What Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Why Is It Important To Your Business?

The process of doing a proper search engine optimisation campaign can seem complex and overwhelming. SEO can be broken down into many tasks, including coding, link building, marketing strategy planning, and management, which most people don’t have experience in.

SEO, when done right, can generate very sustainable results for your website traffic and revenue. SEO can also be integrated with your digital marketing strategy to help you achieve a greater result. SEO is not something that happens overnight, but if you do it correctly, it can and will speed up the process of generating traffic and revenue to your website.

In our past blogs, we’ve discussed the benefits of SEO already and what the trends are for 2022. However, we’re quite sure that lots of people still do not have full working knowledge or understanding of how SEO, how search engines work or how search engines discover websites to rank. Therefore, this blog will answer the one simple question: What is SEO?

What Is SEO?

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. SEO can target different searches, including image, local, video, academic, and industry-specific vertical search engines. It intends to improve a website’s rankings, which are displayed as natural or organic search results. SEO is not an exclusive strategy to the Google platform, you can still apply the strategy and optimise for other search engines as well which will help increase traffic since people pay attention to SEO ranking when deciding which website they should visit.

SEO is considered very helpful to marketers because it helps you get visible in Google search engine results – meaning more potential visits to your website from those searching for what your business is offering on the internet. SEO is technically free, and if successful, it can help marketers gain more visitors, traffic and revenue as well as increase sales.

SEO includes on-page optimization, technical optimization and off-page optimization. Let’s go through each aspect to have a better understanding of search engine optimisation.

On-page Optimisation

SEO managers are aware that on-page optimisation is one big part of search engine algorithms and is also considered a ranking factor. In terms of having a perfect SEO strategy, an optimiser should consider on-page factors such as meta tags on page titles, headers and meta description tags. Apart from the page meta, experts should do keyword research and understand users’ search intent for generating high-quality content. Nowadays, search engines understand the searcher’s intention and try to show the search result pages that have relevant content with the most relevant keywords that users selected.

Apart from the on-page elements, internal links are considered a very important strategy to improve user experience and site navigation. If you implement internal linking and links to all pages on your website logically, it will be easier for users to navigate around the site.

Technical Optimisation

To get the best on search engine rankings, doing only on-page optimisation may not be enough for your website to stay ahead of the competition. SEO experts believe that technical audit and improving the website performance can help your website dominant search engine. If you are doing it right, technical optimisation will help site owners gain a flow of organic search traffic.

The site and/or business owners should be aware that in order to get into a competition with other sites, technical optimisation such as accelerated mobile pages, speed performance, canonical, HTML code, hreflang are implemented properly because if not, the search engine will likely choose to rank the competitor website higher because the search engine and its algorithms have a better understanding on website’s technical structured data than your website. And don’t forget to claim your GMB profile on google maps to ensure that you are also covered in local SEO practices.

Therefore, it is very important to perform an SEO Audit on your website. With the audit, you can point out issues and highlight some aspects that need improvement for a better chance of getting higher search rankings.

Off-page Optimisation

This is one of the aspects that has less attention when compared to on-page and technical optimisation. On-page and technical optimisation can indeed help you improve the ranking position. But you may ask: how can we maintain or improve the ranking position in the long run? Off-page SEO optimisation or backlinks is the answer to this question.

On-page optimisation and technical optimisation are the basics and trust us, most of your competitors may be aware of this as well. Now imagine that both your website and competitor’s site are optimised well on every aspect, almost to an equal level. How then can a search engine such as Google decide which website should rank on a top position based on off-page factors? The answer is that these search engines will judge and evaluate the backlink profile on each website. In the backlink profiles, there are many factors in consideration. For example, the number of quality backlinks is classified by metrics such as domain authority, domain rating, traffic, the number of organic keywords and more.

Think of the backlink competition as a vote of confidence from the users. Imagine your website and your competitor website has 10 backlinks. If your website has 10 backlinks or a vote of confidence from the professor or digital marketing experts while your competitors are getting a vote of confidence from the online content writer or your colleagues. The search result page will consider your website to be more trustworthy than other websites and eventually rank your website to be higher!. Even though the number of backlinks are equal, the quality of the backlinks is weighed slightly higher than the amount of backlink itself.

The Importance of SEO

SEO is not going away anytime soon, algorithms may change but the theory remains the same. SEO should be a part of your digital marketing strategy since it can provide sustainable traffic and revenue to your website. SEO helps you become visible on the search results page and get more visits from organic or natural search results.

But still, why SEO is still important to everyone? In the past, before we had search engines, we had website directories that contain a list of websites that are classified to each type. It sounds perfect at first, however, when the world and the internet evolved, the number of websites increased rapidly and classifying the websites became more and more difficult. It even became unfair to some websites.

For example, the website director was classified and sorted in ascending alphabetical order. I know you can already tell where the problems will come from with this arrangement… What if the website starting with A have low-quality content but the website starting with Z has higher quality but will never be visited because users will not have the time or interest in going through all of them one by one. They will only pay attention to the first ones they see and so no matter how SEO-friendly and user friendly the Z website is, it will have the disadvantage immediately.

People on the internet have more questions today and want immediate answers when their curiosity peaks. Without a search feature, it will be relatively difficult for internet users to get the information they want based on website directory model. These are the core problems that led to the birth of search engines.

Nowadays, optimisation on on-page, off-page and technical optimisation are the main aspects that ensure search engine will show search result that matters to the users the most.

Search Engines At Work

This blog post explains what SEO is and how important it is to your internet presence and digital marketing. Yes, SEO can indeed optimise by yourself but as you can see, there many aspects that need to be handled to ensure your website’s success. It may be a challenge to some website owners as it can be time-consuming and requires extensive knowledge to have a full understanding of how to optimise properly.

At Move Ahead Media, we are a full-service digital marketing agency that has in house experts that know the best and latest SEO tools as well as a dedicated link building team to help your website get a better ranking position on the search engine result pages. Contact us today to receive a FREE consultation and advice on how to achieve SEO success from our team.