What is SEO - Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation, commonly called SEO, is the process of optimising a website to improve its visibility by helping it rank on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

What is SEO?

In simpler terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website more visible and attractive to search engines like Google and Bing and giving its users an excellent user experience (UX). Optimising your website's content, structure and ethical backlink strategy will improve your page ranking, helping it appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and attracting more organic traffic.

SEO is not a get-rich-quick strategy. Instead, it is a long-term strategy that requires technical, creative, analytical skills and more importantly, patience. It involves understanding how the search engines such as Google work by identifying relevant keywords and topics, optimising website content and structure, building high-quality backlinks, and monitoring and adjusting performance over time.

What's the difference between SEO and PPC?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are digital marketing strategies that increase website traffic and generate leads by showing up on search engine result pages. At the same time, both of these tactics aim to improve online visibility and drive organic or paid traffic to a website.

Search Engine Optimisation v Pay Per Click

SEO is the process of optimising a website's content, structure and backlinking to improve its visibility organically on the search results. The cost of traffic with SEO is mostly the time and effort spent optimising your website for the search engines. The SEO path is the long-term option that can take 6 - 12 months to see notable SEO results. 

Pay Per Click is the process of paying for ad placements in search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google or Bing. The cost of PPC is calculated by the number of clicks on the ads. Unlike SEO, the pay-per-click strategy provides instant traffic and results but at a cost.

Why is SEO important?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is important for many reasons. 

First, increasing the visibility and generating organic traffic. Search engine optimisation helps your website rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing, resulting in more people seeing your website and clicking through to it.

Cost-effective marketing: Search engine optimisation is a cost-effective marketing strategy if done correctly by a reputable SEO agency, especially when comparing it to other digital marketing strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Once your website has been optimised for search engines, you can continue to generate organic traffic without paying for clicks or impressions.

SEO is important for all businesses in every industry because it helps to increase organic traffic and revenue while providing an amazing user experience for your website visitors.

Types of SEO

There are three types of SEO.

On-page SEO: On-page SEO is optimising individual web pages to improve their rankings on search engines. This includes optimising the website content, meta tags, images, and other page elements to make it more relevant and helpful to users.

Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO optimises the external factors influencing a website's ranking in search engines. This includes ethical backlinks (See our profile on DesignRush this creates a solid backlink) , social media marketing, blogging, and other proven tactics that can help to improve the website's credibility and authority.

Technical SEO: Technical SEO is when you optimise the technical elements of a website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google or Bing. This includes improving site speed and mobile responsiveness and ensuring the site is crawlable and can be indexed by search engines. Technical SEO also involves optimising XML sitemaps and fixing broken links to improve the usability and performance of your website.

How does SEO work?

SEO works through a combination of six critical areas, which are:

1. Understanding how search engines work: Optimising for search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, it is essential to have a good understanding of the technical processes of how they work, including crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking. It's vital to understand that different platforms have different ranking factors.
2. Researching: Research is an integral part of search engine optimisation and involves researching your target audience, keyword research, competitor analysis, client research and SERP analysis.
3. Planning: An solid search engine optimisation strategy is essential for achieving business goals, including defining and aligning metrics, choosing and implementing tools and technology like Semrush and MOZ, whilst measuring and reporting on results.
4. Creating and implementing: This step involves creating new organic content, implementing changes to existing pages, and removing out-of-date or poor-quality content.
5. Monitoring and maintaining: Monitoring is critical to find issues such as slow-loading pages, broken pages, broken links, and other potential issues.
6. Analysing, assessing, and reporting on performance: Measuring search engine optimisation performance through website analytics like ahrefs and Ubersugest, A/B testing, and other methods are crucial to making data-driven changes that improve your SEO campaign over time.

Conclusion 

SEO is essential for all businesses, from start-ups to established companies, as it can increase organic traffic, improve website visibility, and ultimately increase your business revenue. Organic search using keywords should be your company's primary source of website traffic. Sites that rank higher in search engine page results are more likely to attract organic clicks and visitors. Additionally, SEO helps build trust and credibility with the search engines like Google and its users, leading to increased brand awareness and an excellent online reputation.

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