If you’ve been in business for more than five minutes, the chances are that you’ve heard of Search Engine Optimisation. As buzz-worthy terms go, SEO has remained in the limelight for several years, thanks to its importance in improving brand-reach for companies. Today, there are more websites in the United States than people. The population for the U.S. is 321 million, while the latest web surveys show that there are about 1.8 billion websites.
The growth of the online business means that you might have a lot of companies to compete against, and that’s why it’s so important to make sure that you’re prepared to get your company seen above your competition. If you want to be found online, then you need to know how to overcome the saturated nature of the web, and reach your audience members.
Creating a business website and hoping for great results isn’t enough. Smart businesses today need to always be on top of the latest SEO trends if they want to crush the competition. On top of that, your efforts have to be constant too. One quick tweak to your SEO strategy every couple of months won’t yield the right results. The good news, is that SEO companies can help you get a handle on your results.
What is SEO and How Does It Work?
Just because you’ve heard of SEO before, or you know what the acronym stands for (search engine optimisation), doesn’t mean that you know what it should mean to your business. SEO is the term that’s used to refer to the methods and processes used to achieve visibility online from organic, or free search results, through Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
When you search for something online, some of the first websites you see will be the ones that have paid for advertising through Google. Underneath those paid advertisements, is where you’ll find the organic search listings. Getting onto the first page of the organic search listings is what SEO is all about. You can do this by posting regular content, building your authority, and earning backlinks to your company website, among other things.
Obviously, since most customers would prefer not to scroll through countless pages for an opportunity to find the results they’re looking for, the best thing you can do for your business is work on getting to the top of the listings. Of course, everyone else in your industry is likely to be doing the very same thing, which is why succeeding with SEO can be so difficult without a little professional help.
Which Factors Impact SEO?
At the end of the day, there are a host of on-site and off-site factors that can impact your SEO efforts. For instance, examples of on-site factors might include the content of your website, the structure of that content, and the speed at which your website loads. Some of the additional off-site factors that you’ll need to think about include links pointing to the website, and your social media following or engagement with social media fans.
Ultimately, the aim for Google is to provide the very best user experience for the people that use its service. With that in mind, it needs to use a range of different factors to rank websites according to the things it believes to be most important to the user. For instance, Google ranks for things like quality, authority, and relevance.
If you have an organised website that’s brimming with useful, valuable, and relevant content, then you’re far more likely to get to the top of the search engine for your chosen keywords.
Are you Ready for SEO?
The good news about organic rankings, is that they don’t require you to pay anything to Google. However, they might end up being less than free. Because SEO is so complicated, the most time & cost-effective thing you can do is hire help to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your strategies.
That said, if you’re starting out we have lots of free content on our website that can help you grow your business with SEO, for free.
