The Definition of SEO
What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimisation. It is the method that makes your website rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERP). This makes your website more visible to people searching for solutions for their brand, product, or services via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your online content so that it should be displayed by the search engine as the first result for a particular keyword search.
What hasn’t changed are the methods we use to improve our rankings. This is because of the search algorithms that these companies are constantly changing.
How does SEO work?
Referencing works by optimising the pages of your site, searching for keywords, and collecting incoming links. As a general rule, if your site is already indexed by search engines, you will see the results of your SEO efforts.
However, there are several ways to improve the referencing of your pages. Search engines pay attention to title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and incoming links (also known as backlinks). And this is just a small example of what happens.
Search engines also take into account external factors such as the structure, design, and behaviour of site visitors to determine a site’s position in SERPs.
What is organic search?
Organic search means that a person uses a search engine to perform a search and clicks on an unpaid result. Organic search is a search marketing channel that can be used as part of inbound marketing to increase website traffic.
In today’s SEO, it is not enough to include all the keywords that can reach the people who search for your website. This will harm the SEO of your website as search engines will recognise that it is a keyword jam.
Nowadays, you need to use keywords in your content in a way that does not seem unnatural or forced. There is no magic number – it all depends on your keywords and the length of your article – but if you feel forced, it’s best to ignore it and write naturally.
What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to drive more traffic to your website via search engines. An effective SEO strategy includes on-page strategies that use targeted keywords and off-page strategies that get inbound links from other websites.
Before you create a new website or blog post, you may want to know how to include keywords in your post. It’s not important, but it shouldn’t be your only goal or even your main goal. When creating content, you should focus on the intent of your audience, not how many times you can put keywords (both long-tail and short-tail keywords) in your content.
To get the results you want and rank well in the long run, you should base your SEO marketing strategy on your topic and not on keywords. If you do this, you will find that you can still naturally optimise your website for important keywords. Knowing your target audience (aka buyers) and what they are interested in is crucial to attracting the right visitors to your website via the search engines.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is the term used to describe visits to a website from organic search engine results, rather than paid advertising. Organic traffic is the unpaid traffic from search engines like Google or Bing. Paid search engine advertising does not increase organic traffic, but you can augment your website with inbound marketing software to get more visitors.
When users enter a query into a search engine (such as Google or Bing), they are presented with a set of results that includes both the pages with the highest organic rankings and a set of ads (usually named with the word “ad”) to distinguish them from the organic results.
One of the biggest changes in the last decade has been the way other people design the SERPs that users see in search engines. and today social media has a big impact on the effectiveness of organic traffic. Just a few years ago, it didn’t matter if people found your content through social search. But today, SEO takes into account social signals like tweets, retweets, and Google+ Authorship.
Social search also prioritises content and people you are connected to. This could be a Facebook friend, a Twitter follower or a connection to another social network. Sometimes social search prioritises content shared by influencers. Social search engines understand that you might be interested in content that is important to your network, so they will often point you to that content.
All of this means that when you think about your SEO strategy, you should also consider how your social media strategy fits into this puzzle.
Why is organic traffic important?
Organic traffic is the most important type of traffic you can get for your website. It is more vital than paid traffic, Facebook traffic or traffic from other social networks.
The reason is simple: organic traffic is targeted.
Users who type a question into a search engine have a very specific intention, and if you can offer them a solution or an answer to their question, you are more likely to get a new customer, email subscriber, or follower.
In addition to the above, organic traffic is important because it builds trust in the website, which has several additional benefits.
Users trust Google, and websites that rank organically at the top of Google are reliable. This means that an organic visitor is more likely to convert than a visitor from Facebook or other media.
What is direct traffic?
Direct traffic is visitors who come to your website by typing a URL into a browser, not from another website, search engine, or social media.
Think of SEO as “search engine optimisation”. Users don’t just want to find your website, they want to stay there, interact with the content and come back later. Direct traffic not only increases “page authority” in Google’s eyes but also creates more opportunities to convert people who find you organically into customers.
SEO looks at whether the visitor stays on the page and interacts with the rest of the content. It doesn’t help your website if you rank well for a keyword but attract a visitor who is not relevant to your website.
Think about the visitor and the content they are looking for, not how many people you can attract to your site.
Importance of referencing
SEO is very important because it helps people find information and discover websites on the World Wide Web. SEO is especially important for businesses because it answers your audience’s most important questions on search engines and ensures that you attract traffic to your products and services.
In the past, the success of your SEO was measured by your first page on Google. But if you rank well for a term, does that mean you are getting results? Not always. It is possible to get very high rankings for terms that are not ideal for your business. When you rank well in search engines, you get a lot of traffic, but visitors to your site find that your business is not what they were looking for. You won’t be able to convert customers from this traffic, and high rankings for that particular search term make almost no sense.
Besides, you don’t have to be in the top 3 to be successful. If you are well ranked on the following pages, you can get a high click rate even with little traffic. This is good news for marketers who can’t make it to the top or second page.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the quantity of traffic to your site is not as important as the quality of that traffic.
How much does SEO cost?
Referencing can cost between $100 and $500 per month if you do it yourself using keyword search tools. If you hire a full-service marketing agency, a consultant can cost you $75 to $150 per hour, up to $10,000 per month. Smaller companies generally spend less on SEO than larger brands.
The cost of SEO comes down to two things: your investment in an organic search strategy, or the amount you pay for paid search engine marketing (SEM) services like Google AdWords. If you pay for marketing tools, consultants, or agencies to optimise the content of your website, your bill will vary considerably depending on the scope of the service you receive.
Yes, $10,000 is a lot, but 40% of today’s businesses spend less than $1,000 a month on SEO.
What is paid search marketing?
Paid search marketing refers to paid advertising (PPC). After searching, you can pay search engines for text ads that appear at the top and bottom of the search results page. It is used to increase traffic to your website and attract more customers.
By signing up for a free Google AdWords account, you can pay to appear higher in Google’s SERPs. Each time a user clicks on a result, you choose a different keyword to rank it and pay Google for it. This is called PPC search marketing, and your ads will look very different from the organic results below.
The average cost of a paid search campaign on Google can be less than $1 per click, but the more popular your keywords are, the more you will have to pay.
How to do SEO
- Conduct a content audit of your website.
- Use a keyword research tool to identify the keywords you are being found for.
- Target new keywords you want to rank for.
- Develop new content and optimise existing content.
- Monitor the performance of your website.
- Buy software for inbound marketing or SEO.
- Research which websites are performing well.
- Look for opportunities to get inbound links from similar sites.
- Check your rankings and traffic.
These are all the same tactics we used ten years ago: a set of tactics that, if used, will help you rank better in the search engines. The tactics we use now have changed. If SEO is new to you or you need a refresher course, our free SEO course might be of interest to you.
We need to keep up with rapidly changing trends and remember that the ultimate goal of search engines is to provide the best possible experience for their end-users – the search engines. If you keep this goal in mind in your SEO strategy, you will find that your decisions will pay off, even if you are not completely familiar with all the nuances of search engine algorithms.