By Most people today start theirsearch engine Optimization when they need to find something. Google alone gets 3.5 billion searches per day. Search engines are integral to our daily lives. They also play a vital role in many business marketing strategies. According to 49% of marketers, organic search is the most profitable channel.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is how marketers use organic search to market their products and services. How can you harness the power of search engines for your business growth? This comprehensive guide to SEO will teach you everything you need to rank higher in Google, increase traffic to your website, and improve your brand image.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let’s take a look at SEO in relation to your website.
- Search: What can people do if they need to find the answer to a question, a product, or a service that suits their needs?
- Search engine: A website (like Google and Bing) that allows a person to perform a search.
- Search engine optimization: How to get search engines to link your site to the search results.
Search engine optimization refers to a collection of technical and content practices that align a website with a search engine ranking algorithm in order for it to be easily found, crawled, and indexed and appear in the SERP for relevant searches.
Here’s a simpler definition of SEO
- SEO refers to making changes to your website’s structure so that people who are searching for what you offer via search engines can find it.
- SEO is the simplest form of it:
- SEO is the process of getting more traffic to your website and ranking higher on Google.
Google is only one of many search engines. There’s Bing. Search engines for directory information. Instagram is also a search engine. However, Google holds a 92% market share. The terms “Google” or “search engine” are synonyms for the purposes and intents of this post.
SEO’s benefits and importance
People are looking for anything and everything that is related to your business, both loosely or directly. All these are opportunities to meet people, answer their queries, solve their problems and be a trusted resource.
- Increased website traffic
- Increased customers: Your site must target keywords. These are the terms that your ideal customers/visitors search for. This will ensure you get more traffic.
- A better reputation: Being ranked higher on Google will give your business instant credibility. Google trusts you. People trust you.
- Higher ROI: Your website and the marketing campaigns that link back to it have a higher return on investment. Your investment will be well-repaid if your site is a top performer.
SEO can help you increase brand awareness, online visibility, and sales leads.
Different types of SEO
Google and other search engines consider many factors when ranking content.
- On-page SEO: Optimizing the structure and quality of a page’s content. On-page SEO is all about content quality, keywords, and HTML tags.
- Off-page SEO: Linking to pages from other websites and pages of your site. Your off-page MVPs are backlinks, reputation, and internal linking.
- Technical SEO – Improving the performance of your site on search engines. This is where site security, UX, and structure are crucial.
These three types of SEO can be used to create websites or blogs. However, they also work for three subtypes:
- Local SEO – Getting your business to rank high in Google Maps, and the local SERP results.
- Image SEO: Combination of technical and on-page strategies to get images from your website pages to rank high in Google image searches.
- Video SEO Mix of technical and on-page strategies to get videos to the top in YouTube or Google video search results.
All three subtypes of SEO require the same core types, but they differ in how much they rely upon each type.
