If your business is struggling online, you may have heard of the term “SEO” but have always wondered what is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process used to improve your site ranking on search engines and organic traffic.
There are many contributing factors to SEO. This includes getting high-quality backlinks, writing good content, maintaining your site’s health and a range of other factors, which we will discuss.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO is optimising your website for search engines. Search engines use an algorithm to determine what pages to show for a given search term. They are very complex algorithms, and there may be thousands of factors influencing the decision on what page to rank first. We know that a couple of core metrics that search engines like Google use to determine the site’s quality.
These core metrics help the algorithm rank each website. They are the following:
Content
Search engines analyse the quality of content on a website. Content marketing is a crucial factor in SEO, so creating content that targets a relevant keyword is essential as it helps the search engine know this page is what the users are searching for.
Links
Links are a link from another website to yours. They are seen as a vote of quality from other websites. Website owners are less likely to link to a poor website. The more sites you gain links from, the higher your authority score will be. This is known as “PageRank” by Google.
Page Structure
Structuring your page is the last core metric. So, how the HTML is structured will determine how the search engine can evaluate your website. This includes keywords, title tags and URLs. You should also make your pages crawlable to the search engine. If you have created a new page, you can submit that page to Google to crawl it by submitting it in your Google Search Console. Low traffic sites tend to be crawled less, whereas you are constantly being crawled if you’re the NY Times.
Benefits of SEO
Anyone can use SEO. All you need is a bit of knowledge on it. Investment in a few tools and learning the basics can help grow our organic traffic and decrease your spending on paid ads. The following are a few reasons why you should invest in SEO for your business:
1. More customers through organic traffic
SEO helps websites rank organically under a keyword. Users are searching for a solution, and you are fulfilling their needs as the top rank.
Ranking on page one on Google is essential to be seen by users. They don’t tend to go to the second page for information.
The featured snippet is also a way of jumping to that number one spot. It shows users a quick answer to what they searched for, and they will then be more likely to click on that article.
2. Users have more trust in you
When you are hitting that number one spot in the search results, then it builds some authority around your brand. Users will trust that you have the solution for them if you are ranked number one.
Once you get a user on your page, they should have a quality experience. This is where the technical elements kick in, such as page speed, site health and other elements.
This will make it easier for customers to trust you based on your website functionality and that you are ranked high.
3. You can do it on a budget
The best part about SEO is that you don’t need a huge budget to start seeing results. You just need to know the SEO basics and implement them as much as you can yourself. Of course, you can go down the route of hiring an SEO specialist or an SEO agency, and this may be expensive, but it could benefit your business hugely.
Investing in SEO is a long-term benefit to your business. SEO will stand for years. Maybe you will have to make a few changes, but it should still work for years. It can earn you a significant return on investment (ROI).
4. Everything is trackable
Traditional marketing was frustrating for business owners as it was hard to see if their marketing efforts worked. When you published an ad in print, it was difficult to see how much sales could be attributed to coming from the print ad.
SEO is entirely trackable. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can see conversions based on several factors such as on-site ad clicks, page views, order completions and much more. It all build an overall impression to see if a strategy is working or not.
You can use Google Search Console to see what you’re ranking for and how many clicks on a particular page. If there’s an element you want to find out more about and track, you will find results with SEO.
What Are The Top SEO Tools?
There are many tools that websites are using for SEO. They are both free and paid. These tools help you optimise your website for search engines. Here are some excellent SEO tools to kickstart your SEO strategy:
SEO Platforms: Many SEO platforms utilise several tools to optimise your website. Some of the most popular tools are Semrush, Moz and Searchmetrics. They can help with keyword ranking, keyword research, content planning and many more SEO related tasks.
Google Search Console: A free tool provided by Google. Google Search Console provides ranking and traffic reports for your website. It can also identify any on-page issues and how to fix them.
Backlink Analysis: There are several backlink tools to analyse your backlinks, including the number of backlinks, quality and check your competitor’s backlinks. AHREFS and Semrush are brilliant for analysing backlinks.
Google Analytics: Another free tool provided by Google. Here, you can track conversions and see which pages users interact with and how long. It’s all valuable information for your SEO strategy.
So you know the answer to what is SEO? Now start utilising it on your website to increase your organic reach.