5 minute read
For the majority of web users, search engines such as Google and Bing are still the principal sources used to find a website. Google is not just the most popular but also the most visited website in the world. For this reason, applying a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to your business is crucial to increasing your standing within search engine results relevant to your market.
What does SEO mean?
Google defines SEO as “the process of making your site better for search engines”. In a nutshell, it is a way of improving the visibility of your website on search engines, by optimising the quality and the relevance of the content with the ultimate objective of increasing qualitative and quantitative traffic to your website. This involves some work called technical SEO, on-page and off-page optimisation:
- Technical SEO: is about improving the site speed, structured data, sitemaps, robot txt file, hreflang and more.
- On-page SEO: refers to the elements you can optimise on your website, such as keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content, images, internal linking and more.
- Off-page SEO: refers to the factors you can optimise off your website, such as backlinks, reviews, social media and more.
Basic SEO terminology
Some common SEO terms can be confusing at times. Here is a sample list of the more common terms and their definitions:
- Organic traffic: This refers to any traffic originated from users that access your website as a result of natural (“organic”), unpaid search result. Essentially, organic is SEO traffic.
- Crawler: A crawler is an automated software that discovers pages on the World Wide Web. Google’s crawler is called Googlebot. You could imagine it like a robot automated with the task of crawling the web looking for, analysing, and listing webpages.
- Keyword: A keyword is any word or phrase that a user uses to search with in a search engine.
- SERP: This is an acronym referring to search engine result pages.
Why is SEO important for your business?
- SEO drives traffic to your website and establishes visibility, brand awareness and trust to the clients.
- SEO helps you gain market share - in fact, ranking high on a search engine increases the probability of being discovered by potential visitors.
- SEO generates leads and increases online sales. It can also lead to an increase in offline sales because it encourages local users to visit your physical store after a search.
- SEO is measureable! Thanks to analytical tools, you can measure and analyse the performance of your website, including KPIs such as keyword ranking, organic traffic, visitors, conversions and much more, which can assist you in reaching business goals.