Have You Harnessed the Power of SEO?
If you have a website for your brand, you will have no doubt heard of SEO by now. SEO stands for search engine optimization, a complex methodology by which website administrators can improve the search engine results page (SERP) rankings of their pages. In 2020, more than two billion people bought goods or services online, with global e-commerce transactions amounting to over $4.2 trillion. Studies have shown that consumer behaviors have changed considerably since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, with large numbers of consumers currently preferring to do their shopping online. In addition, consumers have been shown to do extensive online research on products and services even if they plan to purchase from a physical store. With a majority of consumers using search engines to find what they need, a favorable SERP ranking is the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing strategy.
Seek and You Shall Find
Before we can understand SEO and how it works, we need to first grasp the inner workings of search engines such as Google. At any given minute, thousands of search engine robots, also known as crawlers, travel across the Internet. Moving from link to link, the crawlers add uncatalogued pages to the sprawling search engine index and note down vital information from each page. When a user enters a keyword into a search engine, the search engine computes the vital information of all the pages in its index, then displays the pages in a SERP based on relevance. There may be millions or billions of results for a single query, and this can be narrowed down using a variety of filters such as posting time, location, media type, domain address, and more. Because research has shown that search users typically only click the top results and rarely navigate past the first SERP, it is crucial for businesses seeking visibility to improve their SERP rankings.
The focus of SEO is thus to enhance the vital information on your pages, thus convincing search engines to consider them more favorably when creating their SERP ranking. There are a myriad of ways that SEO professionals can do this, with the most common and traditional method being on-page SEO. On-page SEO is where the elements on your page are tailored to make it more attractive and accessible to search engines. These elements can include technical aspects such as page URL and meta tags, and also content characteristics such as page structure, keyword density, and the use of links. With on-page SEO, it is worthwhile to note that previously tolerated methods of keyword stuffing and creating spam in blog comments is now frowned upon by Google and can lead to an entire domain being penalized.
An important counterpart of on-page SEO is off-page SEO. As the term suggests, off-page SEO involves the SEO actions that are taken outside of the website itself. Off-page SEO is mostly concerned with domain authority and increasing organic (unpaid) site traffic. In brief, domain authority (DA) is an indicator of the quality and usefulness of a website. Established websites such as Wikipedia.com and Facebook.com have high DA scores in the 90s, while new websites start with a DA score of one. Since search engines prefer websites that are relevant and informative, websites with a high DA generally rank well in SERPs while websites with a low DA are relegated to the back pages. Through a range of strategies including link building and social media marketing, SEO professionals can improve the authority of your website by associating them with high DA sites.
SEO and The City
Aside from using SEO to reach a wider global audience, businesses can use SEO to target potential customers in their city as well. Certain strategies referred to as local SEO can help website owners receive more traffic from users in their vicinity. For example, a user might search for Ottawa SEO because they would like an SEO expert that they can talk to in person. Local SEO ensures that your business information and location are recorded by the online directories that matter, like Google Maps. On top of this, your site is tailored to reflect the keywords for your city or town, leading search engines to rank them higher in local searches. For businesses that function within a small area, such as restaurants or home repair services, this could result in a huge influx of leads.
Of course, organic SEO outcomes can sometimes take months, which can feel too long for new businesses or those who are eager for promotion. In this case, Google Ads is the answer. Some digital marketing companies offer advertising campaign management for Google ads, getting awareness of your brand out to the greater audience without delay.
Building a successful SEO strategy is a complicated and technical skill. Although there are many free SEO tools available for the amateur digital marketer, it often takes the touch of professionals to achieve lasting results. With a large proportion of potential customers going online, businesses that want to remain competitive must maintain an effective web presence. By harnessing the power of SEO, businesses can invest in long-term reach and continue to grow in the digital age.