What is SEO? If you´re in business you probably heard of this. SEO: this magical word that everyone talks about and somehow gets businesses huge revenues. Ok, let me tell you from now that SEO has nothing magical, SEO requires work, commitment and patience.
With that being said, let´s jump in the subject and start with giving you a definition of the concept.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It consists of strategies, tactics and techniques used to increase ranking on search engine results such as Google and Bing.
Real life example:
Let´s say that you just started an online store specialized in fashion. You sell everything from clothing and shoes to accessories.
After a quick research on Google Keyword Planner (I will talk more about this tool in coming posts), the average number of people in Kuwait searching for online fashion stores is 10K to 100K monthly.
The SEO job is to get your online store listed in the first results when a person types “online shopping in Kuwait”.
Why? Simply because highly ranked businesses on Search Engines get a lot of traffic.
Traffic is the number of visitors a website gets. The higher this number is the more sales the business will close and the more money it will make.When I say a lot of traffic, I mean from 50K to 600K visitors a day which can make you hundred of thousand dollars in net revenue.
Concretely, what is it to be well ranked on Search Engines?
Here is a picture of what a SERP on Google looks like. I´m sure you are very familiar with it but let´s have a close look at it.
As you can see I divided this SERP into two main parts:
- Number 1 is the ads powered by companies that buy space on Google search for specific keywords. I will get back to Google Adwords ( advertising on Google ) in coming blog posts. So the space in number 1 is paid advertising.
- Number 2 is where you want your business to always be on the keywords related to your niche. This SERP shows for example the results for the keyword : Online shopping in Kuwait. The number 2 rectangle is the “hot spot” . The three businesses are organically ranking on top the the page. Organically ranking means that they didn’t pay a cent to be there but Google sees their websites as most relevant to the keyword : Online shopping in Kuwait.
How does Google know what website is relevant to what keyword?
Google deploys billions of robots (known as Google bots) that visit all the websites in the internet. While doing so, they index them and give them ratings depending on many criteria ( there are actually around 200) . The thing is no one has a full list of these criteria. The whole SEO work is to constantly experiment and research to know the good practices in order to get ranked on top of a SERP on a keyword related to your business and niche.
Speaking of good practices, how can I get my business on the “hot spot”?
Let´s face it, Search Engine Optimisation is not something that you do once and get immediate results. You work on SEO every day. It should be a big part of your digital marketing strategy if you want you business to succeed. As I wrote in the definition of SEO: it consists in strategies and tactics. I am not going to develop these strategies in this post but will surely do in the future. However I am going to give you a list of some high level tactics you can use to improve your ranking.
- Build a great website : Search Engine friendly content and design is the fundamental of SEO. Furthermore, your website needs to be mobile friendly: it adapts to smartphone and tablets screens.
- Content is king: Start a blog relevant to your niche. Give your audience useful information that they want to know and share. Content marketing is actually the best way to generate traffic to your website and engage with your audience. And guess what Google rewards you for that by always improving your ranking. When creating contact, share it on social media that helps with link building (see next tactic).
- Build links intelligently : When other websites link to one of your web pages, Google automatically thinks that you are relevant and trustworthy. Result: it puts you on top. Start by submitting your website to high quality directories such as yahoo, DMOZ and look for trusted directories in your geographical area. For Kuwait for example you can find :Kuwait local, Kuwait listing, Q8companies.
PS: Let me know if you need help implementing a winning digital marketing strategy?
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