SEO

 
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

For most of us today, when we need something—whether it’s an answer, idea, strategy, or service—we start by asking search engines. Google alone gets 3.5 billion searches per day. So just as search engines have become integral to our lives, so, too, has it become integral to many business marketing strategies. In fact, organic search is considered to be the highest ROI channel by 49% of marketers.

 

Organic search is just a fancy name for regular, non-ad search engine results, and the way marketers use organic search as a marketing channel is through search engine optimization, or SEO.

So how can you use the power of search engines to grow your business? In this complete guide to SEO, you’re going to learn everything you need to know to rank higher on Google, get more traffic to your site, and improve your brand reputation.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let’s break that down in the context of your website.

Search: What people do when they want to find an answer to a question or a product or service that meets their needs.

Search engine: A site (like Google or Bing) where a person can perform said search.

Search engine optimization: What you do to get said search engine to connect said search with your site.

What is SEO?

That’s all well and good, but you can tell me that RPA stands for robotic process automation and that doesn’t mean I know what RPA is.

So what is search engine optimization?

A formal definition of SEO:

Search engine optimization is a set of technical and content practices aimed at aligning a website page with a search engine’s ranking algorithm so it can be easily found, crawled, indexed, and surfaced in the SERP for relevant queries.

A simpler definition of SEO:

SEO is about making improvements to your website’s structure and content so its pages can be discovered by people searching for what you have to offer, through search engines.

The simplest definition of SEO:

SEO is what you do to rank higher on Google and get more traffic to your site.

Yes, Google is just one search engine of many. There’s Bing. Directory search engines. Even Instagram is a search engine. But capturing 92% of the market share, the terms “Google” and “search engine” are synonymous for the intents and purposes of this post. 

Benefits & importance of SEO

People are searching for any manner of things both loosely and directly related to your business. These are all opportunities to connect with these people, answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

More website traffic: When your site is optimized for search engines, it gets more traffic which equates to increased brand awareness, as well as…

More customers: To get your site optimized, it has to target keywords—the terms your ideal customers/visitors are searching—meaning you’ll get more relevant traffic.

Better reputation: Ranking higher on Google builds instant credibility for your business. If Google trusts you, then people trust you.

Higher ROI: You put money into your website, and into the marketing campaigns that lead back to your website pages. A top-performing site improves the fruits of those campaigns, making your investment worth it.

So whether you want more brand awareness, online visibility, leads, sales, or loyal customers, SEO is your answer.

 

 SEO strategies and best practices

Let’s finish off with some SEO strategies, best practices, and tips to help you get the most out of your time.

Always always search the keyword: What you think users are looking for when they perform a particular search in Google may not be what they’re actually looking for. Keyword intent matters, so always search the keywords you’re trying to target to make sure you have an intent match.

Be patient: SEO takes time. Like, a lot of time. It can take a few months before you really start to see the fruit of your efforts, but once you start seeing the impact, the benefits compound over time—so don’t give up prematurely!

Focus on quality: Google is always updating its algorithm and coming out with new SERP features, but at the end of the day, it’s all designed to surface the best content out there. So your focus should always remain on creating useful, trustworthy content consistently. That is the best SEO strategy above all else.

Maintain your content: While the consistent publication of quality content is the top Google ranking factor, this should not be at the expense of letting old content go stale. Regularly refresh your evergreen pages to preserve their SEO value and get consistent traffic growth over time.

Track and measure: Report on your traffic and site data regularly so you can see what topics resonate most with your audience, detect issues, and set goals for traffic growth.

For further requirement of designing websites and optimising SEO to improve the business, entrepreneurs can enlist the marketing services offered by skyrocket.