SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing aspects of your website to help you move up the Google search rankings. These techniques help potential leads find your website, while a conversion-focused design helps turn them into a customer.
You might be asking yourself, ‘why do I need SEO?’, ‘how does it help me?’, and ‘what even is SEO?’. These are all completely valid questions that many companies ask themselves. In the digital era, Search Engine Optimization can be one of a company’s most powerful sales tools while a company’s online presence can also be one of their most powerful marketing and branding tools.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. The purpose of search optimization is to improve a website’s search ranking results with the goal of increasing the number of quality customers that find their site.
Search engines are machines designed to answer a question or solve a problem. In order to do this for users, search engines have to search billions of pages of content throughout the internet. Sites like Google and Bing are able to do this by crawling, indexing, and cataloging all available content periodically. They then use an algorithm to match their findings and rank them for the end-user. In recent years sites like Google have developed a mechanism to distinguish between a favorable and unfavorable user experience. Providing your potential customers with an easy-to-navigate user interface is one of the key factors to a website’s organic search success.
The search engine optimization process starts with good website design and an understanding of what a high-quality customer looks like for a company or industry. Once you have established your strategy it is then important to research what those potential customers are searching for on Google and what questions they are asking. An expert SEO team submerges itself in that brand and industry to ensure they can make the greatest impact in helping a business grow. This requires extensive research into what keywords or phrases a potential high-quality client would search.
8 Techniques to Help Boost Your Search Rankings:
- Focus on the users experience
- Optimize your title and meta description
- Improve page load speed times
- Optimize your website for mobile devices
- Structure your content properly
- Optimize your images (alt text, title, sizes, etc.)
- Add schema for snippets (FAQ, how to, reviews, etc.)
- Continued & consistent website blog content
Search engine optimization best practices are constantly evolving. Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a year, and purposefully never announces the details of these updates. Establishing a brand for a search engine takes patience, persistence, and commitment. This relies on being able to provide a valuable, quality product or service for your users. Consistency is key for building your company’s online presence.
A study has shown that about 40% of clicks go to the first three organic search results. A second study, conducted by HubSpot, found that about 75% of Google users never even go past the first page of search results. If you aren’t focused on moving yourself up these results, you likely won’t get the web traffic and will lose out on potential customers.
A company’s investment in SEO should have a noticeable impact within the first year. Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy and will only continue to grow with planned maintenance and updates. SEO should not be considered a marketing cost for a company but should be considered an investment in the growth of the business over time. High-quality SEO content and user experiences will always increase a company’s discoverability which will boost the number of leads visiting your website.
“SEO should not be considered a marketing cost for a company, but should be considered an investment in the growth of the business over time.”
Though investing more money into your website might seem like a tough decision, it is important to think about where you would like to see your business grow and think of this as a mechanism to get there. It may be cheaper to go the route of using one of the many free website builders but think of the cost as loss of brand credibility and more importantly loss of potential leads.
Properly completed, a website is one of a company’s best branding tools. The focus on providing an online presence through search engine optimization can be one of the business’s most significant growth tools in the modern era.
