SEO stands for Search engine optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines’ organic results. It’s the process to follow to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic.
SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.
Importance:
The majority of search engine users more than 70% are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust.
SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is an increase in organic traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
Web Traffic
To put it simply if potential customers can’t find your website, sales opportunities are being missed. SEO increases your organic search engine traffic, in turn increasing the number of visitors your page sees each day. This directly correlates to an increase in sales because the more relevant people that see your site, the more likely you are to sell to them.
Visibility and Rankings
When searching for a service or product online, users are more likely to choose one of the top five suggestions that the search engine shows them. SEO helps you rank higher in search results and garner more visibility online, making potential customers more likely to click over to your site and convert.
Trustworthy
The better your SEO score is, the higher you’ll appear on search engines like Google and Bing. While ranking higher on Google is appealing to all brands because on increased visibility, a secondhand benefit is the trust you gain with potential customers. Users tend to defer to the recommendations that a search engine generates, so having a higher position for the keywords a user is searching for will, in turn, solidify your product or service as trustworthy in the user’s mind.
Growth
There’s no doubt about it SEO is key to the growth of your brand. As we mentioned above, the higher you rank on a search engine for a variety of high-volume keywords, the more organic (aka non-paid) web traffic your site will receive. It’s as simple as that.
A website that is well-optimized is more likely to gain more customers and make more sales. People are also more likely to then share your brand across other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram once they’ve found your website through a search engine.
User Experience
A well-optimized website clearly communicates what product or service is being offered, how to obtain it and answers any questions surrounding it. By catering the site build to the user’s experience, search engines like Google and Bing are able to easily pull the information they need to then relay to users. If a user struggles to navigate your site, chances are that search engines do as well.