An important concept you cannot afford to joke with in digital marketing is search engine optimization (SEO), especially if you are running a digital marketing campaign or are about to embark on one. In digital marketing, SEO is one of the most popular terms, but unfortunately, a lot of business owners do not know enough about SEO to make it work for them. Also, some others who are knowledgeable about SEO find it’s implementation difficult to achieve their desired result. In running your business online, advertising is a great way to reach potential customers with your products and services. A very good way to constantly advertise to your customers for long-term sustainability and for free is to optimize your website for search engine.
What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and this is the process of optimizing your website to get free or unpaid traffic from the search engine result page (SERP). In order to optimize your website for search engines, you need to first understand how search engines work. Search engines work with a complex algorithm that is designed to determine websites ranking based on the relevance and quality of the website to their users search criteria. So here’s how it works, when a person types a specific keyword about a topic, product, or service, the search engine scans or crawls their database to find websites that are relevant to the specific keyword. Search engines want to make sure that the websites shown in the search engine results are relevant to what their users are asking for.
In addition to this, the quality of the content, user friendliness, and readability of the website content matter. In order to be rewarded with a high search engine ranking result, it is therefore necessary to put in time and effort to optimize your website for relevant keywords. Relevant keywords are very important because they are like signs or roadmaps for the search engine to show users who are interested in those keywords.
Why is SEO ranking important?
Daily, billions of Google users perform searches seeking information and products. Many times, when users search for particular keywords, they do not go beyond the first page, the second page, or at most the third page. So if your website ranks really high on the search engine to appear on the first page, you are likely to enjoy an increase in traffic to your website when people search for your keywords. This means free advertising for you, and this is also a very good long term strategy. However, if the reverse is the case, you are unlikely to receive great traffic from search engines. Additionally, by improving your SEO strategy, you increase the chances of getting more targeted customers interested in your offerings. You also increase your brand’s visibility via search engines and reduce paid advertising costs. However, by not optimizing your website, you stand a chance of losing potential customers or target audience you may have attracted via search engines.
How to improve your search ranking?
You may be wondering how you can improve your search engine ranking now that you know its importance. The easiest way to achieve this is to hire an SEO specialist to help you optimize your website. The world of SEO is continually changing, making it difficult for business owners who are not specialists in this field to keep up with the trends in the industry. Business owners who tend to optimize their websites themselves may find it difficult to keep up with competitors who hire SEO specialists. However, it is still possible to optimize your website yourself as a business owner; you will just need a great deal of time and dedication to keep up the optimization. You need to note that, SEO is not a one-off process, but once it has been optimized, it becomes easier to make improvements.
Here are some common factors that impact on your SEO
Content
Content is very important in search engine optimization, it is both attractive to the search engine and helps your business make connections with your website visitors. Content of high quality and relevance is more likely to rank your pages higher on the search engine result page. Also, when you have engaging content, your visitors will tend to spend more time on your site and visit more often, which may lead to a higher chance of making a purchase. The secret to content creation is to optimize for both the search engine and your visitors; have a variety of content that will be engaging for your visitors.
Example of content varieties are:
- Blog post
- Videos
- Social media content
- Infographics
- E-book books
- How to guide and more
Keywords density
Keyword density refers to the number of times a specific keyword appears or is used in your website’s content.
The logic behind keywords is that the more you use a particular keyword, the more relevant your website is perceived to be for that specific keyword. This makes the search engine increase your ranking for that keyword. However, keyword overuse may result in penalties if the search engine considers that it is used inappropriately.
META tags
META tags are snippets of text that describe the content of a page. They usually do not appear on the page itself but show up on the search engine result page. Internet users can utilize META tags to understand the content and relevance of the page to their search queries. It is often beneficial to place keywords in these tags. However, including irrelevant keywords in these tags may result in website penalties.
Backlinks
Backlinks refer to links from other websites that direct them to your website. Search engines typically employ this practice to rank your pages. Having backlinks from high-quality websites increases the likelihood of receiving a higher page ranking. The greater the number of quality links pointing to your website, the higher your page ranking is likely to be. However, it’s the quality of the links that holds significance here. If your website is linked to numerous low-quality sites, you’re unlikely to reap any benefits. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that your inbound links originate from high-ranking websites.
Conclusion
Now you have an understanding of what SEO is and its importance to your website, it is time to take the next step of improving your SEO strategy. Focus on creating content of high quality that is relevant and engaging to your audience, focusing on relevant keywords for search engine ranking. Keep in mind, SEO is not an instant solution; it often requires time to yield noticeable results. Nonetheless, adhering to best practices consistently is bound to deliver significant results in the long run.
If you need to hire an SEO specialist, Bodmek Digital is here to help. The talent team at Bodmek Digitals is sure to give you quality SEO services. Contact us at info@bodmekdigital.com.
