What Is SEO and Why It's Important
You may have heard that SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a useful and necessary digital marketing tool, but you may not know what SEO entails in this day and age. This short article will break down what SEO is, why it’s important, and how to implement best practices so that your brand is more discoverable than ever online.
SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.?
Time to explain SEO...
SEO! What Is It Anyway?
SEO stands for?Search Engine Optimization. In the simplest of terms, good SEO optimizes your visibility online. This means that the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases, and the better your chances to provide your product or service to a greater number of people.?Let’s break down why SEO is so important.
There are only 10 spots—that’s right, just 10—on a Google search page. So ask yourself, when you type in a Google search, how often do you venture off the first page onto the second, third, or twentieth page of the search results? Chances are, you rarely have to because the first few options on that very first Google page contain the information you requested in your search query.
If a potential customer types in a topic relevant to what your business can provide, you definitely want to be on that first search results page alongside your competitors. If you aren’t in one of those top ten search spots, another business just gained a new customer—or, you just lost one.
So essentially SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results. ?A higher ranking when someone searches a term in your industry increases your brand’s visibility online. This, in turn, gives you more opportunities to convert qualified prospects into customers. When done correctly, SEO can help your brand stand above others as a trustworthy company and further improve the user’s experience with your brand and website.?
Why SEO is important?
I will touch on a few reasons why SEO is important for a modern-day business
Visibility and Rankings
One of the most important functions of SEO is increasing visibility, which means making it easier for prospects to find you when they search for something you have to offer. Visibility is directly related to your ranking.
The higher you rank on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely prospects will see you and click through to your site, so it’s key to?increase your organic page ranking. The more effective your SEO efforts, the higher your ranking and the better your visibility, which is especially important when you consider that a?quarter?of web users never click past the first SERP.
I can demonstrate this by focusing on an article I wrote for Legacy Motor Group when the launch of the BMW iX was announced. The keyword BMW iX has a search volume of about 9900 per month and the article that I wrote ranked 5th for that keyword in South Africa and it generates about 1800 to 2000 clicks per month on that keyword alone. The article on its own has generated over 7 high-quality leads for a car worth about R1.6 million. this alone should demonstrate the power of SEO is done right.
Web Traffic
Increased web traffic is one of the main goals of SEO, and you increase traffic when you increase visibility and rankings. Backlinko states that the #1 spot on a Google search gets nearly?32% of clicks?and moving up just one spot in search results can increase CTR by an amazing 30.8%.
The golden grail for many marketers is the?‘Featured Snippet’?which is often referred to as position #0 as it appears above the first ranked URL. This is usually content that’s taken from a landing page on a blog that answers a question people are searching for and can give your organic click-through a huge boost.
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Growth
No one can argue against this – SEO is key to the growth of your brand. As we mentioned above, the higher you rank on a search engine for a variety of high-volume keywords, the more organic web traffic your site will receive. It’s as simple as that.
What Are the Main Elements of Search Engine Optimization?
On-site SEO
On-site SEO are the improvements to be applied to the content on your site to ensure that it’s search engine friendly. When optimizing your webpages for search engines, you want to signal to search engines exactly what the webpage is about in a variety of ways.
With On-site SEO, you’ll deal with the structure of your website, SEO keywords, internal links, image alt attributes, and other techniques to help the search engines analyze and assess the content of your website.
Keywords
While keywords are no longer the only SEO technique that matters, they’re still crucial to your website’s search engine ranking. When we speak of keywords, we are referring to specific words and phrases that potential customers use to find answers online.
Picking the right keywords for your website and content takes diligent research, and it’s important to aim for the sweet spot of high volume ratings and low competition.
Local SEO
If you own a local business that only serves your particular area for example in Johannesburg, your website may not be ranking in other cities such as Capetown Durban, or Dublin. Search engines pull the user’s location to make suggestions that are within a certain range so that they can make a quick decision rather than sort through businesses that are nowhere near that point in time. So, if someone wanted to find the best Kota in town, they’d do a quick google search, browse the top results around them, and make their decision. This means if your business isn’t showing up as a top result when it should be included, chances are they’re taking their business elsewhere.?
Ways to improve your local SEO include using local keywords, claiming your directory listings, and creating pages for your businesses on platforms such as Google My Business and Google Maps.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site search engine optimization techniques involve efforts made on websites outside of your own to push your own ranking higher. The key element to off-site SEO is link building or “backlinks,” which is an effort to have other reputable, high-traffic websites link back to your site.
Backlinks are a signal of trust to search engines and they can play a huge part in your ranking position. Ensure that the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites and your ranking will be positively affected. Don’t try and trick the search engine into recognizing bad links, using?“black hat” tactics, because more likely than not, you’ll get penalized and potentially banned from search engines.
After overviewing what search engine optimization is, why it’s important and how to implement it — keep in mind that SEO should be treated as a positive practice with long-term benefits, not an exact science with immediate results. Your rankings highly depend on whom you are competing with, including the size of the company, years in business, and their own on and off-site SEO efforts.