What is Search Engine Optimization?

Contents:

– Define Search Engine Optimization

– How does SEO help my business?

– How do search engines rank websites in search results?

– What are organic results versus paid results?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website to attract more online visitors through search engines.

SEO is part of the Attraction Stage of the buying process, and helps your business by attracting strangers to your website and to turning them into leads or customers.

Google is the most popular search engine in the world. It handles more than 3.3 billion web searches every single day. These searches usually contain questions or problems that people are trying to resolve like “How to keep my pool from turning green” or “homeowners insurance in scottsdale”. Exposing your business to qualified customers is essential.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t really care so much about you or the success of your website itself. Their responsibility is with their customers – those conducting all these searches.

Search engines are charged with presenting the most relevant and trustworthy answers to online questions. To do this, they send what are called web crawlers all around the web to try to understand what each website is all about. A good website is not only crafted with cool, interesting content, but also makes it easy for these crawlers to know what’s happening.

How can my website rank highly in Google? For each web search, Google crunches all of the data gathered by web crawlers and compiles a list of results based on the popularity and authority of each website. The most helpful and highly regarded sources of information are listed at the top.

In real life, to be credible you need a lot of experience, a quality product, a great track record, lots of referrals or testimonials, and offer an awesome customer experience. It’s no different online. A good reputation has to be earned over time…Google is good at spotting fakers.

There are paid search results and unpaid search results. If you conduct a web search, you’ll notice that the top few search results are marked with a small icon “AD”. These are paid searches. Website owners pay money to be shown at the top of the results for the keywords you typed in.

Below these paid results are what are called organic results. Here is where you want to be. These are not paid, but ranked according to relevancy. Successful SEO means earning a spot in the top 10 search results. Statistically, about 94% of users will click on a search result from the first page of any web search. Less than 6% will bother to look over the 2nd page and beyond.

The next step is to find out what your customers are searching for through keyword research and selection.