Understanding SEO: What It Is and Why It’s Important
If you own or operate a business, you are probably acquainted with the concept of SEO. This abbreviation appears in all of your marketing texts, your freelancers’ proposals, and dozens of ‘growing your business online’ advertisements. But what is SEO? And is it worth investing any time and effort into it? This article answers these questions, avoiding any unnecessary professional terms. What Is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving or boosting the number of visitors and the traffic that goes through your website. In other words, SEO is improving your site to get more results on search engines when somebody is looking or searching for something that you are going to be providing. What is SEO – Recall a moment when you were looking for something you needed. A plumber. New shoes. A cake recipe. A place that serves up solid Mexican food. Odds are, you turned to Google and searched for what you were looking for. What Google does is it scans the internet for the webpages that answer the searcher’s question the best and displays them in the search engine results. SEO is the process of making sure that your website is found by searchers who are looking for what you offer. SEO is not a singular task. It is actually a group of tasks related to making your website appear in search results. Put simply – What is SEO – SEO is a set of actions tied to making sure you get visitors interested in what you offer without having to pay for every single visitor. SEO can also be thought of as a conversation with the search engine. You’re basically explaining to Google what your site is all about. What business you are in. Who you serve. The reasons customers should pick you instead of the competition. The more you tell Google about your business and the more consistent the message is, the easier time Google has with understanding your website and, subsequently, ranking it higher in the search results. What is SEO One of the ways SEO differs from other types of marketing is that it does not interrupt the searcher. A billboard sign or a television commercial is the marketer interrupting the searcher. With SEO, the marketer (you) is answering the searcher’s question. As such, SEO is often compared to traditional marketing interruption. SEO is much more efficient at converting because it is answering the searcher’s question directly. How Does SEO Actually Work? Search engines are powered by crawlers that systematically explore the web and save all the information they find there in search engine indexes. When someone makes a query, Google’s algorithm analyses the indexes to find relevant results and ranks them according to their pertinence, level of trustworthiness, speed, user-friendliness, quality of content, and other criteria. As a website owner, your task is to configure your online resource in such a way that Google will be able to easily understand and rank your page higher in search engine results for relevant keywords compared to other websites. This is what SEO is all about – What is SEO – the optimization of your website’s content and structure so that it can be found and ranked higher by search engines like Google. SEO practices generally fall into three main categories : On-page SEO deals with content and coding on your website. Off-page SEO focuses on external mentions of your brand and website. Technical SEO refers to the technical aspects of your site’s setup and operation. What is SEO- Google evaluates websites based on hundreds of different criteria, but the most important ones include page speed, mobile-friendliness, quality of content, and the presence of backlinks. Your website’s page speed is significant because it enhances the user experience (UX) and reduces drop-off rates; in other words, if your website is too slow, people will not be able to access it quickly enough and will leave it after a few seconds. What is SEO- Mobile-friendliness is one of the website’s characteristics that ensure a satisfactory user experience (UX) on any device. It is a must for SEO, as most of Google searches are performed through mobile phones. The quality of the contents refers to its depth since Google rewards longer and more informative articles/snippets with better SERP positions. Finally, backlinks allow Google to measure a resource’s popularity since they are the links to your site from other websites. Each criterion is vital for SEO – What is SEO – as one’s neglect leads to a worse result. Hence, all of them should be taken into account when optimizing to obtain the best result. In addition, people should not focus on one particular side and neglect another since they are closely interrelated. A website with excellent technical SEO but lacking in content will underperform compared to a website with a shallow but technically optimized page. This is why technical SEO, on-page optimization, and off-page promotion (backlinks) need to be developed in tandem. All the details related to SEO are explained in more detail in our Complete SEO Guide. Why Does SEO Matter for Your Business? Here is the part that all business owners will want to hear – why should they invest into this? 1. Most people tend to research their purchase on Google Most people tend to research their purchase on Google before calling or visiting a company’s website. Therefore, if a business owner’s website is not on the first page of Google results, they will lose the client to their competitors. 2. It Builds Trust The appearance of the website on the first page of Google already inspires trust in the client What is SEO Many people believe that Google knows what it is talking about, so if a company’s website is there, then it must be legitimate. And this is enough for making a purchase decision – the client will buy from the first company that appears in their search results. 3. SEO is about attracting free traffic The traffic from


