All You Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With digital marketing becoming a necessity in this technological era, businesses worldwide continue to invest in online marketing. After all, it delivers tangible results.
Among the various digital marketing strategies, SEO continues to baffle brands and digital marketing specialists. Hence, it comes as no surprise that only a few have mastered the art of SEO.

What is SEO?

To put simply, SEO is the holistic process of depicting to search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Baidu to name a few – that your website or page is the ideal result for a specific search query. It is a foolproof way of deriving traffic onto your website without using any paid strategies.

Search engines understand, discover, and organise the content on the internet in order to offer searchers the best-quality, relevant, and detailed results that match their queries.

Websites and individual pages are ranked by search engines based on a number of ranking factors that take into account the relevance, authority, and performance of those websites or pages.

Now, you might be wondering why the ranking is important.

Well, it is essential because the majority of people only click on and view only the first few search results that too only on the first page. They are short on time, need relevant as well as quality results, and trust search engines to show exactly what they are looking for.

Have you ever gone to the third page of the search results to find what you are looking for? If yes, then only a few times, we bet.

Hence, brands compete to be on the first page of search results, among the top few listings.

Different Types of SEO

On-Page SEO

Optimising your website’s pages to rank higher is known as On-Page SEO. It includes optimtised content, which is essentially relevant, unique, engaging, and high-quality content that is linkable and that has the ‘right’ keywords in it.

Some other things that are included in this are the URL, title tag, and meta-description.

Off-Page SEO

It basically refers to how your website is viewed by others. Quality backlinks – links from external sources to your website – is an integral cog of it. Social media marketing, guest blogging, and influencer marketing are also all a part of it.

Local SEO

Focused on optimizing for local search results, local SEO includes localizing link acquisition that is getting backlinks from various local websites, an emphasis on content, as well as on-page optimisation.

Technical SEO

How the search engines crawl and index a website depends to a great extent on technical SEO.

Improving scheme markup as well as link structure, and building proper structured data can significantly help with technical SEO.

Moreover, the site speed as in how quickly the pages load in addition to the usability, responsiveness, and functionality of the website are all part of technical SEO.

The Gist

If you want to achieve a competitive advantage and take your business to the next level, then it is highly recommended that you prioritise SEO in your digital marketing strategies.

Yes, it is challenging and takes time to deliver results, but it is definitely worth it.