Are you wondering what is SEO and how does it work? Keep reading to get a better understanding of what it is and how it can improve your business.
First, let’s start with what SEO stands for. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In this article, you’ll gain knowledge as to why SEO is essential for your website and why SEO plays a necessary factor for your business.
Now one of the things clients tend to ask when starting a business is how I can get more customers? Or how can I get more people or customers to visit my website?
In a nutshell, SEO refers to the work that is done on someone’s website to increase the traffic. By traffic, we mean visitors to your site. Let’s say, for example, you’ve just started your own business and created a website for your business.
However, there aren’t many people visiting your site. You want to get more traffic and visitors to your website. Therefore, you want to get more customers.
Then you need an SEO guide or agency. You need a search engine ranking agency providing you with high-quality work.
SEO is making changes to the backend of your website for Google to recognise it and for Google to recognise its relevance when people search. In hopes for search engines such as Google or Bing to show people your website as a top result, there are many things on your site which you need to be working on periodically.
Let’s say you have just opened up a wholesale dessert company. You’ve now created the website for, or you got someone to create a website. What you need now is for your customers to find you and consumers to visit your site so they can order desserts. I mean, that’s the goal, right?
To gain visitors or traffic onto your site, you need Google or other search engines to recognise your website, so when people are searching for desserts or wholesale desserts, they can find your website/business.
Now, this all begins with your search term for searching something on Google, known as keywords. Keywords are phrase or words you put into the search bar of a search engine such as Google. So, if you search on Google the term “wholesale desserts”, that is a keyword.
When someone is searching for the term “wholesale desserts”, they will find many websites as a result. However, they may not see your business on the first or second page. If you’re not familiar with SEO, SEO best practices or have never done SEO work on your site. Then your business will not be on the first page.
The first few results that display are known as “ads” or “advertisements”. After the first 3 or 4, you will begin to see non-ad websites; these are known as organic search results, meaning these companies are optimising their sites or have hired an SEO marketing agency.
You want customers to find you by searching “wholesale deserts”, then your website needs some serious work. For Google to recognise you and rank you higher for the result of that phrase, you should consider optimising.
Think about it this method; Google is a search engine, and at the end of the day, they are a business. Google wants its customers, who are anyone who uses Google to be happy. They want their customers to find what they are looking for, whenever they are searching for something.
So when someone searches “wholesale deserts”, Google wants to provide that person with the best result and the most relevant websites to pop up to their search. By doing that, they’re keeping their customers happy and satisfied when using their service.
SEO WORK INVOLVES THE FOLLOWING:
- Keyword research
- Quality Content
- Page Speed
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- User experience
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research refers to as, researching the relevant phrases or search terms that is the most pertinent to your website.
For example, if you are a desserts company, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what they would type in a search bar to find your products or service. Your consumers may type words such as “dessert supplier” or “cake supplier” etc.
There are keyword research tools that you can find to help you with your keyword research. The keyword research tools are there for you to see relevant search terms and the search volumes. By that I mean, how many people are entering that search phrase in Google per month.
Some keywords you may find that is the most relevant to your website may only get 10 searches a month. They may not be the keywords that you want to relate to your site as not many people are searching for it. Some keywords have over 10,000+ searches a month. Since there are plenty of people searching for that particular key phrase, that’s the kind of words that you have to target and incorporate into your website’s content marketing.
2. Content
Content refers to the text, blog or piece of information that you write or incorporate into your site’s pages.
Your content needs to be relevant to a search for Google to show you as a result. For example, let’s use the same dessert company reference. If someone is searching for the company, your content must talk about your company, how you provide wholesale desserts and make it very relevant to their search.
This way, Google bots find that you are answering the customer’s questions, and you are providing appropriate information on your website when someone searches for that particular target key phrase. Therefore, Google keeps their customers happy by providing your information on your website. As a result, you gain more traffic.
3. Page Speed
Page Speed refers to the number of time it takes for your website to load on both a mobile and a desktop device.
Why is it necessary? Since we talked about earlier in the article, Google likes to keep its customers happy and therefore wanting to provide the best user experience for its customers. While someone goes to click on a website via a Google search, Google would want them to see the page quickly to load quickly.
You should test the page speed of your website from time to time, especially after making changes to your site.
4. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the modifications you make to your website on the front end that is visible to you and your customers.
These changes include internal linking, quality content, images, metadata, meta description, page title, h1 tags, h2 tags, title tags, website structure, blogs, and more.
5. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the SEO work that you do outside of your website, which includes social networking and other external sites.
Why do you need this?
Your website needs to be mentioned in external sites or social media so that Google can recognise your website as an authoritative domain. Therefore, you become trustworthy in Google’s eyes, and will then rank higher against your competitors. This term is also known as links building. Links building refers to when a website provides a link that points back to your site.
For example, if a blog page published an article discussing different kinds of desserts, and in the article mention your business and recommend customers the best place to order from, is this dessert company and that hyperlink refers back to your website. That means, that blog page is providing a link that drives its customers to your business to order.
Google sees this as another website trust’s your site enough to give a link that sends customers to you, therefore making you an authoritative source. Link building is one of the most crucial ranking factors when it comes to SEO.
6. User Experience
User Experience refers to the experience your customers go through once they land on your website.
It refers to a customer’s experience as a whole. Say you are searching for something and then you click on a website; you would like excellent user experience. By this, you would like the site to load quickly, which refers to Page Speed.
Additionally, you would like the information on the website to be the most relevant to what you’re searching for and to answer your question or your query.
Moreover, you would wish the site to be easy to navigate. Hence, internal linking is essential. Internal linking is when you provide an anchor text link which leads to another page or service on the same site. The excellent user experience would mean that people tend to stay longer and to browse even further into the website and explore.
Now you have a rough idea on what SEO is how it works, how it affects your website, and how it affects your business.
Before you look at hiring an agency, be careful as there are plenty of black hat SEO agencies out there. Black hat refers to agencies who outsource their work and build you links to your website which have no relevance. This is dangerous as it can result in Google penalising your website.
Here at Core Creations. We’re a white hat SEO agency providing high-quality service. So if you’d like to get in touch, or ask further questions, contact us or call (02) 9191 7381.
