What is SEO & how does it work?

If you’re a business owner in the year 2020 there is a damn good chance you have heard of SEO.

However, many business owners don’t take the time to properly comprehend SEO and what it’s about. This is fine, of course, as you can enlist the services of a professional SEO company in the same way you can enlist the services of a professional gardener.

But if you’re a business owner who wants to play an active role in your brand’s SEO strategy it’s important to have a basic understanding of the concept and how it affects your overall online marketing.

Here is an introduction to SEO and how it works.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a system of strategies enlisted to drive organic, or unpaid, traffic from search engine results to your website. It is the continually evolving process of optimising your website to make it more appealing to search engines like Google.

There are many website elements that make your page more appealing to search engines (which we will talk about next), and these all work together in the hope of making your website more accessible to consumers when they search for your industry or product.

So, what elements make a good SEO strategy?

SEO requires a list of fundamental checks to ensure your website appeals to search engines and, in turn, your target audience. SEO incorporates the following necessities to make websites more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs):

1. A quality, accessible website: For Google “bots” to be able to actually begin the process of analysing your website, they first have to be able to easily reach it. To do this, you need a quality website built by a coded website builder, a sitemap that lists each one of your pages and a robots.txt file that indicates where Google bots can search your site information.
2. High loading speed: Google is dedicated to enhancing user experience, and one of the main indicators of a quality experience is fast page loading times.
3. Optimised content: Keyword research and optimised content is vital to search engine rankings as it makes finding your website easier for both consumers and search engine bots. After all, how can either parties find your website if it doesn’t contain information relating to your product?
4. Mobile friendliness: The world is turning mobile or, should we say, has for some time already been mobile. Therefore, a quality website requires easy navigation on desktops, tablets and, naturally, mobile phones. Google places a lot of emphasis on the amount of time a user spends on a particular website, and if users are leaving your mobile page because it is subpar, this could be a big problem for your overall ranking.
5. Domain age & authority: Websites that have been around on search engines for longer usually have a leg up when it comes to rankings, and it is very rare for a new website to quickly climb engine ladder.
6. Links: The internet is built on links, so it should come as no surprise that this is a vital way for your website to rank highly in search engines. The more high quality links direct to your website, the more Google and other search engines will view your brand as an industry authority, thus favouring you in its search engines.

These are some of the most important SEO ranking factors, although there are others that play an important role in boosting your site’s ranking.

Find out more from our team

If you are interested in learning more about SEO and how it is an imperative marketing concept, please feel free to contact the Light Forest experts. We will walk you through SEO and how our strategies take websites to the top of the search engine rankings.