In today’s world, whenever we need something, whether it's a product, an information, an idea, or a service, we immediately open search engines like Google or Bing. Google alone receives 3.5 billion searches every single day. So, just like search engines have become a very essential part of our daily life, they have also become a very important part of business marketing strategies. In fact, 49% of marketers believe that organic search or SEO is the best marketing channel.
There's no doubt that SEO ought to be a part of your marketing strategy. It's an excellent way to attract and retain visitors to your website. But, what exactly is SEO? In this post, we'll discuss what SEO is and a few important things that you need to know before you get started on your SEO journey.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It’s the practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in Google and other search engine results. A good SEO strategy is super important if you want to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.
The difference between SEO and paid ads is that SEO is organic or unpaid ranking, which means that you don’t pay to get SEO traffic. When someone searches for something that you've optimized for, search engines like Google place your site at the top of the search engine result pages.
For example, let's say you run a cooking website. Suppose you have an article about "how to cook biryani at home" and you want your article to rank on Google whenever someone searches for "how to cook biryani at home", here’s where SEO comes into play. It's not easy, however that's what SEO revolves around.
To properly understand how to rank your site higher in search engine result pages, you first need to understand how search engines work.
How Search Engine Works?
Search engines, such as Google, rank web pages using highly complex mechanisms (aka "Algorithms").
These complex algorithms consider hundreds of ranking factors to determine where a specific web page should rank in the search engine result pages.
Google and other search engines rank content using the following stages:
Crawling
Search engines have crawlers (aka spiders or bots) that “crawl” the World Wide Web(WWW) to find out the best web pages to rank for a search query. In order for search engines to find a web page, the page should have links pointing to it. Generally, the more links a page has to it, the easier it is for search engines like Google to find that page.
Indexing
After crawling, Google inspects each page discovered by the bots and tries to understand a few factors. Google will inspect things like content, images, authority, quality and other ranking factors. It then saves this data in its Google Index (in other words, its large database).
Ranking
Google identifies which pages are most relevant and qualified to users' search queries and ranks them in the SERPs.
When a user enters a query, Google searches the index database for sorting pages and returns the results it deems to be of the best quality and most useful to the user. Relevancy depends upon a variety of factors such as location, language, interest and so on. For example, searching for "best salons in kolkata” will provide different results than searching the same in India.
Importance of SEO Strategy
In short, SEO is important because it increases the visibility of your website, which means more traffic and more opportunities to convert visitors into customers. SEO brings "free" traffic to your site, unlike Facebook ads or Google ads.
A higher ranking implies you will receive a great deal of free clicks. According to research, 65% of users click on organic results (not the ads).
SEO is a fantastic marketing channel for increasing brand awareness, building relationships, and securing your business as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your industry.
In other words, if you rank high for your target keywords, you will receive a constant flow of potential traffic over time. SEO requires time, effort, and resources. However, the main benefit of SEO over the other marketing channels is that it continues to generate highly targeted traffic and help you grow your business.
Consistency is Key
SEO is a skill that requires time to master. Aside from learning the theory, practice is the best way to learn SEO.
SEO is a purposeful, data-driven technique to improve the ROI of your company's digital marketing. SEO has numerous advantages for websites and can result in long-term explosive growth.
Businesses that invest in SEO can gain credibility and trust from their audiences, which makes it a crucial component of their digital marketing strategy.
