So, after days or months of planning, brainstorming, and losing sleep – you’ve finally set up your business. Congratulations! You are on your way to great success! Or are you? By now, you must have faced some issues on how to get your product/service through, how to get noticed by clients, how to become and stay relevant on social media. Maybe you even did some research on digital marketing, picked up a few tips on content writing, paid for some ads, and played around in Canva. And right about here, you must have encountered that infamously scary and difficult-to-understand term -SEO. You know enough to understand it’s very important, but you just can’t seem to figure out how to make it work for you. Fear not, we are here for you to explain what is SEO, or at least explain the basics for now (it’s a rather large subject).
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, what that means is that by using SEO you are making your website or webpage more friendly to search engines. For example, it was not sheer luck that brought you over to this article. Actually, your search on whatever engine you are using was put through the engine’s crawlers that are working very hard to gather information from all over the internet. Once they are done with their busy work, they send all that hard-earned information back to the search engine to build an index. Now, this index is fed to an algorithm that does its job by trying to match all the data with your query. And voila – here we are, nice to meet you – hope you are enjoying my writing!
The importance of SEO – Why do you need it
Let’s get serious for a moment, though. By understanding SEO, you understand its importance in your digital marketing strategy. You realize that the ultimate goal here is the high ranking of your website’s presence in search results on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. The higher the ranking – the better.
Okay, we got this by now, but the question is – why?
– In today’s world, we are all using the internet as a tool to keep the world at the tip of our fingertips. You need a recommendation for good coffee? – Check online. You want a relaxing massage? – Check online. You want to hire a digital marketing agency? – Yup, right you are – check online!
So, imagine now that you are the one selling the coffee, giving the massage, offering digital marketing services. You’d want your website to be right there, on the first page, ranked high in the search results, right? Because those first page results are the ones your customer is going to open and probably choose to use! You can of course pay for advertisements and get similar results, but this is the magic of SEO – you use the optimization techniques to actually boost your organic search rank on the search engine results page. Or to put it simply – you are getting great exposure without having to pay for it!
How does SEO work?
In simple terms, SEO works by showing the world through the search engines that your content is the best result for the topic at hand.
Once you decide to start using SEO, you should know that its techniques can and will be used in three ways:
On-page SEO
These techniques focus on everything there is on your page: content, site speed, title tags, internal linking, page URLs, and more. What does this mean for you? To break it down to pure simplicity – it means that optimizing your whole webpage will help the search engines understand your webpage. When the search engines understand it, they will be able to offer it to a relevant search query.
So, if you do your work and provide high-quality optimized content your reward will be a higher ranking, higher visibility, and ultimately – higher profits. If we are to go into a bit more detail – using the on-page SEO will also improve your business authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and expertise, which in the long run will set up a reputation of quality, integrity, and loyalty. This is easily achieved through publishing high-quality content, optimizing page titles and meta descriptions, adding internal and external links, and more. Seems like a win, right?
Off-page SEO
These techniques are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites. We went over the on-page SEO, but now you need to move to the far side of your webpage and think about how you can strategically place your well-optimized content all over the internet. Seems like a big project, but you can relax – it can easily be divided into a few categories that you can control. Think about social media, link building, podcasts, reviews, and influencer marketing. You will, of course, need to offer a quality product if you want this to work – people are not going to share, like, review (at least positively) a poor product or service.
Technical SEO
For this part of SEO – you need to learn how to communicate with your developers. It’s important to be able to speak their language so that this three-piece puzzle works like a charm. Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase.
Remember from way up above when we spoke of this? So, the main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website, so that it’s not only appealing to humans, but also to the internet robots distributing all this information to the much-desired location – your customers’ screen. The most important tools to help out the crawlers (or the internet robots) are: specify a preferred domain, optimize your URL structure, navigation, and website structure, optimize your XML sitemap, installation of SSL, and many more. It would take a lot of megabytes to explain all these in detail, so we’ll save that for the next SEO article.
There you have it – a perfect balance between the on-page, off-page SEO, and technical SEO will save you a lot of trouble when trying to move your startup forward.
Finally, in the course of your SEO journey, it’s important to take advantage of the numerous SEO tools available such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Ubersuggest. These tools can help you create the best SEO and keyword strategy for your website and examine how difficult it is to rank your page for the relevant keywords.
I promise, optimizing your website for search engines isn’t as scary as it sounds! It simply takes a lot of time and some solid effort to do it right. It depends on many factors that might seem tricky. So, if you are a startup lacking in just those two – you can always reach out to our digital marketing agency for experienced help and your own peace of mind.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
