Oh boy. This is the Whopper of marketing. Hard to ingest, harder to digest. But don’t worry, we’ll break it up for you and serve it in little pieces. This isn’t going to be your average, jargon-filled productivity article. Nor just an introduction. Somewhere in between. But make no mistake, SEO is pretty darn important.
So, what is SEO and why is it important? SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization’. To understand that term, you must first know what organic search is. It refers to searching anything on a search engine and clicking on one of the non-advertised results. These results are ranked, that is, they appear in a specific order. SEO is basically a set of methods that help your website get a higher rank among organic search results and appear further up in the order. A crude description, but it’s enough to get started. SEO is volatile because search engine algorithms keep changing (looks like you’ve got a friend, Elon Musk), and websites age and lose their relevancy. Now the reason why it’s so important is that you simply can’t succeed as a brand/business without a strong presence on Google and SEO gives you exactly that. According to a survey, 67% of buyers turn to papa Google first if they want to buy something.
How does Google rank websites? The algorithm takes two factors into account – relevancy, and popularity. This is where ‘topics’ and ‘keywords’ come in, but more on those later. The process of scanning your page is termed ‘crawling’. When crawling, the search engine doesn’t see images or any graphic content that may be present on your webpage, at least not conventionally. It sees all the content on your page as text. Taking that into consideration, there are a lot of things you could do to get that high rank in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). We’ll focus on what you can do within your page, also called ‘on-page optimization’.
So, keywords. What are they? They’re the phrases that your customers use while searching for a product/page on Google. The algorithm looks for keywords on your page to rate it for relevance, so you want to include a fair amount of those. Include keywords in the title, the website’s URL, and even in image file names, because your images are read as text. Don’t overdo it though, as keyword stuffing can result in penalties for your site and it’ll be sliding down the rankings real quick.
Next up, is the content itself. Having long hair doesn’t make you a Keanu Reeves. Having short hair won’t make you a Katy Perry either. Your content must be top notch, that’s a no-brainer. But there are a few other aspects that are involved in SEO. For example, longer content (especially in blogs) tends to gain a higher ranking. And duplicate content tends to earn penalties. Don’t include links to low quality or redundant websites. The algorithm is a rather posh fellow. Next up, links. Backlinks/inbound links, to be specific. These are links present on other pages that lead to your page. The more popularity and quality the other websites have the higher your ranking. Admittedly, this is the hardest to influence while building an SEO strategy, because it isn’t directly under your control. But there are a few ways. If your page is of high quality, other websites will include references automatically. You could reach out to pages and ask them to publish links to your websites. You could also do a guest post on another website in exchange for a few links.
All that being said, some things are best left to the experts, and SEO is one of them. Just imagine the consequences if Neville from Harry Potter made you potions. Jokes apart, the investment is definitely worth it. You’ll be smashing your marketing goals and shouting SEOUIIIIII at the top of your lungs.