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Basics of Search Engine Marketing | SEO 101

Do you know how important search engine optimization is to your business? The fact is it’s a critical piece of the puzzle when growing your online brand and every business wanting to expand its online presence needs its content optimized.

Of course, you may think this is just a step too far and particularly at the moment as the planet recovers from the impact of the pandemic. We can understand that and it’s probably the last thing you want to think about.

 

But let’s try and get you in a more positive place about Search Engine Optimization. In this article, we’ll give you the low down on why SEO is needed by your business, and more importantly how we can help you build it into your everyday business world.

 

In fact, when you strip away all the waffle about SEO the fundamentals are very simple and with Google accounting for 57.8% of all web traffic, it is something worth putting into action for your own website universe.

 

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a technique used for increasing both quantity and quality of web traffic as well as brand exposure through the search engine’s unpaid results (which is termed “organic” traffic).

 

SEO is about

  1. Really understanding your community

  2. What are people searching for online

  3. The type of search queries generated by them and the answers they’re seeking

  4. And the type of content that interests them

Finding the answers to these questions will enable you to build out your own community of customers, visitors, and other stakeholders. It will help you serve them better by putting your brand’s knowledge and expertise in their line of sight. SEO takes your keywords and puts them at the top of the subjects that your community are searching for.

 

If identifying your audience’s motive is one side of the coin, then delivering it in a way search engine crawler find and understand is the flip side.

 

Why is SEO important?

The prime reason why SEO holds so much importance in the online world is that the majority of organic traffic from Google is driven by SEO. In other words, SEO accounts for more web traffic than all other sources like social media, Pay Per Click (PPC) and other traffic channels combined.

 

Another reason why SEO is crucial is that SEO is the only marketing campaigns that when set up correctly can yield results consistently whereas other marketing channels need regular funding to send traffic to your site.

 

In a nutshell, optimizing your site for SEO will deliver accurate information to search engines so that your website can be indexed properly and ranks well in the Google search results.

 

What are the benefits of SEO?

The most widely touted advantage of SEO is improved rankings, but rankings are merely a means to an end. Many of the true SEO advantages are traffic-related.

 

1. Leads to more traffic

The people you want to come to your brand tend to click on the top search results, as they present in Google, so a higher ranking can lead to more traffic to your website and other channels.

 

2. SEO leads to consistent traffic

SEO is not something you modify every day as you need to allow time for things to start working on the search engine. When done right it leads to consistent and passive traffic. That isn’t always the case for mediums like social media and email marketing, which often produce strong winds that quickly fade away.

 

3. SEO leads to ‘free’ traffic

Search engine traffic is effectively FREE traffic or as it is termed, “unpaid”. This is unlike paying for ads. That’s a relief for a lot of business owners because most of us want results from free SEO to avoid the complications and expense of PPC. We will be writing about the pros and cons of PPC in a forthcoming article.

 

Steps to get your website listed on Google-

Though Google will find your site on its own, manually submitting your site on Google has its added advantages

 

1. Quick Discovery –

Newly created websites don’t have any backlinks from other authoritative sites, so Google might take some time to discover them.

 

2. Improvise your pages

-Google Search Console provides suggestions for how to boost and optimise your pages.

 

Step 1- Finding your sitemap is the first step in uploading your website to Google.

 

Sitemaps are the list of all your web pages. You will usually find yours by going to one of the following URLs in your browser:

 

website.com/sitemap.xml

website.com/sitemap_index.xml

 

Step 2 – Build a free Google Search Console account and upload your sitemap as the second move.

 

White Hat Vs Black Hat SEO

Although some SEOs portray these as two separate schools of thought, they are more akin to a right and wrong way to do SEO than equivalent categorizations.

 

The term “white hat” refers to the proper and ethical way to optimise a website. It focuses on a human audience and takes a long-term approach to serve more value to people.

 

Whereas Black Hat SEO is essentially the opposite of white hat. It’s a technique that relies on manipulative tactics and violates search engine guidelines to achieve quick wins.

 

On-Page Vs Off-Page SEO

The distinction between On-Page and Off-Page SEO is as follows:

  • What the website communicates to a search engine is known as On-Page SEO. Off-Page refers to other sites point of view about the site.

  • On-page SEO is used to improve the ranking of individual web pages in search engine results pages. External rating signals such as links are referred to as off-page SEO.

Improving your On-Page SEO will significantly upscale your marketing activities by attracting the right visitors to your website and reaping the benefits of a better ranking on SERPs.

 

Summing-up

Hope, you’ve enjoyed learning about the basics of SEO, and we’ve managed to guide you well through it.

 

The aim of SEO is to improve the user experience by paying attention to everything from the copy to the design to the keywords to the feedback from your target audience.

 

Being relevant to your content and making it useful for the user is important.

 

If you’re looking for a company to perform SEO for you and drive traffic to your site for conversions, you can buy all the strategies listed above from Shergroup.

 

We ensure that you have clearly defined your business objectives and then use SEO to assist you in achieving them.

 

Our SEO service experts can save you a lot of time and money as they are through with the techniques which don’t go wrong.

 

SEO takes time, so once you hand it over to us, relax and focus on your business goals and we will present you with regular updates on how your website is performing as part of our Digital Marketing Packages. Contact us through our hub at www.shergroup.com for more information about how we can help you.

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Last updated | 19 July 2023

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