Search Engine Optimisation, SEO for short, is a digital marketing strategy designed to improve your website’s presence in organic search results. The more visibility your pages receive in SERPs, the more opportunities your business has to attract potential and existing customers to the website.
Search engines determine what website pages rank at the top spots on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) by using many factors.
What do Search Engines use to rank pages?
- Site structure – This can ensure good crawlability and UX, helping Google understand the site better.
- High-quality content – Frequently published with relevant keywords to the topic.
- Backlinks – This is when another website links to your page, this can help boost your website in the rankings. *proceed with caution; you only want good quality backlinks!
- Many more… we can’t spill all the secrets!
Why SEO?
SEO helps increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic.
Search Engine Optimisation allows search engines to understand your website’s purpose. With that, search engines will show your website for relevant search queries, bringing interested consumers straight to your site.
Without investment into SEO and best practices to prepare and ready your content, search engines will likely rank your pages much lower on the SERPs, resulting in prospective audiences not finding your pages, content or services.
Successful SEO ensures that your website ranks higher on the results page allowing you to compete with major competitors to make an impression on audiences, generate a higher number of clicks and increase the number of quality viewers on your pages.
SEO improves UX
There must be a balance between optimising content for search engines and the users as producing content with too many keywords will make your business unapproachable.
There needs to be a critical balance between content optimisation for your search engines and over-optimising for search bots and damaging the User Experience (UX) with keyword cannibalisation (using too many keywords) and leaving a negative perception of your website for audiences.
When this happens, a key metric, your site’s bounce rate, will increase, having the opposite desired effect on your SEO work – Google will see an increased bounce rate and deem the content is not of good quality or relevant to the search and rank you lower!
SEO increases brand visibility
SEO works towards one goal: for your business to show up for relevant search queries that resonate with your consumers. To help improve your business’s appearance, you must communicate to Google that your offering is a good solution to the search. When the website continuously ranks at the top of these queries, it increases brand awareness and helps build a loyal customer base.
The key to SEO is to maintain your website in the top ranking! You can boost your website’s authority with inbound links through social media. When your brand maintains its appearance on social platforms, it can drive traffic to your website, which helps to boost your domain authority through more visits to your website.
SEO competes with competitors
Search engines aim to provide users with the best and most relevant answers to their search queries, so a website that does not regularly provide relevant content will lose position quickly. It is highly recommended to monitor your competitors – are they ranking above you? And why?
The higher number of good quality websites that link to your website, the better the SERP’s ranking. This helps Google to determine your page’s authority when it’s linked to other high-quality websites.
Why invest in SEO?
SEO is a long-term strategy beneficial to many businesses as it optimises the website and content to attract more consumers.
With SEO, businesses can expand and reach a broader target audience, boost revenue and secure business growth.
As Google updates the algorithm, your Search Engine Optimisation strategy needs to keep changing with it. ExtraDigital experts have the resources to help you achieve your business’s goals. Get in touch with us!
