Search Engine Optimization basics and why you need it!
30th Apr, 2020
Search Engine Optimization Basics and why you need it!
Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most critical concepts to understand if you want to execute a successful digital marketing campaign for your brand, business, products or services.
SEO is a concept that is becoming increasingly popular and is vital for every business owner who wants to market their brand more.
So, what is SEO and how does it work? Well, SEO (or search engine optimisation) is a form of marketing that refers to the way in which one can increase the quality and amount of organic traffic to a website. This is done by increasing a website's visibility to internet users when they search for a specific term within a search engine.
In terms of digital marketing, SEO is vital. With a good SEO campaign, your website will be much easier to find, navigate and easier for search engines to categorise. This ultimately increases traffic to your website and converts website visits into sales, thereby increasing your profits and giving you a larger potential customer base. SEO is one of the foundational components of an integrated digital marketing strategy.
If you would like to maximize the potential of your website, you should be thinking of search engine optimization, first and foremost. When you have a cleverly-created SEO website, you can be easily found in major search engines. According to the content on your site and the SEO keywords you make use of, when an internet user types in a certain word or phrase, your website should feature in their search results.
A good SEO agency will offer services that are important for improving your website's visibility on most search engine results pages. Such services involve careful planning for critical changes to your website's design to make it more user friendly (UX) and more "Google" friendly.
The more you improve your website according to Google's SEO requirements, the more visible you will be and your digital marketing agency should be able to assist you with this. In addition, SEO services include making the content on your website more attractive to Google and alternative search engines.
Did you know that when searching for something online, most people will not click on the second page of the search engine results? This is one of the reasons it is so important to rank high up on Google and other search engines.
Research has shown that the higher your website ranks, the better the chances of being clicked on. High-ranking websites on search engines are those that are continuously working on improving their SEO strategy by populating their website with relevant content that is aligned to an online marketing and content marketing strategy.
Search engines like google have one key role, and that is to serve its users with the most relevant answers, information and solutions to the user’s search query.
Take this basic example of how it all works.
Mary has a 7-year-old son who is starting to take an interest in soccer. As a Mom, she wants the best for him. She is aware that there are 3 or 4 within driving distance so she jumps online and searches for the following - “Soccer clubs close to me”.
Google receives the request and in a nanosecond returns the most relevant answers to her question.
Club 1 and 2 are on the first page of her google results and club 3 & 4 do not even feature. But why? Well, club 3 and 4 have websites that are not optimised and lack content so google categorises them as irrelevant and lists them on pages 2 and 3 of the search results. Club 1 and 2 have been optimised and contain content that is optimised. Its is safe to say that Mary would now spend her time reviewing the content on the websites of club 1 and 2.
Having a good quality and well-thought-out SEO campaign can have countless benefits for your business. Not only does it give your website visitors a better user experience, but it also can result in higher sales conversion rates.
Of course, when you rank high up in search engines, you naturally have better brand credibility which, in turn, can do wonders for your sales and revenue. This also creates amazing brand awareness and folks will be more likely to remember your business at a later stage.
SEO is only as good as the sum of its parts.
There are a number of SEO tools that one can use to check how well a website is performing from an SEO perspective. These tools will highlight all the major SEO problem areas on websites pages so that the webmaster can fix the problems. SEO can be very technical and the role of the SEO specialist hab become a key role within most organisations that have a website.
Digging a little deeper into the subject SEO can be divided into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the factors you can control on your own website and off-page SEO refers to the page ranking factors that occur off your website, this includes things like backlinks from other websites, your promotion methods, and how much exposure something gets on social media. But don’t think you have to understand all of this. Any good digital agency will be able to perform all these tasks on your behalf.
A critical point that one needs to also understand is that SEO is an ongoing function of an integrated digital marketing strategy and should be never-ending. What I mean is that business should always be adding search engine optimised contnet to their websites. A website should always be growing and as you add information to your website you optimise all the pages.
Think about it like this. If your direct competitor who sells the same products as you have one hundred optimised webpages and you have fifty, your content is similar but they have more. Who do you think google is going to list first on the search engine results pages.
As an integrated digital marketing consultancy SEO is a service offering that we have mastered for our clients and for ourselves. As part of our onboarding process, we always run a full digital marketing audit and that includes a full SEO, deep dive. We believe that all business have the potential to be the best in their field of interest and by understanding the current digital situation analysis we then arm ourselves with the all the relevant information to then flesh out a digital marketing journey.
In closing one also needs to be aware that most of the major search engines update their algorithms as they try to perfect the ultimate search journey for their users. Being aware of how these algorithms work and function is a critical element to good SEO practice. Should a search engine change their algorithm one needs to be able to adapt and re SEO any webpages that require adjusting.
In its most simple form SEO is all about websites playing by the rules and looking good to the search engines and the people they serve.