What is SEO? How SEO helps your business?

SEO terms for beginners

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the strategy of having traffic from free and natural search results in search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

In simplest terms, SEO is a technique to improve your website’s overall searchability and visibility naturally (not paid search). The more people see your website, the more traffic you receive, and the better your chance to offer your product and services to your customer.

SEO is an ongoing process as Google is regularly updating its algorithm. The rules are constantly evolving, and to stay on top of changes, you need to be up to date with the latest SEO trends and strategies.

See an example of SEO in action below.

Still Up appears at the 2nd top of Google organic search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keyword “digital marketing fredericton“.

Keywords are the words, terms, or phrases that people search for on the internet to find what they are looking for. For example, if you were looking to buy a new car in Canada, you might type in the Google search something like “buy a new car in Canada“. Even though that phrase consists of more than one word, it can be considered a keyword.

What is the difference between organic search vs. paid search?

The difference between organic search and paid search is that organic search focuses on attracting traffic in a free or organic way, while paid search focuses on paid rankings such as PPC or pay-per-click. Both have their unique benefits, and one is not naturally better than the other.

Organic search commonly involves keyword research, content creation, optimizing, and distributing high-quality content to attract your audience or customers. With organic search, you don’t have to find funds in your budget to spend on your monthly advertisements.

The most important thing you need for this approach is a time commitment. That time commitment can range from researching, analyzing, building strategy, optimizing content, and more.

In a paid search through PPC, you pay for Google Ads to show your website listing above the organic search results and on the first page of Google. PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) strategy where you pay Google or Bing for each click that occurs on your ads in the search results. This allows businesses to only be paid when consumers interact with their ads.

If you use PPC ads, you’ll attract people who are interested in your offer and ready to buy your product or service. The only disadvantage of paid search is that your ads and traffic will stop as soon as you stop the campaign.

How SEO helps your business?

SEO is crucial to your business because it gives you more visibility online. Having a website is not enough, except if you don’t have a plan for getting customer leads and converting them into sales. You cannot always wait for people to accidentally land on your website while searching the internet. You must make people see your website, and this is where SEO comes into play.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider SEO for your business.

1. SEO builds trust with your customers and boosts the credibility of your brand.

SEO helps build your brand’s authority and reputation. People tend to trust more websites that show up on the first page of a search engine like Google. If people start to see your page at the top of their search when typing specific terms or keywords, they will click on that result and probably make a purchase on your site. However, building this authority will not be an overnight success but should be done over time.

Establishing brand authority takes patience, effort, and commitment. It also relies on the user experience and the products or services you offer that allows customers to trust the brand. When people start to trust your brand or business, your credibility increases, making your brand more valuable.

2. SEO drives traffic to your business website.

When running an online business or eCommerce, one of your goals is to attract people to your website. To attract people and help them find your business, your website needs to rank higher in the search results. The more people who visit your website page, the more likely they are to purchase your products or services.

A large part of SEO involves improving your website’s page rank for target keywords on search engines. The higher your page ranks on those keywords, the more traffic you will get.

3. SEO helps increase your lead generation and conversion rate.

Using a proper SEO strategy, your website’s online visibility and awareness of the company will increase. This means that the more often your website shows up on Google’s first page, the easier it is for your target audience to find you and learn about your business’s services.

When these people are interested in your brand, product, or services, they will contact you for more information (quality leads) and are likely to purchase your product or services (convert to sales). The higher your conversion rate, the more leads you convert into customers.

The 3 important types of SEO you need to know

1. Technical optimization (technical SEO)

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of search engines like Google. Basically, your website pages need to be indexed, rendered, and crawled so that Google will be able to find you.

To be fully optimized for technical SEO, your website pages must be secure, organized in terms of structure and navigation, optimized for mobile viewing, fast loading, free of duplicate content, and free of broken links, among other things. You can find a list of the technical issues in the audit report you will receive after the website analysis process.

2. On-page optimization (on-page SEO)

On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is the process of optimizing web page content, so it ranks higher on search engines and acquires organic traffic. This includes updating the content, the SEO title tags, meta descriptions, image alt texts, internal links, and more around the keyword or terms you want to target. This covers anything within the website (internal).

On-page SEO works together with technical SEO; the optimization starts with the technical improvements, then moves on to content and other SEO strategies to improve your website’s visibility and ranking for your target keywords.

3. Off-page optimization (off-page SEO)

Off-page SEO (also known as “off-site SEO”) is the strategy implemented outside of your own website to improve its ranking. The most common techniques are social media sharing and link building or backlinking. The goal of this is to get links from their website to yours (hence, backlinks). The more high-quality links that point back to your web page, the higher the chance that page will rank.

Final Thoughts

A good SEO firm will address all three types of SEO to boost your search engine ranking. Schedule a free consultation today to see what we can do to improve your website and make your business successful with a tailored, comprehensive SEO strategy.