SEO is a really essential topic for businesses in present days. It is an approach that companies take to improve their visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. But since, Google is the major search engine today, SEO has become mostly about visibility in Google.

Why your business should adopt SEO ?

One of the prominent reasons your business should adopt Search Engine Optimization is to make sure that your website is visible on any search engine. Getting on the front page of Google, or any other search engine will bring a lot of visitors to your website. Increased engagement on your company’s website means that more people are now aware about your services or your products. Your content is now visible to more people. Needless to say, you now have more prospective customers which may result in increased sales.

Some interesting and fun facts about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

• In 2017, Google accounted for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 7.27%, Baidu at 6.55% and Yahoo at 5.06%. (Source: NetMarketShare)
• Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly.(Source: MarketDive, 2016)
• 80% people search a company online before dealing with them. (Source: SocialMediaToday)
• The top five web addresses on the first page of any search engine get 75% of all user clicks. (Source: Hubspot)
• Putting a video on your website’s landing page makes it 53% more likely to make it to the top of Google rankings (Source: Rosaline)

How Your Business Grows with SEO

• Increased Website Traffic: With your company’s website on the front page of a search engine, there’s no doubt that you’ll receive increased number of visitors. SEO is a way to get organic traffic 24/7 even on the off business hours.
• Trackable Return on Investment: When it comes to Return on Investment (ROI), SEO provides trackable and quantifiable results. You can track actual number of visitors who are interested in your business.
• Target customers: SEO is one of the most fruitful online marketing strategies as it targets only those who are actively looking for your products and services online.
• Increased Trust: Being on the top of search results increases the brand value of your company. And this means more trust from the customer base.
• Fast Access: SEO helps your website to be fast and user-friendly to be accessed from mobile and tablet devices. Thus, people coming to your website are more likely to become customers, subscribers or loyal visitors.

Getting Started with SEO

Well, the first thing you need is a website. It can be a single page site or a site with multiple pages. The second thing is you need to be familiar with the search engine algorithm. An algorithm is a set of instructions designed to perform a specific task and in this case, instructions to rank pages or sites. Google uses a complex algorithm called ‘Site Authority’ in order to rank websites in their search engine results.

Google’s algorithm is extremely complicated. Following are some basic facts that give you an overview how the Site Authority algorithm ranks pages.

• Google looks for high-quality, unique pages with relevant information and engaging content that matches the searcher’s query.
• A crawler crawls your content and evaluate its relevance based on the keywords it contains, backlinks, social media popularity, comments and shares.
• The number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site determines your content quality and trustworthiness.

What can you do to improve the ranking of your website?

There are some methods, some steps to be followed that helps you to effectively perform SEO. Following are the few tips that you can work on to increase your search engine rankings.

1. Choose a keyword and carry out keyword research: A keyword is a word or a group of words that people use to search certain things. So, you need to anticipate what words people will use to search your business. Effective keywords need to be relevant and natural. After determining few keywords, perform a keyword research. There are few tools that you can use for this such as adword’s keyword explorer (free tool), Moz’s Keyword Explorer and KWFinder. You have to take into account the following factors when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:

• Search Volume: Look for how many people are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people searching for a keyword, the bigger the crowd you stand to reach.
• Keyword Difficulty : Keyword difficulty refers to how hard it is to rank in the search engine with the given keyword. If the keyword difficulty is low, then it means it is easy to rank for that specific keyword.

So, you need to find a keyword that has high search volume and low keyword difficulty.

2. Understand about On-page SEO and Off-page SEO: There are certain tasks to be performed within the page to optimize it and others that need to be performed outside the page, even outside the website. A page needs to be well structured. Usage of proper meta tags, proper headers, length of the content, relevant outbound links, usage of interactive content such as videos and images etc. are few factors that effect on-page SEO. Off-page SEO refers to making your page popular on the overall web. The number of shares done by other people, links from other sites to your page, popularity in social media etc. are few off-page SEO factors. So, you need to work on both on-page and off-page SEO.

3. Create a blog section and publish blog posts:You should create a blog section in your site where you’ll regularly publish quality articles. You should ensure that you are always creating unique valuable content. Then make them accessible and linkable from other sites such as community articles and discussion forums that take place outside of your website. You should create a good, up to date and relevant content that people would actually share it with others.

4. Include keywords on your content:Include keywords in the contents of your site, be it a slight introduction of your business or a blog post. But be careful to not stuff unnecessary keywords everywhere. The keyword density must not be more than 3-4% in any kind of content. And also include alt tags in all images and do use keywords in those alt tags as well. The keyword inclusion must look natural, not forced.

5.  User friendly site structure:Your website should have a very clean sitemap or site structure. This is essentially how your website will flow in terms of links from one page to another. Users should be able to navigate to every page without any complexity. It’s also very important for you to have an SEO friendly URL. An SEO friendly URL is basically having a very clean and short URL. Users can type the URL get to the page quickly and easily.

Measuring SEO effectiveness
After all the actions you have taken to optimize your site, you need to check how your progress is going on. You need to look for few metrics that ensure your work is producing fruitful results or probably you are doing something wrong. Below are four metrics that you need to look out for while doing SEO.

• Check your website traffic: You can use Google Analytics to check your website traffic. Look for page views, number of visits and bounce rate. If the page views or number of visitors is not increasing, then maybe you need to change your SEO strategy. If the bounce rate is high, then maybe your content is not good enough or your site looks ugly.

• Check for visitor engagements: See if people are commenting on your posts or your posts are being shared. Maybe some people are repeatedly visiting your site. See if anybody has emailed you to talk about the post or probably to do business.

• Watch for site authority: Everything that you’re doing under SEO is to increase your site authority. You should check whether all the stuff that you’re doing to increase your ranking is improving the positioning of your site in the search pages. If the rank is not increasing, maybe you’re doing something wrong.

• Measure your links: You should measure the links to your site by keeping a daily or weekly report. Google and its algorithm is as much about content as it is about link building. Thus, a report to show the steady flow of an increase in links is essential. There are few tools which you can use to explore backlinks such as Moz’s Link Explorer or Ahref’s Backlink Checker.

In a nutshell, SEO is all about taking your website to the front page of a search engine so that more people can see it which ultimately leads to more number of customers. Starting optimizing your site today and present your business among a larger audience.