What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in Marketing? 📈

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is an essential practice in how a page could show up as relevant results for your queries in a search engine.

Since there are an estimated 70.000 searches every second on the search engines, such as Google, optimising your website will be beneficial for your brand’s marketing strategy.

Hence, understanding what SEO is can help you to elevate your brand to new heights.

What is SEO? 🔎

SEO is a process to grow visibility and traffic to your website that comes from organic searches in your favourite search engine. Good SEO practices will help the visibility of pages on your website to the searchers.

For instance, when you search “how to cook an omelette”, the front page of your search engine usually will show you the pages that a search engine thinks would be the best and relevant for you to learn about it.

In other words, SEO may help the pages of your website appear at the front page of search results without spending any money for an advertisement to be placed at the top of a search result.

How does SEO work? 🤖

To help understand what SEO is, we also need to know how it works.

According to Search Engine Land, your favourite search engines, such as Google or Bing, utilise bots to look at pages on the internet. Once the bots finish collecting information, they will submit them into their index. Then, when you perform a search, algorithms from search engines will check up on their index and determine which pages will appear as the result of your search.

The algorithms then give you the best and most relevant results by taking into account many ranking factors. Some clues from Google regarding the ranking factors for the search results are:

• Your query
• Pages’ relevance and usability
• Expertise of sources
• Your location and settings
• Your page loading speed: you can check it on PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix
• Mobile-friendliness: check it through Mobile-friendly test

Recommended reading: All You Need to Know About Integrated Marketing

Three key benefits of good SEO for your website 👍

There are three key benefits that you could get from good SEO practices:

• Quality of traffic
• Quantity of traffic
• Organic results

So, what are actually these three things, and why are they important to understand what SEO is?

1️⃣ Quality of traffic

An excellent example from Moz, quality of traffic means when people visit your pages relevant to their search queries. For instance, if you sell apples, quality traffic should come when people perform a search to buy an apple fruit, not Apple as in the makers of your iPhone or MacBook. Hence, quality traffic can attract visitors that have genuine interests to buy what you offer.

2️⃣ Quantity of traffic

Second, the quantity or amount of visitors to your website. More and more people visit your website from Search Engine Result Pages(SERP) relevant to their search queries, the more visitors you will receive for your website.

3️⃣ Organic results

Last but not least, SEO can help you show up as an organic result on the SERP. Organic results will generate organic traffic for your website.

The term organic for result or traffic means that they are not something you pay for.

Suppose you spend a certain amount of money to be shown on the first page of SERP. In that case, it will be considered as paid traffic because it is a paid search advertising or search engine marketing.

This might make you wonder: why should you optimise your website for organic traffic when you can pay to show up on the first page?

It is because the statistics show that people prefer organic links instead of paid links.

Furthermore, organic results and traffic may be beneficial for you in the long run. For example, you can allocate some of your advertising budget for other stuff to help your business.

A final note of what SEO is 📝

One thing to note is that search engines are constantly evolving. Your current SEO strategy might work in the present time but may not work effectively in the future. Hence, you need to keep up with the changes made by search engine companies.

Then, keep in mind the O in what SEO stands for, which is optimisation. Once your SEO strategy increases the organic traffic, always find out how to optimise the website and its content to maintain and improve your position on the SERP.