Do you want to get better rankings on Google? Read this article and learn everything you need to know about search engine optimization or SEO.
What is SEO, and How Does it Work?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility. The ultimate goal of SEO is to be on the first page of search engine results such as Google.
If you own a business, what is the first thing you need to do to reach out to your target audience? You need to create brand awareness to know that you are selling a product or a service. With SEO, it’s a lot easier to reach out to your potential customers. By making your site friendly, you can increase its visibility. As a result, you can gain more traffic to your site. More traffic means more chances of generating revenue for your business.
There are two types of SEO strategies that you can implement. The on-page SEO involves all strategies that happen within your website. This includes creating attractive landing pages to compel a customer to buy from you or increase your CTA conversions, optimizing images to increase visibility, working on your speed, and making your site mobile-friendly.
By off-line SEO, we mean strategies that happen outside your website. This includes improving your brand reputation through influencer marketing, social media marketing and press releases.
The first goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website. It’s important that you understand SEO in its entirety. While it’s crucial to have the right keywords for brand awareness, it’s just as important to have high-quality content. Google uses over 200 different factors for rankings, but it pays more attention to your site’s content.
If you want Google to give you the best ranking, it’s essential to publish only relevant, high-quality and compelling content. Great content plus excellent SEO strategies can help you succeed. It can help you keep and attract more users to your site and ultimately give you more conversions.
To do this, you need to work with the right professionals who can help. You need a team of experts who know SEO like the bank of their hands.
SEO can do wonders for your website. If done correctly, it can drive A LOT of traffic and help increase conversions.
Why Do Search Engines Care About SEO?
Where do you go if you want a list of lucrative businesses or the best destinations in the world? You open a search engine. Google’s main job is to provide users with relevant information. If you’re looking for a list of lucrative businesses, Google will search its database and give you a list of websites with content related to lucrative businesses. As much as possible, they want to provide users with the exact information that they want.
The first page of the search engine results is usually the most viewed. Some users will not even click the second page. This is why businesses compete for keywords or phrases so that Google would rank them better. You will get more traffic to your site if you get a better ranking.
The SERP will give you two results: organic results and PPC or pay-per-click results. Organic results are those influenced by SEO, while PPC are paid results.
Search engines care about SEO because that’s how they make money. Businesses will pay for ads to get paid traffic, to increase their chances of generating revenue for their business. Also, users will trust the search engine more if they can provide the best results to a search query.
Why Care About How SEO Works?
“To increase conversions” is the simplest explanation of why you should care about SEO.
You may have the most innovative product or the best service in the world, but if no one knows about it, how will you generate revenue for your business? Traditional advertising may work, but that’s incredibly expensive. Also, you won’t be able to reach a global audience.
SEO is a marketing strategy. You need it so consumers would know you’re actually selling something. They can’t buy from a business that “doesn’t exist.” Through SEO, you can reach out to your target market. You can create awareness for your product or service. Ultimately, you can make more sales.
While it’s important to optimize your website and landing pages, it’s also crucial to do SEO right. Ensure that you only implement the best SEO practices not get penalized by Google.
Hire the right people. Choose SEO experts who care about your vision. Communicate to them what your goals are to help you create an SEO strategy to achieve your objectives. If you’re a startup, the first goal would probably be to create awareness for your product. For established businesses, it may be to write compelling landing pages to make more sales. Whatever your goal is, it’s important that the SEO strategies also align with these goals.
A Technical Explanation of How SEO Works
Search engines like Google exist to discover, understand and organize content that they see on the internet. Their ultimate goal is to provide the most relevant results to a search query.
Your website needs to be visible to the search engines to show up in the search engine results. This is where SEO comes in. When you optimize your content for SEO, Google would understand your content better.
Google has spiders or crawlers. What they do is scour the world wide web for content. They collect information such as page speed, backlinks, title tags, etc. Then, they follow an algorithm to help them rank content better. Regardless of what format your website has, whether it’s an image or a PDF, it’s discovered by links.
The search engine collects links from the web and adds them to their index called Caffeine. This is a massive database of all links discovered by Google. Links are retrieved when a user looking for information that the content on that link is a match for.
After the spider crawls your page, the next step is Indexing, or how the search engine stores your webpage. Google will then analyze your page and store the page’s content to the index. Now keep in mind that your webpage can still be removed from Google’s Index.
Reasons that your page might be removed:
- When it says URL not found
- No metadata added to the page
- It asks for a password
- You have been penalized for violating the guidelines
To maximize SEO and avoid being removed from the index, you need a team who can help, experts who know how SEO works.
The last function of a search engine is to rank the web pages on their database. Google uses algorithms to help them rank web pages. If you’re taking care of SEO, it’s important that you have the latest updates to the algorithm.
To succeed with SEO, it’s essential that you know the most important ranking factors. First, your website has to be mobile-friendly. Next, work on the user experience and the speed of your site. Also, it should have a responsive design and must adapt to whatever device the user is using. Most importantly, publish only high-quality and relevant content to get better rankings.
Other important factors you need to consider include keywords, social media, outbound links and inbound links.
SEO may seem complicated, but with the right help, your business can gain more traffic and increase conversions.
You Know How SEO Works, Now Make it Work For You!
Whether you are a startup or an established business, you need SEO to increase traffic and increase conversions.
Don’t worry if you’re not highly technical, as you can always reach out for help. And that’s where we come in.
We are Hays Digital Marketing, committed to helping startups and established businesses with their SEO efforts. Our goal is to help your business succeed: create brand awareness, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and increase conversions.
Our team of experts has been in the digital marketing industry for years. We have helped several businesses in the past, and we are one of the fast-growing digital marketing agencies in the US. Like you, we want to see you achieve a competitive advantage and help you become an industry expert. We can do this through SEO and content marketing.
What’s in it for you? We can help you generate more leads through SEO and skyrocket your sales! Let us know your goals, and we are more than happy to assist you in achieving them.
Do you want to know more? Contact us at your most convenient time! You may also sign up for our 100% free website audit! No obligations; we simply want to help. With our website audit, you’ll gain insights into your website and how you can improve it. Get in touch with us to learn more.
