What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimisation?
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of enhancing your website's visibility on search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing. When people search for products, services, or information related to your expertise, SEO helps your website appear in search results, increasing the chances of attracting visitors who could become your customers or audience. In this guide, we'll delve into the world of SEO and its significance, various types and specialisations, how it operates, and how you can learn more about it.
Distinguishing SEO from SEM and PPC
SEM, short for search engine marketing, encompasses SEO and PPC efforts to drive organic and paid traffic from search engines. In essence, SEO focuses on organic traffic, while SEM combines both organic and paid traffic. It's important to note that the industry sometimes uses SEM interchangeably with PPC. Still, it's crucial to recognise that SEO and PPC are complementary channels rather than competitors, so it's essential to incorporate both into your marketing strategy.
The Importance of SEO
SEO plays a pivotal role in today's digital landscape. Organic search accounts for a significant portion of website traffic, making it a crucial marketing channel. With trillions of searches conducted annually, it's imperative that you make your brand or business "search engine friendly" across various platforms, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even social media and retailer websites.
SEO is vital for several reasons:
SEO results in tangible business outcomes, contributing to brand growth and awareness.
Search engines are the go-to starting point for most users' journeys, whether they are seeking information, products, or services.
SEO helps your website stand out in competitive search engine results pages (SERPs), featuring various search features and paid ads.
Good SEO practices offer sustainability and long-term results, unlike paid campaigns such as Google ads and paid social media campaigns, which only drive results when the campaign is active.
SEO serves as the foundation for holistic marketing, influencing your campaigns, website content, and social media properties.
Types of SEO
There are three primary types of SEO:
Technical SEO: This involves optimising the technical aspects of your website, including architecture, URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and factors like Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, and usability. It also covers structured data (schema), web hosting, CMS, and site security.
On-site SEO: On-site SEO focuses on optimising your website's content for users and search engines. It aims to provide high-quality, user-friendly content that covers relevant topics, incorporates relevant keywords, is original, well-written, up-to-date, and includes multimedia elements. Key elements to optimise for search engines include title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, image alt text, and metadata for social platforms.
Off-site SEO: This type of SEO includes activities like link building, brand building, PR, content marketing, social media marketing and optimisation, listing management, and managing ratings and reviews. While off-site SEO may not directly impact your technical ranking, it helps enhance your brand's visibility and reputation.
SEO Specialties
SEO has various subgenres, each requiring distinct tactics and strategies. Five prominent SEO specialties are:
E-commerce SEO: Specialising in optimising category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking, product images, and more for online stores.
Enterprise SEO: Focusing on SEO at a massive scale, often managing websites with millions of pages or catering to large organisations with substantial revenue.
International SEO: Involves optimising websites for multiregional or multilingual content, targeting international search engines like Baidu or Naver.
Local SEO: Aims to optimise websites for local organic search results by managing reviews, business listings, and local visibility.
News SEO: Focuses on delivering news content quickly and efficiently to appear in Google's index and features like Google Discover, Google's Top Stories, and Google News.
How SEO Works
SEO's effectiveness relies on a combination of factors, including people, processes, technology, and activities. These components come together to influence search engine visibility, and key areas that make SEO work include:
Understanding How Search Engines Work: SEO requires a deep understanding of search engine processes, from crawling and rendering to indexing and ranking. However, each platform, like Google, Facebook, or Twitter, has unique ranking factors, making SEO practices platform-specific.
Research: Research is crucial in SEO, encompassing audience, keyword, competitor, brand/business/client, website, and SERP analysis. These insights inform your SEO strategy.
Planning: Your SEO strategy is like a roadmap, setting goals, KPIs, project implementation, team structure, and budget. It provides a clear direction for your SEO efforts.
Creating and Implementing: This stage involves creating new content, optimising existing pages, and removing low-quality content to align with your SEO strategy.
Monitoring and Maintaining: Regular monitoring is vital to detect issues like traffic drops, page speed problems, or broken links and fix them promptly.
Analysing, Assessing, and Reporting: Using website analytics and tools to collect performance data and create reports is essential to track SEO progress and make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process as search engines, user behaviour, and your competitors continually evolve. Regularly update your strategies to stay ahead in the SEO game.