Each day millions of people search for services, products or information on Google and other search engines. For most online companies getting found on the search engine for a relevant keyword often equals more customers and more sales. So being visible on Google is for most companies an important part of their marketing strategy. But how do you make sure that it’s your company and not only your competitors that are among the first search results? The answer is called Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO. Let’s take a closer look at this
What is SEO
SEO is a technology that is used to manipulate Google’s algorithm in order to make your website rank higher on the search results (SERPS). This algorithm looks at over 400 different factors like use of keyword in text and headings, types of backlinks to your website, how user friendly your site is and many other things. Not every factor is valued equal, for instance a good long text on your main keyword is more important than using it in a on an image alt tag. If you don’t SEO optimize your website properly, you usually won’t be listed among the first 10 results when people are search for services or products you are selling. If you optimize too much, you won’t be found either. So, SEO is all about finding the right balance between property optimize your website or webshop, and not overdoing it. We will in this article mainly be focusing on Google, as more than 90% of all searches these days are made on Google.
Why do SEO?
Now that you know what SEO basically is, it’s time to take a look at why you should consider doing it. Let’s say you have a webshop that sells computers. Each month about 550.000 people in the US search for a keyword like gaming pc. About 32% of these will click on the first natural (organic) result they see. 22% on the second result, 13% on the third result and so on. So imagine you could optimize your website to popup at third place for a keyword like this. This would bring about 71.500 monthly visitors from this keyword alone, to your website. If just 2% of these placed an order it would mean an additional 1.430 orders each month in average. And with an average price of 1.500 USD for a gaming pc – that would mean 2.145.000 more in revenue each month. And that is for just 1 keyword. Imagine if you were ranking for this and several other pc related keywords. Now you might understand why it’s a constant battle to maintain the best rankings on popular keywords. It’s all about having the best SEO agency taking care of your website.
Types of SEO
When it comes to search engine optimization, you typically split it up in 3 different categories. The things you can do on a specific webpage such as text, images, headings, titles and other tags. The technical stuff like pagespeed, canonical tags, rich snippets and such. And finally all the stuff that happens outside your website. So let’s take a closer look at these 3 SEO categories.
1. Onpage SEO
Onpage SEO or onsite SEO is typical things like having a good relevant text about your main kewords. A good SEO text is often around 1000 to 3000 words long, and contains headings with your keyword or variants of your keyword. Images with optimized images tags and filenames. The proper use of keywords in title tags, headings, internal links and such. Without a good onpage foundation you won’t be ranking for anything no matter how good your website is optimized on the other SEO aspects. There is a good old say that is still true here in 2022 – content is king.
The good part about onpage SEO is that it’s mostly things you can easily do yourself, that is – if you feel like it and have the time. It’s not a technical hard part of the SEO optimization to do a well written SEO text. Most companies have people skilled at write, and if they know what keywords to use for a text, it’s often much cheaper to do this part yourself instead of paying an expensive SEO firm to do it.
2. Technical SEO
Another SEO category is called technical SEO and covers many of the technical things on your website, like URL structure and format, canonical urls, rich snippets or structured data, code optimization and core web vitals. Another important aspect of technical SEO is how mobile friendly your website is. This actually makes a lot of sense, since most people are using mobile phones to browse the internet these days. A lot of these things can be a bit tricky to setup yourself. Things like website speed can require a bit of CMS specific knowledge to do properly. So most of the time it’s best to just leave the technical SEO to your marketing agency or webdesign company.
3. Offpage SEO
Ofsite or Offpage SEO is all the things that happens outside your website but still effects it. Like what other websites are linking to your website and how they are linking. How many social signals do your website have, and how many click on the link to your website. A link to your website, is a way of telling Google that someone trust your website and finds your content useful. The more relevant the site linking to you is, the better the link. Also the more well known the site linking to you is, the more effect the link has. So if you can get a link from an authority site within your niche, it will likely boost your rankings quite a bit.
Even with the best onpage and technical SEO you most likely won’t be on page 1 for a keyword with just a little bit of competition if you don’t have enough backlinks to make Google think that you are a trustworthy website. Of all the 3 SEO categories, the offpage is often the hardest part. Getting people to link to your website is actually pretty difficult.
Conclusion
This was a little bit about search engine optimization and how you can use this technology to manipulate your placement on Google. Something you really should consider looking into if you, like many others, want more relevant visitors to your website. And best of all, the traffic you get from SEO is often of a much higher quality than traffic from Social media and other sources.