New to SEO? Here Is Everything You Need to Know
In this digital age, nearly all of us turn to Google to find answers to all manner of questions, however complicated or mundane those questions may be. For this exact reason, all types of businesses, e-commerce brands, and entrepreneurs clamour to do anything and everything just to be at the top of those search pages.
This is the precise definition of search engine optimisation or SEO—improving the content in your website to make it appear higher in the search results of Google. Because in this day and age, if your business isn’t found on Google, you might as well have an invisible business. But first, let’s have a better definition of SEO and what it entails.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the process of “optimising” your website so that you’ll have a better ranking on search engines, specifically Google. This is a crucial marketing process and this can’t be done simply by paying Google to place you on the first page of search results. You have to go the extra mile by outsourcing with an ecommerce SEO agency in Sydney to help you navigate the SEO playing field and master all these:
- Quality of website traffic – People who visit your website should be genuinely interested in what your website has to offer. This means that if your website sells clothing items for kids, but your website visitors searched for “womens shoes”, it’s highly likely that these visitors won’t be converted to a sale in your e-commerce site.
- Quantity of website traffic – Okay, now that you’ve got visitors who are actually interested in what your business has to offer, you also need to increase how many visitors are actually visiting per day, per month, per year. You have to increase the amount of traffic going to your website and this happens when your business can be found on the top of the search engine page results or SERPs.
- Organic search – This describes the kind of website traffic you’re receiving that’s not part of the ads you paid precious advertising fees for.
Now that you have a better inkling of what SEO is, let’s talk about how optimisation works. You have to understand that how SEO worked in 2016 is different from how it works now, especially since Google keeps upping the game. The search engine giant continues to upgrade and upscale its algorithms to keep the digital business world on its toes. They also keep doing this to make sure that search results remain genuine, informative, and end-user focused.
How SEO Works
Search engines use “crawlers” to go through all the website pages online. These crawlers then extract information from that webpage and allow that page to be indexed. Once the page is on an index and then delivered to an algorithm, this index will match the data of the web pages with the searches that people do on search engines like Google. This entire process takes less than a tenth of a second, practically instant.
Now when it comes to ranking factors such as those that Google uses to determine your webpage’s ranking, search engines use the following:
- Off-Page Optimisation – This uses metrics that involve the quantity and quality of backlinks on a page. These are essentially links from other websites that lead to your site. In a way, a backlink is a vote of confidence from other websites. The more you have, the more trustworthy your website seems.
- On-Page Optimisation – This metric considers the quality of the keywords and information queries that are contained on the web page itself. It’s an essential part of SEO that focuses on the kind of content you upload on your website, whether it’s actually useful information to your target niche or you’re basically just filling your pages with keywords and nothing else.
- Technical optimisation – This metric takes into consideration all the other factors and aspects of building a website, not just the keywords or the links that lead to and from the webpage. Essentially, it looks at your e-commerce website as whole rather than looks at the individual webpages.
Why SEO Is Important
Search engine optimisation is basically the reason your search results appear the way they do. Those web pages that are seen at the top of the first page, those are the pages that answer the query you typed in. Without the improvements in SEO over the years, it would be as easy as manipulating the system just so that your website will be at the top of the pile. Today, with modern optimisation and constant updates to search engine algorithms, there’s very little chance that businesses can worm their way through SEO by taking short cuts or cutting corners. Today, every website earns the ranking that they deserve.
This is exactly why SEO matters and plays a big role in modern digital marketing. When business brands work hard on optimising their content and invest in outsourcing for their SEO needs, doing so grants their business a better chance of ranking highly on the search results of their target audience. If an e-commerce site that sells hair products appears at the first page of search results for queries for “hair products”, then the outsourced SEO agency has done a remarkable job.
