In this blog post, we will unravel an answer to the question “what is SEO and the importance of SEO in digital marketing“. You might have heard the term SEO already, but for those who are new into digital marketing, the term may sound a little technical.
Let’ unfold these questions one by one.
What is SEO?
We have heard the term SEO many times, which is often related to search engines, ranking, and web sites someway.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which simply means optimizing your site or blogs for search engines. Include a process of implementing techniques to increase a website’s position on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
To increase ranking in search result pages, a blogger performs a certain set of actions that ensure a better ranking of his/her website. These actions are applied to various aspects and elements of the blog.
The SEO strategy applied to various factors like:
- A title
- Proper use of keywords,
- Hyperlinks,
- Meta description,
- Backlinks
All of these factors put together and optimized in the best way ensures a better position in search results for your blog.
Why does my website need SEO?
But obvious, a question arises in one’s mind, why there is a need for SEO if everything is in order on the website? A well written and presented content, a piece of detailed and qualitative information can still attract visitors, right?
Though our site has great content, if it is not optimized for search engines, it may lose the chance of getting exposure to the large audience who is constantly looking for the information. The importance of SEO comes directly therein.
If a search engine is unable to list our website or our website has a poor appearance in the search results, ultimately our content wouldn’t reach to the large audience, as it may have been possible.
To include our website into search result pages, we will have to understand the working of various search engines in general.
Search engines operate on a preset algorithm (a set of rules to be followed in calculations) which keeps on changing from time to time and is hard to predict. These algorithms process a vast range of data and produce a refined search result when someone makes a query into a search engine.
At large, how these search engines or algorithms work internally is beyond the reach of a common user, is confidential, and a much-complicated process. However, some of the rules of these algorithms are widely known and followed by blog owners.
These rules are based on small actions that need to be completed during content creation process and some post the content creation. Once have completed these actions, it can help our site get listed with a better rank. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) techniques help you get this work done.
An optimized site can produce a better rank in the search result page and ultimately increases the chances of getting more visitors to our site.
Benefits of SEO
Have a look at the below chart displaying CTR (Click Through Rate – a number of clicks made on a site link from the Google or any search engine result page) of the year 2020
Now, if we closely look, the only first ranking website gets a maximum number of visits. As we move on to further ranks, this number goes on decreasing.
For a better understanding of how important it is to rank in a higher position, let’s consider an example. Let’s assume that around 50,000 users from across the world make a query into the search engine “what is SEO“. As per the above chart, the 1st ranking site will get 10,560 visitors, the 2nd ranking website gets 5,325 visitors, and the site on the 3rd rank will get 3785 visitors. Now, see the major differences in the count of visits a particular site gets depending on its position in search ranking.
Brand awareness: SEO could help you to reach more audience. Google displays sites in the top-positions that have done a better SEO and people trust Google for doing it so. Hence, the top positions in the search result page have a good impression and get more clicks. Resultantly, the top websites get more exposure and recognition. Ultimately, it helps to make your brand known to the larger audience.
Return on investment: As SEO drives more traffic to your website, you will gradually start building a fan base. People start to trust our brand, which increases the direct and indirect sale of the services. Thus, involves a greater possibility of converting a prospect to a customer, which would help us make income online.
Also looking it through a different perspective, SEO drives traffic to our site absolutely for free and hence it saves your money from wasting it on paid mediums to drive traffic. This provides an opportunity to invest this money elsewhere to achieve larger goals.
Take your website to the next level: A better-planned SEO strategy will always drive a good amount of regular and sustained traffic to your website. This traffic could open new doors for our online business to grow. One may upgrade his/her website to accommodate the requirement of the growing traffic and also can plan to set a foot in a new market and economies for even greater opportunities.
New customers encourage growth: SEO drives targeted traffic to our website and translates them into customers. We get better conversion rates, increased brand awareness, eliminates the cost involved in traffic through paid channels, and increases the chances of breaking into new markets. This is all put together assists us to grow.
how does SEO work?
Knowing the inner working of the search engines is a really tough task and it is something that search engine companies do not wish to share with the general audience.
It is fair enough not to disclose this information or else anyone with information will rank top in result listing and there wouldn’t be any quality and relative content in the search results. People wouldn’t trust a search engine for a reliable source of information. This would encourage people to make their website search engine focused rather than focusing on content.
Having said that holding the top position in SERP isn’t a complete mystery.
So, how one could get on the top place in the SERP? There are two approaches to do SEO for the website. One is called white hat technique which involves legitimate methods one can apply to their web pages and sites to rank top in SERP.
Whilst another method involves tricks to cheat search engines and get a better position in SERP. The second method is called a black hat technique and it isn’t the right way to get in top position. This method violates the search engine rules and if caught you may get penalized for your actions or search engines may completely ban your content from appearing into SERP.
The below-listed methods are legitimate ways to do SEO for a blog. These methods help our page to get the best-deserved position in the search engines:
- An attractive title
- Proper use of keywords,
- Descriptive hyperlinks,
- Meta description,
- Relative and quality backlinks
Search engines gather information about your web page and the content inside it through computer programs called spiders and crawlers. Spiders and crawlers read and analyze our web pages for the content we have provided. Once analyzed they assign a rank to your web page (the process is called indexing) based on the above-listed factors and our web page appears in the SERP.
The search engine algorithm is far more complex inside, operates on secret techniques, and keeps on changing from time to time. Thus, it is beyond the reach of any ordinary webmaster to predict. Though, we should try our best to optimize the content which is in our control.
Can I do SEO myself?
Better Understanding SEO techniques is not much complicated. It is an easy process if done in the right way! We will have to be attentive and active to be in the competition. There will be our competitors trying many different things and to bit them, we will have to stay updated as per the changing demands.
Google Webmaster tool helps you understand the requirement of SEO friendly site. With Google Analytics service you can review your online website traffic and make necessary changes depending on the user’s behavior to meet the desired goal.
There are plenty of other free and paid tools to assist you during the process. Tools like Google Keyword Planner helps to determine keywords for our blog post, OpenLinkProfiler helps you track the backlinks of your and competitor’s website, know insight details of SEO strategies and many other tools like these.
The important thing here to note is that if you are planning to do SEO by yourself, consider how much amount of time you can dedicate to it. As it certainly demands an investment of time and hence it up to you to decide if you can afford to have that much of time spent on SEO or you need to invest that time focusing on other things.
Conclusion:
Finally, to conclude, we learned that SEO means optimizing our content for search engines so they understand our content and display our web pages and site in the best deserving place.
We learned how important it is to make our content search engine friendly. Having a content-rich site is not enough but it also needs visitors for growth.
We outlined the benefits of having SEO done for our site and these benefits are, search engines drive huge traffic to our blog, it helps to spread the brand awareness, we get better returns on the investment, we can grow our website to meet new demands and new customers coming through search engines.
Whether to do SEO by ourselves or not is our personal choice but most of the SEO related activities are associated with content creation and promotion strategies. i.e. when you create and promote your post. Hence from my perspective going for it has no harm. You should give it a try.
Thanks for reading. Please share and comment on this article if you really liked it.
I’ll guide you on some more insights on the SEO tips and how you can optimize your web pages or blog posts for the search engines in my next article (13 On-page SEO Techniques for Better Ranking). Until then stay tuned. 😊
Read More Our Other blogs:
- what is SEO and the importance of SEO in digital marketing
- Off-Page SEO Techniques for Better Ranking in 2020
- SEO for plumbers Websites
- Mobile SEO Experts in India
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