SEO or “Search Engine Optimisation” is a process used to make anything you are searching for in a search engine easily findable.
The purpose of the process is to make your website easily visible to the public by improving it by using various techniques such as specific keywords which will mean the most to your target audience. In this blog I am going to inform you about what SEO is and how vital the process is in the digital marketing industry.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most useful processes in marketing. The goal is to get your website to stand out and appear at the top of a search engines results such as Google. With the trillions of searches that are made every year, it is vital that search engines find the exact thing that you are searching for. With providing a good user experience with the relevant high quality content, your website will rank high and garner more organic traffic.
What is a search engine?
A search engine is an online tool which is used to search for a variety of different things such as clothing and entertainment. They also are a great source of information and it’s a good opportunity for business owners to attract people to their websites.
Google is the primary search engine that is focused on for SEO as the engine controls 90% of web searches.
There are different methods that search engines such as Google use so that they can provide the best search expeirence possible for the user. By doing this, it will benefit the search engine greatly because it can set a great first impression for the user and potentially form a loyalty to the service. Some of these methods are:
Crawlers – A bot used to scour various web pages to gather the information by visiting the links.
Indexing – Google analyses the webpage and saves the information in its index.
How does SEO work?
At its core, SEO works by optimising a website for a search engine such as Google by producing and providing good quality content, adding relevant keywords, making it mobile friendly and so much more. By doing these, your website will rank higher in the search engines results page (SERP) and people will be more attracted to your website and you will start accumulating traffic organically.
Here a few of the techniques you can use to optimise your website:
- Keywords – Words and phrases that are relevant to the content that you are producing so Google will automatically recognise this and link it back to the search made.
- Backlinks/Inbound Links – These are links that are in a website that links to another website. Google consider these links as votes so a website with a lot of backlinks will have a better chance of ranking higher in the results.
- Mobile Friendliness – This ensures that your website and the content available is easily accessible across different devices such as phones as well as computers. This will help your website rank higher because it greatly improves the users engagement and experience which are two factors used by Google seeing where your website should rank in the search results.
These are just a handful of factors that search engines such as Google will consider when ranking a search result.
Why is SEO important?
SEO is important because essentially, if your website doesn’t rank high in search results, the less people will visit and less organic traffic is accumulated. For example, the website that ranks the highest organically on a search is ten times more likely to be clicked on than the other results. You could pay to get your website to the top of the search result and it will appear as an ad. However, you have to keep paying to keep the ad at the top of the search and more importantly the majority of users ignore advertisements and are more likely to click on the organic result instead.
What does Google want from a webpage?
Google wants to create a perfect search experience for their users and they do this by showing the most relevant search results as possible; by ensuring each and every search result meets the intent of a user.
With this in mind, it’s important to remember that SEO should consider the user above all else. Google’s algorithm is becoming better and better at understanding and evaluating ‘quality content’ and the core ranking principles always relate back to the end user.
Google has identified that they deem quality content as:
- The Page Purpose – Figuring out the purpose of the page is the first step in understanding the website.
- Search Relevancy – No matter how good the content or information may be, if the content does not answer or isn’t relevant to the search query, the result is incorrect.
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EEAT) – These are a set of guidelines used by Google that determine the reliability and quality of the content on a page.
