What is SEO
SEO means optimizing your website so that search engines can
better understand your content and reward your website with higher rankings.
For example, If you have a website that is related to travel, how do search
engines tell that your site has content related to traveling?
You need to optimize or include suitable keywords to traveling.
When search engines index or crawls your page to know what the page is about, by
analyzing the keywords it can easily understand what the content is related to,
and will also show your website in relevant search results (in this
example it is traveling).
So, many bloggers, digital marketers, SEO specialists work hard
to bring the website or blog to the first two pages as the audience will rarely
go past the third page.
To bring it to the first page, Marketers use several
techniques to improve their website’s search engine optimization. But the most
important thumb rule is to have value-rich content with relevant search terms (keywords)
in the content. And, These keywords need to be placed strategically in
headings, subheadings, introductions, etc.
On-page SEO involves
making optimizations on your website like creating relevant and value-rich
content, creating internal links, ensuring the website loads fast enough, and
checking for the correct usage of URL structure and titles on your website.
Why SEO
is important for a website?
There are many sources of traffic. You can drive traffic from
paid ads, social media, influencers, and several other sources to your website.
However, if organic traffic is not your main source of traffic, it may not be
long before you stop receiving traffic.
For example, if you run paid ads, you can see a high influx of
audience visiting your website, but once you end your paid ads, your traffic
will go down drastically. It’s the same in social media channels too, if you
stop sharing fresh new content on your website, it is likely your traffic will
also, take a nosedive.
According to Bright Edge Reasearch,
53% of the audience comes to a website with SEO efforts.
When implemented correctly, SEO can continue to drive traffic
without much effort. Often when you have ranked for a few keywords, there is
not much more effort required. Maybe just minor tweaks here and there. The
majority of the work is put in initially when you want to start ranking for a
keyword, and once you are ranked the traffic
will come on autopilot. With SEO, dividends are reaped over
time and great content, along with other SEO techniques will result in
more traffic eventually.
SEO is important for any kind of website. While search engines
have become smarter over time, it is still important to optimize your
website. This will help search engines better understand your content and rank
it for relevant terms.
How SEO is
important for business?
SEO has several benefits for any business. Generally, the
benefits revolve around better search rankings, which leads to more traffic and
hence more conversions or revenue.
Business A has a search engine optimized website and constantly improves its rankings. Business B has a website but does not focus on SEO. Which one would you expect to get more leads? Which business is likely to have better conversions? Which business is likely to grow at a faster pace? Of course, all other things being equal, business A with an optimized website is likely to attract more customers through searches.
Whether your competitors are doing SEO or not, you need to get started with it to get your fair share of organic traffic. If they are doing SEO and you are not, they probably love you right now for giving leads away.
On average, 83 percent of
the traffic from search engines comes from SEO, and 17 percent from paid search
·
Helps
increase organic traffic – Organic traffic is
search engine traffic that is not from paid ads. It is of high quality and one
of the best sources of traffic. Users tend to click on your website when you
offer a solution to them. So, by providing value-rich content along with good SEO,
you are increasing your chances of ranking higher in search results, thereby
improving your organic traffic. More traffic also means more
conversions.
·
Results
in better user experience – Often website
owners will overlook the user experience of their website. A good user
experience is a combination of neat design, a fast-loading website, relevant
photos and videos, an easy checkout process, no errors, etc. All these are part
of SEO and if a website improves its SEO, it will need to improve on the
user experience as well. An improved user experience can lead to higher
conversions.
·
Increases
Conversions – SEO is important to increase the credibility of a
website. If Google and other search engines are ranking you higher in search
results, it obviously means they have some trust in your website. The search
engines understand that your website is relevant to certain search queries.
Users also understand that your website is credible enough to be ranking for
the search terms. Hence without doing much you will have already built some
trust with users, which ultimately will result in better conversions. This is
an excellent way to build brand awareness.
·
SEO
has the best ROI – SEO is an inbound marketing strategy. This means you are
not putting yourself out there and interrupting people with ads. Instead,
when people are searching for your products or services, your website shows up
in search results and they land on your website. They already have
an interest in your products and services, else why would they be
searching for those terms? Hence, there is not much more convincing that you
need to do. When you rank higher in search results, you have won most of the
battle before it even starts.
How Does SEO Work
Search engines crawl millions of web pages and digest the
content available on those web pages. When a user makes a search query, they
search their database for relevant results related to the query and display
them to the user. The order of results is dependent on how well the website is
optimized. Sounds too technical, let me simplify it for you.
Source: Alexa Blog
Let’s say, You have a website that sells shoes online. When someone searches “buy shoes online” on Google, the search engine will scan several websites and bring out the best websites with related content to the search query.
In order for your website to show in the result, you need to optimize your website for the related search term, When a search engine crawls your website, you need to ensure it is optimized with relevant content, the website should be optimized both for.
SEO Ranking Factors
There are several factors considered by search engines when
ranking websites in search results. Here are the major ones that you must
optimize for if you want to rank higher in search results.
Relevant
& Optimized Content – Search engine algorithms
rely on keywords. These are words and phrases that users search for. They are
also words and phrases that should be on your website and should guide search
engines about your website’s topic. Ideally, the two should match up, i.e
keywords that people search for and keywords on your website.
For example, if your website is related to cars, you don’t
expect it to show up in search results for computers because your website will
have content related to cars. Have you ever realized how accurate search
results are? This is usually due to search engines understanding a website’s
content and ranking it for only relevant search terms.
· Responsiveness – Consider two competitors who have similar websites and sell similar products in a similar niche. If one has a responsive website that fits any screen size, e.g desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. The other has a non-responsive website that only fits on large desktops. For search engines, they will rank the responsive website higher in search results. This will result in more traffic to the website that is mobile responsive. Your website should be responsive and not just for ranking purposes only, but also for a better user experience for your visitors. Website’s speed – Another major ranking factor is website speed. low website results in poor user experience as visitors won’t waste time waiting for a website to load. Again let’s consider two sites in a similar niche, one website loads in under 3 seconds and the other in 9 seconds. Which website has higher chances to get in better results? Yes, the one that loads in 3 seconds. Search engines will always rank the website that loads faster in top results. There are several ways in which you can increase a website’s speed like, choosing a good host, using caching, optimizing the code, using CDNs, etc.
·
Social
Signals – When people share your content on social media, search engines
understand that your content is valuable. They then reward your content with
higher search rankings. This is because more social signals will most likely
generate more traffic and can also result in more backlinks as well.
·
Bounce
Rate – Another important factor that will impact SEO is how long
visitors spend on your website. If a user lands on your website and leaves
quickly it means they have most probably not found what they are looking
for. Hence they end up looking elsewhere. If your bounce rate is high it
means your content is not relevant to the search query. Your website will
eventually end up ranking lower.
·
Security –
An SSL certificate is
vital for any website. Not just for ranking purposes but for the overall
security of the website. Search engines tend to rank websites that have a valid
SSL certificate installed higher in search results. This is to ensure users are
not at risk.
Search engine optimization, therefore, involves identifying the ranking factors considered by search engines and optimizing your website to comply with those ranking factors. Although there are several other rankings factors, the above list contains all the major factors that will impact SEO rankings.
Conclusion: Now that you know why SEO is important, how it works, along with its benefits, are you wondering how to get started with SEO? It may like a difficult task, but trust me, it's not, To get started, you can Contact us And follow us on social media.
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