What is SEO and why do you need it?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is key for all online businesses, especially if you deal with high competition, good ranking is crucial.  If your goal is to help your business reach more people and grow your sales, you need to understand how SEO works and how it can help you.

In today’s article, we are going to walk you through some basic things you need to know about search engine optimization. We will also share some of the most important SEO rules you should try to improve the performance of your website.

Let’s get started.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Its main role is to help improve the quality and quantity of the traffic that comes to your website from search engines. 

Once you optimize your pages by following the rules of SEO, they will bring more people to your website thanks to the better ranking. When your audience searches for topics, services, or products your business offers, they will easily find you and ideally, choose you over other businesses. This is all because your pages rank better and have better visibility among other search results.

Search engine optimization works like a chain. Once a page has gained a good ranking in search engines, it will more likely catch the attention of your audience and people will more likely visit your page. The rest is on you. If your website is fast loading, has a well-written copy, is easy-to-navigate, and offers quality products, people will happily take action and make a purchase.

But how does SEO work exactly? To fully understand it, first, you need to learn how search engines work. It is also essential to understand the connection between your website and the search engine and see what you can do to optimize your pages according to the requirements.

Search engines use bots to check every page on the internet. They go from website to website and collect different types of information from each page. They put all information they learned into an index. 

As a next step, algorithms analyze these indexes. They have hundreds of factors to follow. Once a search is made by the user, algorithms decide the ranking order of all existing pages to that given search. 

Based on the factors they follow,  they are able to estimate how well a page is capable of providing the needed information to a certain question or search. 

Now you can see that understanding how SEO works is crucial if you want to improve the ranking of your pages in search engines and grow the traffic of your website. In the following section, we are going to show you what SEO means beyond keywords and what you can do to optimize your pages according to the SEO rules.

SEO beyond keywords 

Most people think that SEO is only about inserting the right keywords to the right place. But the truth is that optimizing your pages is so much more than finding the relevant keywords and building them into your content. 

Undoubtedly, keywords are crucial to well-optimized content, but there are other things you should consider.

To help you understand SEO more, here is a list of some of the most important SEO rules to keep in mind:

Your audience comes first

Before you start to write content for your pages, do some research to identify your target audience. Try to learn more about them, understand what type of content resonates with the people that are interested in your business, and find out what topics they enjoy reading about. Once you got the answers you are good to start creating content that your audience will most likely appreciate.

Follow the current trends

Search for keywords related to your business or the topic you are writing about. Again, do some research to see what is trending. Try to describe your product with the right words that are trending and people are familiar with them. You can rely on tools such as Buzzsumo. These tools are specially developed to help you find the right keywords that you can use to help your content perform better. 

Format your content smartly

Formatting your content is one of the most important steps you can do to help your readers actually read the pages of your website. Just think about it. Who would have the patience or find joy in reading a huge block of text that is hard to navigate? Before publishing your post, make it to be SEO-friendly. Try to use only short sentences, separate your paragraphs, use headlines, bullet points, insert lists for products or items, insert images or other types of media. The goal you should concentrate on is keeping the visitors of your website engaged and preventing audience fatigue.

Do some data analysis

We cannot emphasize enough: data is key. Leverage your data. Keep an eye on your data, because it will tell you everything you need to know to improve your business and be more successful. Just to mention some, the data you see in reports and analytics will show you how your posts perform, how popular your products are and how your audience navigates your website. 

Final Thoughts

As you can see, search engine optimization is not as complicated as it might sound. Even a few simple things can make a huge difference when it comes to the performance and ranking of the pages of your website. 

Finding the right keywords, taking some time to understand the behavior of your audience, formatting your content based on the rules of SEO, or following the current trends are just some of the things you can do to easily improve the traffic of your website, get more potential leads and convert them into customers.

In case you need help, never hesitate to use the contact form on our website and get in touch with our talented team of professionals! We are looking forward to helping your website reach more clients than ever before. Just make sure you are ready to handle them!