As part of the process of setting up your new business website, or looking to upgrade an existing one, business owners will no doubt come across the term “SEO” while doing your research.
It’s no surprise that most people do not know what SEO is as it can be very technical and it’s not really something most people outside of digital marketing or website development would know about. That said, it is probably the most important area of development that you have never heard of, when it comes to your business website and getting found online.
So, let’s shed some light on the subject for you.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it means the work carried out on a website after it is built which enables search engines (like Google or Bing) to understand it better. This SEO work helps the search engines to understand what the website is about and increase its visibility in relation to various search terms or keywords. Increasing a website’s visibility on search engines means trying to get listed on page one of Google and increasing your chances of getting traffic to your website. Therefore your organic traffic to your website increases, as opposed to paying for traffic via ads on using social media. SEO is crucial to growing a business and needs to be incorporated into your business’s digital marketing strategy.
What is SEO Optimisation?
SEO optimisation is basically the process of getting the best out of your website by fine tuning it and polishing it up with a view to it getting ranked higher in Google. It is the work carried out by an SEO specialist or SEO expert, and it is part of a wider SEO marketing and digital marketing strategy.
Types Of SEO
SEO can be split into two different camps, both of which are extremely important in terms of your website rankings.
On-Site SEO
On-site (also called on-page) SEO involves work done directly on your website. This takes the form of optimising a w ebsite's title tags, content, internal links and URLs as well as the HTML source code. Some of these terms may be new to you and might sound complicated, but they are easy to update on your site.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site (or off-page) SEO is, as you have probably guessed, work done outside your website. Semrush defines it as: “Tactics such as brand building, citation building, content marketing, social media, and more all play an important part in a comprehensive SEO strategy.”
So, How Does SEO Work?
In simple terms the SEO process goes something like this:
You publish your website with content on each page.
Search engines like Google, use software commonly called “spiders”, (as if people weren’t already freaked out about artificial intelligence!) to crawl your website and analyse it. They can see all technical aspects of your website written in HTML, and also look at updated content. This includes blog posts, pdfs, articles, images and videos etc.
At this point the search engines act as a kind of librarian, using complex algorithms to sort through the data which was gathered by the spiders. Search engines will index the website under the categories and search terms or keywords it deems to be best fit. Basically it tries to determine how its users will find your website based on what keywords they enter.
Once the website is indexed, the algorithm determines how your website compares to other websites in your industry, and how relevant the content is on your website. They use search queries as a means to grade how relevant your content is and ranks it accordingly. This does not mean if you have a fantastic website that you will be in position 1 of page 1 on Google next week. It takes time for websites to build authority especially for new websites, and page 1 is never guaranteed because of the competition in the market.
Interesting SEO Statistics
To give you a broad picture of the importance of SEO and why it matters to you and your business, we have compiled a list of statistics for you.
According to BrightEdge, “...68% of all trackable website traffic is sourced from organic and paid search, vastly exceeding all other channels, including Display and Social Media.”
BrightEdge tells us that “53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.”
According to Sparktoro, 90.86% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps combined.
SEO Expert tells us that “92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results.”
What SEO Means For Your Business
I don’t know about you, but for me, after reading through some of the statistics above, and articles which they came from, the importance of SEO to modern businesses couldn’t be clearer.
Future Proofing Your Business
SEO means planning for the future and ensuring that your business attracts new customers, and reaches a greater number of people than it ever could have before. Technology is becoming more and more intertwined in our daily lives, and as a result changing how we look for products and services as well as advertise them. Businesses need to account for this and plan accordingly, making SEO an essential part of their business and marketing plan.
If you have a website and it isn’t properly optimised, potential customers will only find you if they type your website URL directly in Google, or if they Google your business name. That’s not going to help you if you are trying to grow your business. Effectively your website isn’t working for you the way it could be. People who don’t know your business exists, but are looking for the product or service you provide, will never find you. In fact they will only find your competition who have optimised their websites for SEO and have factored SEO into their business expenditure budget.
Make SEO Work For Your Business
So now that you have an understanding of SEO and why it is important, what do you need to do to optimise your business website?
We at Solid Consulting specialise in optimising business websites for SEO, and we manage SEO campaigns for our clients. If you want to find out more about our SEO services, you can get in touch with us here.
