Fahim Ahmed
If you are thinking of building a website or you are already running a blog, “SEO” is the most important keyword that you will hear frequently.
So What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is the process of optimizing your web pages or content on your site to improve your site’s visibility on search engines. SEO can help you improve your website quality and thus increase your organic traffic. It is a way to improve your search engine visibility for relevant search results by understanding users’ search intent.
In simple terms: It is a way to make more money
There are over 90 million posts published every month only using WordPress and if you count other platforms this number will be much higher.
With so much content being published it has become extremely difficult to get enough exposure.
This is when SEO comes to the rescue. SEO will help you reach out to a potential audience. With SEO you will be able to improve your SERPs ranking and garner more attention from appearing higher in search results.
Importance Of SEO
According to SEOtribunal, there are over 5.6 billion searches per day on Google alone. People all over the world are using Google and other search engines to –
- Learn about a topic
- Find solutions
- Make a purchase
- Entertainment
Search engines help people find out the appropriate search results that will lead to the most relevant high-quality websites containing the most relevant information that matches search intent.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use bots to collect information from web pages all over the internet. All those pages are then put into an index.
Later those pages are analyzed by an algorithm. After taking over hundreds of ranking factors into account those algorithms then decides the order in which those pages will appear on search results.
Google’s algorithm is designed to improve the users’ search experience by providing relevant content.
This might seem very simple but it actually is much more complicated than that.
Let me put it into perspective –
Suppose you started a new restaurant on a very busy street. You can expect quite some people to visit your restaurant everyday right?
But what happens when there are thousands of restaurants on the same street, selling the same food.
The internet is sometimes like that busy street with thousand of people creating similar content every day.
Google’s job as a search engine is to guide you through all those contents and find the best result for you.
SEO helps Google and other search engines better understand all those content so it can provide with the best search results. The better your site SEO the better chance you have of people finding your content.
When you make a search online, you probably don’t even bother looking at the second page of search results. Most people choose to click the first website that appears on search results.
Improving your website SEO can help you rank on top of SERPs.
Understanding Search Intent
When surfing the internet we search for content using keywords. Keywords are the focus words that describe the search intent of a user. Those keywords relate to the topics people are looking for online.
When you want to find a restaurant you don’t type ‘Find the nearest restaurant for me’. Instead, you might type ‘restaurant near me’ and Google will exactly show you the list of some restaurants near you along with some other information related to it.
Most of our searches are keywords based. Some of those keywords are really short and some are long-tail keywords that describe your search intent better.
Google’s algorithm understands what people are actually searching for using keywords.
The role of SEO is to make sure your website shows up for the right search queries. Better SEO practice can help you show up on top of SERPs.
The amount of organic traffic and the quality of search traffic depends on how well you have optimized your website for search engines.
Importance Of SEO In Digital Marketing
SEO is the most important part of digital marketing. People make trillions of searches every year and a big chunk of those searches are done with commercial intent to purchase a product online or to inquire about a product.
Organic searches are the most crucial part of online business or blogs. Organic searches are traffic that you will get without spending a dime.
Most organic searches are based on keywords with specific search intent. So if someone types ‘best attorney in Las Vegas’ they are probably in need of an attorney. So if you are an attorney showing up on top of Google search results, chances are they are going to hire you.
SEO can impact your visibility on search engines and help you rank higher in search results than your competitor. This will have a huge impact on your business as your online presence improves.
Why Do You Need SEO
SEO increases the organic traffic of a website by improving SERP ranking. Optimizing your web pages properly can help you show up for the right term on SERP. It can increase your visibility on the search engine and can website to thousands of visitors each day.
SEO is the perfect way to grow your business and increase revenue. Improving your SEO can drastically increase your organic search traffic. 92% of our site’s traffic comes from organic searches which is a lot. We don’t spend much on advertisements and heavily rely on organic traffic referral traffic.
It is because all of our content is very carefully optimized. We spend 4 hours creating a post and 1 hour on keyword research and on-page SEO. We spend most of our time on link building and guest posting on high authority sites.
Our site is a niche site based on SEO, digital marketing, and blogging. Although it is not the biggest in this niche yet we have managed to bag a lot of visitors from our competitors’ site through SEO.
So if you are not focusing on your site SEO, you are missing out on potential website visitors, or even worse you are losing customers.
Now we are going to dig deep into SEO and understand the basics of it –
So, Google owns 90% of the search engine market share. Almost 4 billion people use Google as their search engine. With 5 billion searches made per day and 62% of those clicking the top 5 search results, you can understand how the top search results dominate in search engines.
Most of the websites that show up on page 2 of Google search barely gets any traffic. There is a running joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results.
So you understand how important it is to rank on the first page of Google. Ranking on any other pages is equivalent to not ranking at all.
Search engine optimization is basically the cornerstone of digital marketing.
What is On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is a very important ranking factor for Google and other search engines. It is a way to optimize your page and for search engines to better understand the content.
On-page SEO revolves around keyword research and content optimization. Your content should be the utmost priority as you are creating content for humans and not for search engines. The better your content the lower your bounce rates.
A good content marketing strategy can help you increase your website traffic drastically.
It is important to provide people with the correct information they are looking for and offer a pleasant experience.
Google always tries to provide the best user experience. So if you want to comply with it you need to make sure people don’t get bored visiting your pages.
Your page speed is a huge concern for Google. Page speed is an important ranking factor for Google and other search engines. If you have a page that takes more than the average time to load, it will be impossible for you to rank on the first 5 pages.
There are a lot more things involved with on-page SEO but the most important is your content and page optimization. Make sure your content stands out and your page is well optimized to load instantly.
What is Off-Page SEO
While on-page SEO depends on your content and page optimization, Off-page SEO totally depends on actions taken outside of your own website to impact your SERPs rankings.
It is mostly about developing the authority of your website and establishing trustworthiness on search engines.
So how does one website build trustworthiness and authority?
The idea is very simple. When someone or some website promotes your content by linking to it because they found your content to be unique or fascinating, you build authority.
All SEOs use the metrics of domain authority to compare the popularity of various sites. You can increase your domain authority by building backlinks pointing towards your content.
One of the easiest ways to build backlinks is by listing your website on business listing sites. Most business listings sites have high domain authority and allow do-follow backlinks.
This is a grey hat SEO strategy that most SEOs use to rank high on Google. Here are some links for lists of top business listing sites –
You can also get free backlinks from image sharing sites. All you have to do is add images that bring value to your content.
You can use SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to calculate your domain authority. All those SEO tools take different metrics into consideration when measuring domain authority. We have found Ahrefs to be more accurate.
The more authoritative your domain, the greater chance you have to show up on top of search results.
How To Optimize For Google
There is a famous misconception that Google ranks webpages. Actually, Google ranks web pages and not websites. Google uses over 200 ranking factors to choose the position of a website.
Although Google never disclosed the actual number. But most SEOs and digital marketing experts believe they take at least 200 factors into consideration before ranking a web page.
While no one knows what those factors actually are but most SEOs have cracked down on the most important factors that can help a website rank on top of Google SERPs.
Google uses a bot called ‘spider’ to crawl web pages all over the internet. This bot crawls links from indexed websites.
Suppose you have a new website that is not indexed on Google. But the homepage of your website has a backlink pointing towards it from another website that is already indexed on Google’s database.
So the next time google bot crawl that website it will also index the new link. From there it will find other pages of your website.
To make sure your website is optimized for crawling and index properly on Google make sure you do the followings –
- Improve your internal linking
- Avoid no-follow internal linking
- Make sure robots.txt is not blocking google bot
- Show newly published post on Homepage
- Use alt tags and meta tags properly
- Use keywords on the heading
- Optimize web pages for mobile
How Long Does It Take To See The Result of SEO
All of our clients ask this one question when they talk about SEO “How long will it take to rank 1st for my keywords on Google”.
We find this question very fascinating because being a digital marketing firm we can’t give a proper answer. Why? Because this question is vague and irrelevant.
Previously we could have answered this question very easily. Because the market wasn’t so competitive and there were some simple strategies that could improve your search results.
You could just target 4-5 keywords, stuff it within your page and get some backlinks and social signals and it would improve your search ranking within months.
But now it is very complicated. After Google realized that people are spamming search engines by black hat SEO techniques and buying bulk backlinks to rank on top of SERPs, they rolled out a new algorithm update.
After the penguin and panda update, the world of SEO has seen a paradigm shift. All those tips and tricks that you could get from SEO related Facebook groups don’t work anymore.
Also, back in 2012 SEO was a very new term. Very few people were interested in SEO and the competition was very low.
But now everyone is doing SEO on their websites to reach that top spot on SERPs.
So the appropriate question to ask is “how long will it take to see the result of SEO”
It actually depends. It depends on a lot of factors and your overall goal.
How long will it take to see changes in your website traffic depends on these factors.
- Your website age
- Your domain age
- Website’s backlink profile
- The web page that you want to rank
- Keyword difficulty
- Backlink profile for that specific web page
If you rank one of your older posts and you have an old website with a good backlink profile it would take less than 3 months to rank for medium competitive keywords.
But if you have a new website with few web pages and a weak backlink profile, it can take years to even rank for low competitive keywords.
Some people choose black hat SEO techniques to improve their search results but unfortunately, that won’t work in the long run. It will take some time to see any visible effect on your website’s traffic.
So have patience and wait for SEO to do the magic for you.
