Living in a world dominated by technology, it’s uncommon for a business not to have a website.
Consumers no longer trust companies that don’t have an online presence, which is why businesses are focusing most of their marketing efforts on digital marketing and sometimes hire an SEO Agency to help them out.
Yet, having a website is not enough. You need to be visible, and you need to drive traffic to your website. You need to increase your visitor numbers. This is where SEO comes in because it will help you reach a wider audience.
But to achieve this, your website needs to rank high in search engine results pages for people to be able to find you more easily. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key to achieving this objective, but it takes a lot of work and dedication.
You’ll find that there are SEO techniques that are easy to apply, but others a little bit more difficult. But given the competition that already exists in the online marketplace, you will need to use a variety of SEO techniques to achieve your goal.
In any case, with millions of businesses selling their products and services online, it will be difficult to get an audience without SEO.
What Is SEO And How Does it work?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is a marketing strategy that aims to create and maintain a visible web presence.
To achieve this, SEO must be applied appropriately. When you create content for your website, readers should be able to find it without much hassle. But for users to find your content, your web page must appear in a search engine’s result pages.
For your web page to rank high in a search engine result pages to make it easier for people to find it, it has to be well-structured and it should contain quality content.
So how do search engines rank web pages? Here is how:
Search engines use algorithms that incorporate semantic search. Techopedia describes semantic search as:
“A data searching technique in a which a search query aims to not only find keywords, but to determine the intent and contextual meaning of the words a person is using for search.
Basically what a semantic search does is to provide search results that are meaningful by assessing and understanding the search phrase and then finding the most relevant and valuable results in a website or database.
For example, if you key in the word “cloud” in the Google search bar, Google will return varying results in different contexts. This is because Google takes it that you are looking for any information that contains the word cloud.
But if you are looking for something more specific such as cloud storage, you need to include the word storage in your search phrase. Therefore you would need to key in the phrase “cloud storage.”
Google will then assess and understand what you are looking for, and return the relevant results, which in this case is anything containing the word “cloud storage”. Therefore, by defining your search phrase in a better way, Google will understand your query better and provide the best results based on that query. This is the goal of a semantic search.
More importantly, search engines use semantic search to rank web pages that have semantically related content; however, not without the help of SEO.
So How Does SEO work?
When a user enters a search phrase (search query) in a search engine bar, the search engine returns results that are most relevant to the query. It’s only when you key in the right words, will you get what you are looking for in the first results page of the search engine.
Now, search queries should not be confused with keywords although people tend to use both terms interchangeably. While both these terms are key elements of SEO, they are different.
A search query is a phrase you input in a search engine bar when you are searching for something. It can be one word or a bunch of words.
A keyword; however, is a phrase that describes the content of your web page. Keywords make it possible for people to find your web page through search engines. For example, if you own a business that sells baby clothes, how would you get people to find your web page?
The only way to do this is by using highly targeted keywords in your content. These are keywords that form part of a user’s search query. When you add highly targeted keywords in your content, you are optimizing your web page, and search engines will rank it high on their result pages.
Let’s say your target audience is women looking to buy baby clothes for girls. To optimize your web page, you should include the keywords “baby clothes for girls” instead of “baby clothes” in your content.
This means any user who enters the search query “baby clothes for girls” is likely to find your web page because the search engine will return all the web pages that contain that particular keyword in its first results page.
So by adding relevant keywords in your content, people will find your website much more quickly because search engines only return those results that are relevant to the user. Hence the reason why search engines use semantic search. And when your web page ranks on a search engine’s results page, this increases your visibility.
This is what search engine optimization is all about.
How to Utilize SEO In Marketing Your Website
Remember, the key goal of using SEO is to increase traffic to your website, and you can do this in several ways:
- Optimize for search engines – optimize your web page to ensure that it ranks high on popular search engines such as Google
- Optimize your web page by including high target keywords in your content
- Include page links that link to other authoritative sites in your web page
- Create high-quality content
- Update your website with fresh content regularly
- Optimize your content by adding relevant meta descriptions, page title tags, links, images, videos and keyword tags
- Optimize your website’s off-page using techniques such as social media engagement
- Optimize your website’s load speed
Advantages Of Using SEO For Business Websites
Some of the key advantages of using SEO for your business website include:
- Increased visibility and web presence
- Increased quality traffic – SEO will increase visitor numbers to your business website.
- Increased conversions – it will help convert potential customers into paying customers.
- Increased leads and sales – with SEO you can generate more consumer leads and you can make more sales.
- Cost reduction on advertising and marketing – SEO eliminates advertising costs
- Measurable results – you can measure SEO performance by analyzing your website’s date using an analytics software such as Google Analytics. These data includes organic search traffic, organic revenue, bounce rate, conversion rate, pages per visitors, and other key data elements.
These are just but a few ways SEO can benefit your business. The remarkable thing about SEO is that it levels the playing field for both small businesses and large businesses. Now small businesses and startups, thanks to SEO can compete with large businesses.
Should you use SEO for Marketing?
The answer is a definite yes. We are living in a digital era, so if you want your business to succeed you must have a web presence. Beyond that, you need to use SEO to reach your target audience for your business to experience any significant growth and success.
Do you I need an SEO expert? If you don’t know how to use SEO to market your business, I highly recommend you hire an SEO agency to help you out. These people know the ins and outs of SEO and they can help you increase your sales and grow your business.
