What is SEO and why do businesses need it?
In this new era of digital communication in which we live, where we are all connected to social networks, we send the important information by email, we even shop online and we live much of our lives through the internet; search engines are vital tools that we can end using multiple times throughout the day. This reliance on them to receive information about what we need is what determines a big part of the internet’s traffic.
Explaining it simply, Search Engine Optimization; better known by its acronym: SEO, is the process whereby a company or website improves its organic positioning in the search engines, showing higher in the listings, gaining traffic, exposure, market share and finally revenue.
How do search engines work?
Since the mid-90s, at which time the search engines were created, its algorithms to determine which pages to display and in what order to do so have varied greatly. At first, they were mostly based on the number of times the words that were searched for get repeated on the text and were easily exploitable. Nowadays, these algorithms have been updated with the objective of offering a better experience to the users, using a great amount of variables for this, but mainly focusing on two basic elements: Relevance and Authority.
- Relevance of the specific web page: It is simply the relationship that has a determined web page with the realized search. For this, the search engine uses a number of robots that “review” a large number of factors, including the quantity and originality of the content, its connection and mentions in other sites or other relevant sources. All this is contrasted in tenths of a second with the information that the search engine has about the user, their latest searches, their geographical location, etc. To offer the best possible content, attached to what they are looking for.
- Site Authority: Basically it is the popularity of the website among users. The content of a website in general gains validity and will go up in the lists of the search engines the more it’s visited by the users, the longer time they pass inside the site and the more its content gets shared. This means that by a general rule, a certain amount of traffic will generate over time more traffic.
How does SEO achieve its goal?
The SEO service achieves its goal by improving and optimizing a website in two ways:
- Off-site SEO: encompasses all SEO tools used outside the target website. Creation of links that target the web page from sites with great relevance (Linkbuilding), increasing the proportion of clicks (CTR) and get mentions on authority pages are SEO Off-site methods.
- SEO On-site: is the optimization of a web page so that the search engine attributes the site a greater relevance. Including code optimization, use of keywords and URLs.
Why do businesses need SEO?
Google, undoubtedly the most popular search engine; both in the United States and worldwide, performs approximately 70,000 searches every second. This means a huge traffic of users, that, with the correct use of SEO tools, a company can catch and direct towards its website, increasing its market share, its exposure and its profits exponentially.
Much of the present and future of business is definitely on the internet and mere web presence is no longer enough; as we have said before, we are an increasingly interconnected society and we want solutions to our questions, needs and problems as quickly as possible. Why go to the second page of the search engine, if we get what we are looking for in the first one?