What is SEO: Basics of Search Engine Optimization
Every business loves potential client leads to hit their sales pipeline. In the current age, getting potential clients to reach the sales team through searches on Google, Bing has been among the top sources of leads for most businesses, if not all. Well, then the question is – Would listing on search engines ( Google, Bing, etc.) suffice to open the flood gates to client leads? The short answer is a straight and obvious NO. So, what more? The next leading question will help answer this: If you were looking for a product or service, would you bother to go beyond the first page of the search engine? We will answer this question based on research. Based on Backlinko’s analysis of over 5 million searches, below 0.8% of potential clients look beyond the 1st page of search engines, and as a positive, more than 30% click on the website if you are ranked first on search engines like google. So you can expect anywhere between 30 – 300 clicks on your website even if just 1000 potential customers search for the focussed keywords. In our experience as a reputed digital marketing agency, we would say that these numbers are realistic, possible, and achievable for your business too. With that understanding, we now shoot for the golden question that most businesses are after – how do we get to the first page of search engines or rank at the first position on google. The quick and short answer is SEO! Time to dive in! What is SEO? What does SEO stand for? Remember the last time you looked for a product or service but did not know where to find it. Here is what you would have done next: Gone to google, searched for the product you were looking for, and eventually landed up contacting and buying from among the first few results you saw on google. The reason you saw those websites was not a coincidence. It was a concentrated effort by the companies to list at the top. This effort is called SEO. In the non-technical jargon, SEO is the steps taken to ensure your website shows up at the top of Google, Bing, and other search engines. It is the abbreviation for search engine optimization. It is an assured approach where your targeted customers come looking for you rather than the business searching for new customers. SEO is the process of convincing the search engines to list your website right at the top of their page. While this increases the visibility of your website, you need to have the credibility to be at the top. Every step taken to achieve this credibility falls under the banner of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. There are no shortcuts, and yet the effort on SEO is worth it. The more visibility your website gains in the results, the higher the attention and attraction from possible and current customers to your business. As a leading SEO company, we have ensured 100s of our clients have made it to the top of search engines. In our blogs, we tell you just how we achieve this. How does SEO Function? Best to understand the basics first with how search engines work. Search engines use bots to crawl the web on various website pages, going from one site to another, gathering information from those pages. These are the spies or informers who come to your website. As a layman, you may not even be aware. The process is not transparent unless you look up the logs or online tools to investigate when such spies or bots visited your website the last time. By the way, if you want to keep your website like a hidden treasure that would never list on the search engines, there are ways to do that too. We will cover it in our later technical or web development blogs. The bots then take all the information they have collected and feed it back to the search engines. The search Engines will then decide which rank your website should appear in their lists ( technically known as index) based on the information the bots have collected for them. And like any other competition, may the best website win! OK, but how do these search engines decide where the website ranks on the page ( or index). How we wish there would have been an easy answer to this. Google has treasured this secret recipe just like Coca-Cola has kept the secret of its formula for decades now. While many folks have tried interpreting and working out what leads to the top ranks on Google, we believe the closes we could get to this is the Google ranking factors. The search engines analyze the pages in the index. They then segregate the website pages into several ranking factors. The ranking factors determine the rank websites should appear when you search for the information on a search engine. And here is when SEO experts walk into the picture. They help you tick the box on these ranking factors to ensure you are climbing the search engine ladder successfully. And our blogs tell you everything about this process. Is it easy? Of-course yes! Is it time-consuming? For sure! Is it too much effort? No doubt. LOL. Our way of making a living! With SEO strategies, there is direct effort to ensure that a website makes the top search rankings. You cannot pay the search engines to display a webpage among the highest rankings like paid ads. The quality of the content and keywords are factors for content optimization along with optimum crawling and speed. The search engine algorithms intend to provide the most relevant, strong pages and give the users a good search experience. Improving your site and content while remembering these factors can help your website rank higher. Why is SEO essential for Marketing? SEO is an integral part of online marketing because there are trillions of searches conducted every year,