Someone somewhere is probably searching for information about your products or services, and SEO is the difference between whether your website will feature at the top of their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or not.
Clearly, SEO is an important aspect of every digital marketing strategy. But what is SEO, and how can you go about it to ensure your website ranks favorably against similar sites on the web? Let’s dive right into it.
What is SEO and how does it work?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your web content so that it ranks at the top of the Search Engine Results Page. What SEO does is that it increases your webpages’ visibility which then enhances their chances of getting clicked on by searchers.
But why is it important to rank at the top of SERP?
Well, the reason is in the numbers. Some sources reveal that the first page of search engine results receives up to 92% of organic traffic. This is then followed by the second page at a distant 6%, and no one quite cares what the rest of the pages have. This means that if your website doesn’t make the first page then you can’t possibly enjoy the lucrative organic traffic.
Optimizing your web content for favorable search engine ranking is way more efficient than deploying traditional marketing techniques. Here’s an illustration of how the two marketing tools work:
When you commission a billboard ad on a busy highway, not everybody that sees it wants to buy what you’re advertising. You can run a targeted campaign by having billboards in neighborhoods you believe your target audience resides and still not witness sales growth throughout the marketing campaign period. A good billboard campaign will cost you a lot of money, and there’s no guarantee it will convert.
How SEO works
Say you just typed “Luxury vacations” on Google. What the search engine does is comb through the web looking for this key phrase or related content. The search engine uses intelligent bots that crawl through millions of search results before indexing pages that contain the most relevant results –text, videos, or images. In so doing, Google recommends your site to visitors with commercial intent unlike in traditional advertising.
Google, however, doesn’t share publicly how its algorithm works to avoid manipulations. Therefore, we don’t know for sure what it takes to have your site indexed on the first page of their search results.
SEO is an ever-dynamic field undergoing constant upgrades because Google is looking to provide the best user experience to searchers through relevant and actionable search results.
How to Nail SEO
As already mentioned, no one knows for sure how Google determines its SERP indexing, but somehow it has everything to do with SEO. So how do you optimize your website to enhance its visibility in a sea of millions of other web pages competing for the same traffic?
Although Google’s ranking algorithm is extremely complex and confusing, here are some of the things they look for generally:
- High-quality and relevant content
Google will scrutinize your web content for relevance to the search topic before recommending it to searchers. Focus keywords and key phrases come into play when determining if your content is what searchers could be looking for. This is not your cue to saturate your content with keywords because Google won’t like it anyway.
- User-friendly website
Your website should be mobile-friendly and have a good response time. As we’ve mentioned above, Google is looking wants its visitors to have the best possible user experience.
- How other visitors interact with your site
Did your visitors find what they came looking for or did they bounce to other sites? It doesn’t look good for you when visitors spend seconds on your site and then go back to search again.
- The number of unique content on your site.
- Number of quality (authoritative) links in the various web pages on your website
If you need a professional agency to help you out, consider using Faceless Digital’s SEO services!
