First things first.
What is the objective of any business? Growth and profit.
Let’s just take a reverse route to growth and profit for a business, especially through the internet.
Having a business website or blog can help you reach a wider set of audience which further helps you attaining your business targets. Unlink stores, websites are 24*7 open and capable of driving more sales. Having said that, what’s further significant is to ensure that people are able to find your website when they search for relevant keywords on search engines.
The most important benefit of doing SEO on your website is that it helps you rank on search engines, thereby giving you better visibility and hence giving you more visitors.
Following are the 9 most essential things you should know about Search Engine Optimization
1. What is a keyword?
In the language of SEO, a keyword is a word or phrase that basically describes the contents of a Web page. Each time someone makes a query a.k.a. keyword on search engine, the Search engine spiders start crawling the sites and, if the query made is relevant to the content on your site, the search engines serve those sites up as SERPs.
For example, ‘Online Flower Delivery’ is a keyword for an e-commerce flower delivery platform.
2. Long Tail Keyword’
The keywords that are longer and more specific to your product or content on your website.
For example, ‘Online Flower Delivery in New York’ is a long tail keyword for an e-commerce flower delivery platform who delivers in New York and wants to capture that audience.
3. Search Engine Page Results (SERP)
As per Wikipedia, A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by a web search engine in response to a query by a user.
4. Organic Listings
SEO, abbreviated for Search Engine Optimization, basically refers to an optimization process that is performed to make your content easily visible and helps you get better rankings on the search engines. Better referred to as Órganic’ listings, these results are listed just below the paid listings.
5. Focus on Your Content
If you need to strengthen your SEO game, you got to have powerful content and this can’t be compromised with. As Lee Odden from TopRank Marketing says, Content is the reason Search began in the first place. Whether content is actually the king or queen, that’s something that is secondary but one thing is certain, the quality of content on your website does have a significant impact on your rankings on Google.
6. Positive Impact on Sales
The good part about SEO is that it doesn’t really involve a lot of money as it is majorly an organic method of doing things. However, the impact that it has on sales is considerable. It attracts potential buyers to your website through relevant keywords. This helps in providing better ROI and hence, conversions.
7. Landing Page Layout
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t read your website like a human being and hence, its unable to understand the graphics and important aspects of content. Therefore, in order to make Google understand your content and website, you need to make use of different tags such as the Title tag, Meta descriptions, Alt tags, H1, H2, H3….and more. All these are aspects of on-page Search engine optimization.
8. Better Traffic Quality
Most of the people use Google Adwords or other paid form of advertisements, however, even then more than 65% of the search volume can be attributed to organic a.k.a. SEO. And not just the quality of traffic but the conversion ratio (sales/traffic) is also considerable.
9. SEO Is Intent Based
Most often the paid advertisements that we see are based on impulse and not intent. Impulse-based communications imply that they are dependent on a convincing sales pitch. Of course, the Google search ads (other PPC advertisements). Same is the case with SEO as it is also in sync with the intent of a user, therefore the conversion rate tends to be higher viz a viz social media or other display campaigns.
And a bonus sign of information,
Measure Your Results & Analyse
There are various analysis tools for SEO such as Google Analytics that help in evaluating and understanding the impact of SEO. Almost each element of your SEO is measurable and to a good extent, it can be quantified as well.
There are other important factors that play a significant role in your SEO game that includes your site’s performance and user experience. The site’s performance basically implies the site load time, optimization of images, quality of coding, and etcetera. Another thing of importance is the responsiveness of your website. How responsive your website is in the various screen sizes such as a Mobile device, laptop, a tablet, and more.
As a whole, SEO can really help in increasing quality traffic and conversion rates. However, search engine optimization needs time and effort. It doesn’t reap fruits overnight but over a period of nine months, it does. Also, a period of nine months is needed to observe more than 70% of the impact.