Maybe you’ve heard people talking about SEO but you were not sure what exactly means to do SEO.
SEO, as you probably know, stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a marketing technique that enables you to get more visible in Google when people search for keywords related to your business. Thanks to SEO, companies are able to get more visitors to their websites, which will also mean more conversions, sales, translating into business growth.
If you’d like to know more about SEO and understand what SEO is, continue reading.
How does Google rank results?
SEO focuses on so-called organic search results – those results that are not marked as ‘Ad’. These results are ranked by Google, with the best result at the top. The decision on which results will be first and which will be displayed lower, depends on the Google algorithm. Its main job is to offer the best results to users looking for information. If Google ranks websites well, users are happy and will continue using it.
How Google algorithm ranks websites
There are many pages with search results, each containing a mix of rich results, e.g. video, images, shopping, maps etc. and text results (usually ten per page on desktop). Only the best websites make it to the first page, to its very top. These websites will need to have a lot of information about the keyword the user just entered, be very user friendly, and be acknowledged by other users and websites – have a solid authority.
How does SEO work?
SEO helps get you to the top of search results by working on the factors mentioned above. SEO specialists will work on making pages on your website relevant to search terms that are interested for your business. They will also work on increasing the authority of these pages, making them usable, quick to load, interlinked with other resources, and in general – attractive to the user. User behaviour on your website, after coming to your page from Google, is one of the key ranking factors. So if your page is not interesting or not optimised, users will leave quickly, indicating to Google that you do not deserve top ranking positions.
So what is SEO?
SEO is a long-term activity, focused on getting you more organic traffic from Google and other search engines (Bing, YouTube etc.). Good SEO needs to be sustainable: It’s easy to overpromise or overachieve and get you to the very top quickly. That’s what will many ‘so-called’ SEO specialists offer you. However, fast often means that techniques that manipulate search rankings are used. Speed does not necessarily translate to quality; with SEO it usually is the other way. Sustainability is the key – you want to keep your rankings for years to come, even after multiple updates of the Google algorithm. Thus, doing it smartly is the only way – you need to provide value to users and by doing that, your website will be relevant now and remain relevant in the future.
