What is SEO & Why is it Important?
While we’ve seen dramatic changes in the digital landscape over the past few years, SEO still remains a very effective and important strategy. SEO offers many benefits and can help position your business as authoritative and reputable. Not to mention, it’s also free.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” Search engine optimisation is important for the success of any business. It helps to increase both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through organic (non-paid) search engine results.
SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. According to Moz, it’s about “understanding what people are looking for, the answers they’re seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume.” The overall goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic from search engines by improving the positions the website appears in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Why is SEO Important?
In today’s competitive online environment, the importance of SEO cannot be underestimated. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. SEO is significant because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and opportunities to convert prospects into customers. Beyond that, SEO is a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert.
An increasingly important element of SEO is local SEO. Local SEO is a strategy that helps your business be more visible in local searches on Google. Any business with a physical office or location can benefit from local SEO. It’s essentially a strategic process that focuses on emphasising the optimisation efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses. Google (and other search engines) uses an individual’s location based on an IP address (for desktop) and geolocation (for mobile) to determine what results to show the user. When a user performs a local search for a dentist, the search engine will display local businesses relevant to their location. This is also referred to as local SEO 3-pack - the listing of three businesses you see first in the search results when searching for terms using keywords like “near me”.
What are the benefits of SEO?
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, SEO can help you build relationships with your audience, improve the customer experience, increase your authority, drive people to your website, and increase conversions. This ultimately means more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your business.
What are the 3 types of SEO?
SEO is not a static process but rather a framework with rules and processes. It involves many different techniques, tactics, and best practices. In the most simplest form, SEO can be broken down into three main types:
On-Page SEO
According to Moz, on-page SEO refers to the practice of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO involves optimising content, meta tags, and other elements on your own websites’ page. This includes content marketing, keyword optimisations, images, and page speed, etc. On-page shows search crawlers what your website is about. It helps search engines see that a page is a good search result because it is relevant and useful.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to any activity that is not linked directly to your website. It involves activity that drives awareness and referral traffic to your site from other websites such as backlinks, domain authority, guest blogs, social media, etc. Off-page SEO shows search crawlers why a website is important and valuable. A web crawler (or spider), is a type of bot that is operated by search engines like Google. The main purpose of web crawlers is to index web pages for quick retrieval of content.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimisation. According to Yoast, Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements of your website. It is the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other means.
Like what you read about SEO? For more information on how SEO could be beneficial to your website, contact our team today! We’re happy to help.
