If you are a business owner who is looking for ways to generate more leads, get more conversions, generate more traffic, or possibly gain more exposure online; then you must have heard that SEO is a means to achieve all of that. But what is SEO? How does it work? How does it affect my business? Do you have such or similar questions about SEO? Then continue reading because, in this article, I’ll be demystifying SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization abbreviated as SEO can be defined as the process of improving a webpage or website visibility on a search engine results page (SERP) in order to make that company’s or business’s website more discoverable which in turn generates more traffic that can be converted into sales.
SEO is a strategy that focuses on organic or natural (unpaid) traffic rather than paid or direct traffic. The organic traffic it generates can be gotten from different kinds of searches such as academic search, image search, news search, video search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
How does SEO work?
Have you wondered how search engines like Google and Bing filter through thousands of websites to bring useful information to you based on your search? Probably you haven’t. Well, search engines make use of bots to crawl through the pages on the Internet, moving from one website to another, gathering information about the pages and then placing the gathered information in an index. You can consider an index to be a huge library where the librarian can pull out a book (in our case, a web page) to help you find the information you are searching for.
After the information gathered has been indexed, algorithms analyze the pages in the index, taking into consideration hundreds of ranking signals or factors in order to determine the order in which the pages should appear in the search results of a given search query. To help you better understand it, think of it as a librarian who has read every single book in the library and can accurately tell you which books answer your question the best.
Search engines like Google (the most used search engine in the world) use a lot of algorithms to determine website placements for certain search queries and their algorithms take into consideration the following factors:
- The words of your query
- The expertise of sources
- Your settings
- Relevance and usability of your pages
- Your location
So where does SEO come into all this? SEO takes into consideration the factors search engines like Google use to rank pages on SERP and then optimizes your website based on those factors in order to give you a higher ranking in search results. Why is ranking so important? The ranking is important because, the higher your website ranks on SERPs for certain keywords, the more traffic and sales you generate.
What are the benefits of SEO?
The benefits of making SEO a part of marketing strategy are numerous and in this section, you’ll find the major benefits of optimizing your website using SEO.
- SEO drives more traffic to your website
- It builds trust
- It promotes a positive user experience
- Helps in building conversion and engagement rate
- Increases lead generation
- It makes your brand more valuable
- Produces long-lasting results
- It’s cost-effective
Conclusion
Every business or brand that wants to gain more exposure or become more discoverable online needs SEO. However, implementing SEO on your website isn’t an easy task because it takes a lot of time to learn and you’ll have to constantly monitor the ever-changing algorithms of search engines like Google.
It’s obvious your business needs SEO but you might have the time to fully master the required SEO skills for your business needs. In that case, you need SEO Assistance and you can get that when you hire the services of professional SEO agencies in Sydney or consultants.
