What Is SEO?
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. The brand’s visibility is proliferated, when someone, who might be a potential customer searches a term that matches the interest of your industry. The increase in visibility on the public domain will attract more organic traffic to your site, and this, in turn, gives you promising opportunities to convert qualified prospects into buyable customers. SEO, when done precisely can help the brand climb and set its foot above others as a trustworthy company and further improve the user’s experience with the brand and website.
Why Is SEO Important?
SEO plays a vital role in a brand’s awareness as it thrives to be a highly effective way to improve the brand’s visibility through search engines, drive more e-commerce traffic to the website, establishing the brand as a trusted companion in and around the industry, enhancing sustainable and reliable grow of the business, and much more. Let’s see how each of these factors contribute to the importance of SEO.
Visibility and Rankings
A customer who is in search of a product or a service online, are more likely to choose one of the top five suggestions that the search engine shows them. Search engines such as Google may exhibit thousands upon thousands of results for any given word, the vast majority of searchers never make it past the first page, and more than half the percentage of people click onto the first search result that pops up on their screen. SEO helps the brand to be positioned higher in search results and congregate more visibility online, making potential customers more likely to click over to the site instantly and convert.
Even if users don’t visit and convert immediately, simply populating in the rankings will make users more familiar with the brand. As the brand grows popular on the rankings of the search engine, the brand gains advantage of being familiar to the group of users. Any customer who comes across the brand, likely remembers the name and the next time they’re interested in associating their interest in the products and services, they might be ready for a direct search.
Web Traffic
SEO increases the organic search engine traffic, increasing the number of visitors the website witnesses each day. Potential customers, once track hold of the website give the brand an immense opportunity for sales. This directly imparts stability for an increase in sales because the more relevant people make a visit to the site, the more chances of the purchase or at least an enquiry can be made sure of.
Trustworthiness
A technically optimized website will always have an advantage of topping the leading search engines such as google, Chrome, Bing etc. While ranking higher on these search engines would be of great support to the brands because of increased visibility, the trust the brand gains with potential customers also makes them shine brighter. Users tend to get along with the recommendations that a search engine suggests, so obtaining a higher position for the keywords a user is searching for will market the product or service in the user’s mind simultaneously.
User Experience
A well-optimized website clearly communicates the supreme goal of the brand, the product or service that is ready to be offered, shows ways to purchase it, provides FAQs for a clearer view, and answers any questions revolving it. User experience is a major ranking factor for Google or any other search engine in the e-commerce platform. By catering the site to appeal to search engines like Google and Bing, the website would also be catering the user’s experience. This means both search engines and users are able to retrieve the information they require. On the other hand, if a user struggles to navigate the website, chances are that search engines would as well.
Growth
SEO definitely carries a lot of importance for the growth of any brand. The higher the rank on a search engine for a variety of high-ranking keywords, the more organic web traffic the site will receive. A website that is well optimized is more likely to draw more customers and make more sales due to increased lead generation. Customers are also more likely to share the brand with their peers across other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram once they’ve found the website through a popular search engine. Imprinting the brand’s quality in a customer’s heart will do wonders in favour of the brand.
Constituents of Search Engine Optimization
On-site SEO
On-site SEO basically is the process of improving the actual content on the site to make sure it is search engine friendly. When optimizing the website for search engines such as Google, the main objective is to communicate what each and every webpage is about to the search engine.
The intension of on-site SEO would be solely adding keywords to various sections of each page and also construction of the website. The key areas of attention for on-site search engine optimization are:
- Keyword research
- Link architecture
- Image alt tags
- Content refinement
- SEO titles and meta descriptions
Local SEO
Owning a local business that only serves the local radii, the website would not rank in other cities for most high-value terms, this is where the best digital marketing companies come to your aid. Search engines are good at accessing the user’s location to offer suggestions that are within the latitudinal range so that they can make a swift decision rather than sort through businesses that are nowhere near them at that point in time. So, if someone wants to find the best sandwich in town, they’d do a quick Google search, browse the top results around them, and make their decision.We can clearly agree that the other businesses or not in compliance with your brand, if the brand does not pop up as a top result while a search takes place. Ways to improve your local SEO include using local keywords (i.e. those that include your city or service area), claiming your directory listings, digital analytics and creating pages for your businesses on platforms such as Google My Business and Google Maps.
Off-Site SEO
Once the process of optimising the website is done from the owner’s end, an extra push to the increase in visibility of the brand is also handled outside the constructed website thus pushing the ranking higher. Link building or in short “backlinks” are the key elements to an off-site SEO which is undoubtedly an effort to have other established, high-traffic websites backing them.
Search engines carry backlinks as a signal of trust and play a pivotal role in the ranking game. Once the links are ensured of coming from reliable sites, the ranking will definitely have a positive impact. Tricking the search engine into recognizing bad links, using “black hat” tactics, will have the website penalized and potentially banned from search engines.
Hopping onto the Path to SEO Success!
On understanding what search engine optimization is, its importance, and ways to implement it, the owner of the business should be aware of the misuse of the technique in several other ways. SEO should hail as a positive practice with long-term benefits, not an action with immediate results. The website’s rankings should strongly depend on a potential competitor, the size of the company, years present in business, and their own on-site and off-site SEO.