gets you quality leads. How? Let us look at these statistics and key facts to understand this!
- B2B and technology companies generate 2X times more revenue from organic search than any other marketing channel.
- Only .78% of the Google searchers click on the results on the second page.
- Approx. 53% of the website traffic is generated from organic search
- SEO drives 1000% more traffic than the organic social media
In the last five years, Google has enhanced the users’ experience by pricing the most relevant and accurate results on the search engines. The businesses use various techniques to catch the google algorithm and to rank their pages on the Search Engine Result Pages. Search Engine Optimization is that technique that improves the business page’s searchability and enhances its visibility. These are some reasons, which shows how SEO is important for business growth:
- Website traffic: SEO is the source of website traffic. With SEO, the ranking of the web page improves, which increases traffic. It is found that the number one ranked page on Google gets 33% of the total search traffic, and the top five ranked pages get 75% of the total clicks. The SEO practices help get better rank on the web page on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
- Visibility of business: SEO increases the visibility of the website. The improved visibility improves the chances of getting better prospects and conversions finally. It can be said that visibility brings ranking for the web pages. The higher rank of a web page on a search engine, the more visible it will be. Better SEO efforts will get you higher rankings and will build the visibility of the web pages too. It is also important because 75% of the users never skip the search engine’s first page.
- Better visitor experience: Better SEO efforts creates a user-friendly website, which enhances the visitor’s experience. For instance, improving the page speed will take less time to load the page, reducing the bounce rate and encouraging visitors to spend more time on the website. Lower the bounce rate; higher will be your conversions.
- Increased engagement and conversions: SEO helps in improving the user experience. Thus, increase the user experience. When spending more time on the website and getting a positive experience, the users tend to be converted into the customers of the business.
- It is comparatively cheap: SEO costs money, but it is comparatively less expensive than other digital marketing techniques. It can also be considered as an investment, which brings fruits for the years to come. It is the organic way of getting the audience for the business website/ web pages.
Also read: Digital Marketing Tools for 2022
- Brand building: SEO also helps in strong brand building. The customers use the internet to search for their queries, products or services. Better ranks and visibility of the website will enhance the reputation of the brand. As a result, the customers will develop trust and credibility for the same brand, as they will get familiar with it. The enhanced recognition of the brand will generate leads too for the business.
- A better understanding of the customers: To make a business successful, one must understand the target audience, their pain points and their behaviour. In an offline business, businesses use market research for the same. They used to do surveys and interviews for identifying the market trends. However, with the evolution of an online business, SEO has taken up that role. Customer behaviour can be monitored with the help of SEO. The bounce rates, clicks on the website and the repeat customers help in identifying customer behaviour. The actions can be taken accordingly after identifying the behaviour of the target audience.
Conclusion
After going through all the above points, it is clear that SEO can help achieve many business goals. It drives audience, engagement and conversions for the business. It also enhances brand visibility and reputation. It increases more sales and growth for the company and an edge over the competition in the market.
Please Read: Why SEO Still Rules Online Business Marketing in 2022?
SEO needs to be updated and optimized for making your business website a success. If the website does not have proper links, content or keywords, the search engines may not index the site, which will fail in pricing higher rankings.
Learn more about SEO in the PG Program in Strategic Digital Marketing Course. Get certified with the Great Lakes Executive Learning within 6 Months.
