What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Which is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.
To understand the basic meaning of SEO, let’s break down the concept and look at the parts:
- Quality of Traffic: Quality traffic is an outcome of providing the right content and experience for your visitor. It attracts visitors who are genuinely interested in the products that you offer.
- Quantity of Traffic: The more people click through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), the more traffic is better. Without enough traffic, there will be fewer conversions made, fewer sales made, fewer readers for your blog which means the business has slow growth.
- Organic result: Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
How SEO works
Search engine is a website where you are able to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or other search engines you’re using unexpectedly provides a long list of links to web pages that could answer your question.
But have you ever wondered what’s behind those magical lists of links?
Here’s how it works: The search engine you’re using has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
Why should you be concerned about SEO anyway?
Isn’t Google supposed to find you naturally? Well, millions of websites are launched daily but only a small percentage achieve their set goals. If your site is not ranking highly on search engine result pages (SERPs), there is no way your target audiences will find you.
Regardless of the type of business, you are marketing online, you can now leverage the increasing number of internet users to meet your goals. If you are able to leverage the internet numbers, you have to boost ranking on SERPs using different strategies. Below are a few reasons why you should invest in SEO irrespective of the size of your business:
4 Reasons to Invest in SEO
- Brand Visibility
If you are to compete in your niche, then you must make sure your brand is visible and easily recognizable.
People do everything via search engines, and Google is by far the biggest with over 90% of the search engine market share.
When you’re looking for a new television, you ask Google. If you want to book a hotel, you ask Google. Google is our faithful friend, who we trust to help solve most of our everyday problems.
The second largest search engine is YouTube, which brings in a whole new area for optimization. It’s not enough just to post a video and hope that it ranks. Compelling video content with a strong SEO foundation and strategic distribution strategy helps bring your brand to life and opens up another significant avenue to capture traffic.
2. Receive impressive ROI
SEO brings a great return on investment if you have a healthy budget and an on-going process. Don’t set unrealistic expectations. Budget 6 to 12 months of SEO, otherwise paying for just a few months won’t bring you the results you’re longing about and you’d be like throwing money outside the window.
According to Search Engine Journal:
- Organic search is the digital marketing channel that brings in the highest ROI according to 49 percent of the respondents.
- 49 percent of revenue is captured by organic traffic
- 19 percent of revenue is captured by paid search
- 18 percent of revenue is captured by social media
- 14 percent of revenue is captured by email
An investment in SEO is an investment in your business’ future. It is a long-term strategy and it shouldn’t be seen as an immediate way of generating sales.
3. SEO Builds Trust & Credibility
The goal of any experienced SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search with thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.
Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. In addition to the factors mentioned above, authority is accrued over time as a result of elements like:
- Quality backlink profiles.
- Positive user behavior.
- Machine-learning signals.
- Optimized on-page elements and content.
But establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. Problem is, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight — just like real life. Authority is earned and built over time.
4. SEO Can Be Cheaper Than Other Paid Search Strategies
It can be cheap if we take into consideration a 6-month plan. For SEO you need to invest a lot more money in the first phase, compared to other paid advertising methods where you have to pay from month to month if you want to keep receiving traffic on your website.
Paid search marketing, compared to search engine optimization, has a shorter time for returning conversion, but your business should invest to see results. As long as you keep paying for results, you’ll get them, which in the long term is not so equitable as SEO.
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