A Beginners Guide to What SEO Is
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of optimising websites, web pages, and content to improve your ranking in search engine pages. SEO uses practices that are designed to improve the appearance and positioning of a website, making it user friendly, while ensuring it is easy for the search engine robots to crawl the site, identifying what it is about and ranking it.
Search engine optimisation relies heavily on quality content. This content can be anything from the content on web pages to videos, images, business listings, blogs, and more. People rely on the internet more than in the past, using it to find information, products, and services. This is usually achieved through organic results. Organic results are natural results, they are not paid advertising, you cannot buy your ranking from Google. Organic results are the outcome of hard work, time, dedication, and effort. It's all about SEO to improve your ranking, in turn, increasing your website visitors, conversion rates, and visibility.
Before taking a closer look at what SEO is, you need some understanding on how the top search engines, such as Google, work. Search engines use robots, also known as bots, to crawl websites. These bots are responsible for gathering information from websites and placing it in a large database, known as an index. Crawlers use known and reputable websites, following links to other pages and sites.
When someone searches for something you provide on your website, Google extracts the information from its index. All the data in the index is ranked based on their EEAT (Experience – Expertise – Authority – Trust) principle. The more links you have directing to your website, the more credible your website looks to the bots. The search engine chooses content that it believes to be relevant and add value to its user experience.
SEO falls into three categories. These categories include:
Not all businesses use SEO in 2024, which is rather worrying, as it is an imperative online marketing technique that cannot be ignored. The statistics speak for themselves:
These 2024 statistics clearly show how important SEO really is
The top search engines can provide a number of different results based on a users query. These results include:
SEO comprises of an effective strategy based on your online marketing goals. Search engine optimisation can help you achieve five main results, including:
Brand visibility is essential to your SEO success. It's a fact that most users only look at the first page of results with less than 1% visiting the second page. At the same time, 75% of users will click on the first or second result on the page. The main goal of SEO is to boost your brand visibility by helping you make your way to the first page of results. The more visible your content is, the higher your chances are of reaching your audience and driving quality traffic to your website.
Having a professionally designed website is a major asset, but at the same time, it's worthless if you do not have visitors exploring your site. SEO focuses on boosting your brand visibility and reaching your target audience, in order to drive more traffic to your website. Search engines use a number of ranking factors and this includes the number of visitors to your website (click-through-rate) and how long they stay on your website (bounce rate).
While having visitors to your website is a benefit, you want visitors that are specifically looking for the products or services you provide. The main goal is to convert your website traffic into sales. SEO helps to drive quality traffic to your website, helping you increase your conversion rates.
Google rewards content that provides value to your visitors, at the same time, it ensures you improve your visitors experience. As a result, SEO is valuable in helping your website become more usable and discoverable. It influences what your content looks like, while ensuring that you provide a good user experience for those searching for products and services you provide.
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