Building your digital content strategy on the foundation of a solid SEO strategy will help customers find your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the visibility of your website via a search engine’s (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go etc.) organic (un-paid) results. The higher ranked and the more frequently your site is listed in search results, the greater the quantity and quality of visitors the website will receive from search engine users.
There are two main goals of SEO, and they’re inextricably linked to one another. The first goal is to create a website that search engines can find, crawl, and index. The second is to help you create high quality content that provides the information users are searching for in relation to your business. The better quality the information on your website is, the higher it will rank and the more likely search engines are to find, crawl, and index it.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Think of the internet as a giant library full of information. All that information is great but you need some help to find the specific information you want. Enter search engines, which are basically the reference librarians of the internet – they help you find the information you want quickly. They do this by ‘crawling’ the internet (going from site to site using bots) to build their information databases. Within a certain time frame, they will cover the entire internet and start over again.
Each search engine uses a unique algorithm to decide which content they prioritize but there are enough similarities between the algorithms that you can optimize for search engines in general instead of each specific one. To make your website more attractive to the search engines, you need to have keyword rich, high quality information on your website.
Why is SEO important?
In the most basic terms, SEO is important because it is one of the ways to get more people to visit your website without paying for ads (though a good SEO strategy should also incorporate Google ads). Research shows that the top Google search result gets almost a third of the traffic that searched for the keywords – so getting as high as you can will help more people see your business’ website.
Your goal should be to make it to the first page of search results since a quarter of internet users never go beyond that first Search Engine Results Page (SERP). So if you’re number 11, that means you’re losing out on 25% of users from the start. For tips on getting to the first page, take a look at our ‘How to make it into the top 10!’ article.
Ideally, you should be thinking about SEO when you’re first building your website. Many people consider SEO a marketing tool, which it is, but it’s much more than that. Good SEO is an investment in the future of your business as a solid SEO strategy will continue to pay dividends for years to come. Investing in search engine optimization and keyword research should be seen as just as important as the graphic design of your website.
Good SEO practices don’t just affect the search ranking of the website either. They can help make the user experience better, by helping ensure key information is laid out in a way users can understand and navigate. This will increase the amount of time users spend on your website, and help give them a favorable impression of your business.
Finally, SEO can help differentiate you from competitors. If two companies are selling the same product, the one that is more easily found by customers will likely make more sales.
Search engine users trust their search engines to provide the most appropriate, reputable and popular results. If you’re looking to up your SEO game, contact Y to see how we can help.