SEO, CTR, B2B, and KPI. These are just a few of the many terms digital marketing professionals deal with every day. But if you are new to this industry or a small business owner, chances are, you know little about these terms. There is also the intimidating task of knowing how each element works for a digital marketing campaign.
As you may know, search engines play a fundamental role in boosting digital presence and obtaining more website visits as possible. A search engine exists to learn, discover, and organize the Internet’s content to provide relevant and up-to-date search results to millions of web searchers. To show up and rank high in these search results, web content needs to follow the core web vitals while staying visible to all search engines.
But all these can be possible by following the right SEO techniques. If the website is nowhere to be found, there is no way a site will appear on search results. The good thing is, there is a way to get acquainted with the basics of digital marketing—knowing how SEO works. This article will discuss the basics of how SEO works and hopefully answer all of your questions related to basic SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO which stands for “search engine optimization,” is the process of enhancing a website to boost its visibility and rank high for all relevant searches. For example, if you are selling cat food and a user enters the search query “healthy food for cats” in a search engine, your website will land at the top result only if you are using a quality SEO approach.
Basically, SEO plays a huge role in the ranking and visibility of a website in popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A website with better rankings and visibility in search results, the higher chances it has to attract and gain the attention of existing and potential clients to a business.
One of the fundamental parts of SEO practices is keyword targeting and keyword research. This involves determining which part of the website you want to optimize and identifying search terms users usually search for. Knowing how to apply these elements can make a website rank high in popular search engines such as Google.
Employees and business owners are the ones who greatly benefit when following the right SEO practices. How you leverage SEO can drive relevant traffic, customers, sales, and profit for a business.
How does SEO work?
Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have bots for crawling web pages by going from each site, collecting data on web pages, and placing them in the index. Search algorithms examine pages included in the index while taking into consideration hundreds of signals and ranking elements. These elements determine and organize the order of how web pages must appear in search results for any given query.
Factors for search ranking are proxies concerning a user experience. Meanwhile, keyword search and content quality are key elements in optimizing web content, while mobile-friendliness and “crawlability” contribute to site architecture. Search algorithms drive relevant and reliable web pages and provide a worthwhile search experience. By optimizing the content and website helps each web page gain high rankings in search results.
Internet users search for a wide range of information. Traffic is very powerful for any business and website, not just because of traffic and millions of web users, but because the Internet has plenty of high-intent and specific traffic. Users search for any form of information directly associated or loosely related to a business. These present plenty of opportunities to attract and connect with people to solve day-to-day problems and answer questions while being reliable sources.
What makes SEO important for marketing?
SEO plays a fundamental role in digital marketing because web users conduct millions of Internet searches each year. These people bear a commercial intent or purpose to discover information about services and products. Search can be a vital source of online traffic for companies and brands, which complements their marketing channels. Better rankings and visibility in search results than other competitors provide a material impact on a marketing campaign.
But as search results evolve over the past years, search engines have provided people with more direct and relevant information and answers. This led them to solely rely on the search results instead of exploring other websites. This puts more pressure on business websites to gain more traffic to their pages.
Keep in mind that the most important role with any SEO effort is to obtain more traffic and exposure to a business or website content. While the discussion above is just the tip of the iceberg, knowing the basics of SEO will help you navigate the entire SEO process. As you improve your website’s search rankings, make sure not to overdo your SEO efforts as it can hurt the quality of your website and overall business.
