What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. what is SEO? SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google. The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don’t pay to be in that space. To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.

Look at it this way. When someone types “vegan lasagna” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making vegan lasagna, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for vegan lasagna. It’s not easy, but that’s what SEO marketing is all about. The ultimate goal of this article is to help you understand the ins and outs of search so you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more eyeballs on your posts.

 

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers, sometimes also called bots or spiders, to gather information about all the content they can find on the internet. The crawler starts from a known web page and follows to pages within that site as well as to pages on other sites. The content on those pages, plus the context of the links it followed, help the crawler understand what each page is about and how it’s semantically connected to all of the other pages within the search engine’s massive database, called an index.

When a user types or speaks a query into the search box, the search engine uses complex algorithms to pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and useful list of results for that query. These organic results can include web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, local business listings, and other more niche types of content.

There are a lot of factors that go into the search engines’ algorithms, and those factors are evolving all the time to keep up with changing user behavior and advances in machine learning.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because  every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.

However, the search results have been  to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Also note, features like and in the search results can increase visibility and provide users more information about your company directly in the results.

In sum, SEO is the foundation of a holistic marketing ecosystem. When you understand what your website users want, you can then implement that knowledge across your campaigns (paid and organic), across your website, across your social media properties, and more.