What Is SEO, and How Does It Work?

Understanding the Benefits of SEO for Your Business

Being a business owner, you face many challenges. The most crucial of which is figuring out a way to distinguish yourself from competitors. After years of relying on traditional methods, such as print ads and word-of-mouth, you’ve decided to invest in a website to share your products and services with your consumers. While you may love your website’s eye-catching graphic design and genuine message about your brand, you’ve noticed it doesn’t seem to generate your return on investment as you had hoped. What can you do to get your website noticed by more users? Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ask any website guru this question, and the answer you’ll receive most often is the need to improve your SEO rankings. You may be asking yourself, “What is SEO, and how does it work?” You don’t have to be an SEO expert to start implementing changes to your website. Here’s a quick SEO beginner’s guide to get you started.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Makes Your Website Pop

This next paragraph will be technical in what SEO means, but we promise to relate it back to how it will benefit your website. SEO refers to making your website populate higher organically on the Internet’s search engines. While you could pay to have your website prominently displayed in search engine results through paid SEO, most businesses prefer to rely on organic (unpaid) SEO. There’s an entire science around optimizing content for organic search rankings and how to make them work the best for your business. While the powerhouse search engines like Google and Bing will never release the exact algorithms used to rank their results, we do know some things about what makes optimization possible. Search engines use data crawlers to scan Internet content to determine what a website or webpage is about in order to index it. If your webpage contains the keywords or topics requested by the user, the search engine considers it a match and ranks it according to how strong of a match it is based on its algorithms. The more relevant the search engine deems the content, the higher up your webpage will appear on the search engine results pages (SERP). But quantity isn’t all that matters. Quality is also a key SEO factor.

How the Internet Has Changed Your Consumers’ Needs

Understanding SEO begins with recognizing how the Internet has changed consumer behavior. Thanks to the invention of smartphones and tablets, today’s consumers rely on the Internet more heavily than ever before. Online shopping has almost replaced the need for brick-and-mortar stores, as consumers enjoy the convenience of browsing from anywhere. The Internet has been the preferred medium for many searching anything from home remedies to recipes and tips for completing do-it-yourself home improvement projects. Whatever business you are in, it’s in your best interest to optimize your website to provide consumers with more detail about your products and services, even if you don’t offer online shopping services just yet. However, what purpose does your website serve if nobody can find you? These days, in the digital era, you not only want consumers to find you online, but you also want to have your website contain enough useful content to engage them and increase your return on investment. We’ll elaborate further about that point later.

What Are Search Engines, and How Do They Work?

The World Wide Web has come a long way since its creation in 1983 and is ever evolving. Today the Internet is vast, with an estimated 380 new websites being launched every single minute. With billions of websites existing in the same digital space, your brand can quickly become obsolete if you aren’t willing to make the necessary changes online to reach your consumers. Popular search engines, such as Google or Bing, have built a business on making it easier for people to locate information online. Search engine databases rely on the usage of keywords or special characters to match the websites most likely to contain the type of details the user has requested. For example, let’s say someone is looking for a dry cleaner in their city. They could enter the phrase “best dry cleaner in Dallas” on Google, and the search engine would bring up pages of results based on this search criteria. If you operate a dry cleaning business in the Dallas area, you want your business to be found as high in the search engine results as possible because many users won’t scroll down very far or even to the next page. One way you can achieve this is through proper SEO techniques.

Quantity and Quality of Web Traffic Measures SEO Success

Content is king. To improve your SEO rankings for your business, it is best to ensure your website contains the pertinent keywords and phrases consumers are most likely to search. However, it’s not enough to have those keywords merely on pages within your website. You also have to find a way to incorporate the keywords into engaging content that will keep consumers on your website, and more importantly, return for more content. SEO is all about the quantity and quality of keywords to drive traffic to your website. The goal is to show up in the appropriate search results for the type of products and services you offer, but you also want those casual website visitors to turn into bona fide customers.

Don’t Be Afraid to Vary the Type of Content on Your Website

Generally speaking, the more quality content you have on your site to make your business appear reputable, the more likely the search engine crawlers will recommend your site. Don’t be afraid to vary your content beyond the traditional website text, as people have differing needs for processing information. One person may prefer infographics that appeal to a visual learning style, while another may prefer a how-to video or tutorial to appeal to their hands-on approach to everything. Blog posts, videos, and articles are perfect for social media sharing, which is also a valuable tool for drawing in more traffic to your website and increasing your SEO rankings. Refreshing the content on your website periodically is necessary to keep your brand high in the search engine results. It is okay to expand or rewrite certain content pieces to include new keywords or more up-to-date information for your consumers. Could you use help establishing your brand’s voice? The award-winning content creation team at designIQ can lend a hand with professional, persuasive copywriting, blogs, branded content, SEO development, and more.

Eliminate the Guesswork from SEO; Pair with designIQ Today

Once you’ve figured out how to make your website’s content more engaging and SEO-focused, you’ll be well on your way with a roadmap for success. However, you don’t have to make this journey alone. Partnering with SEO experts can eliminate some of the guesswork. designIQ has emerged as a leader in digital solutions for businesses spanning all industries. Whether you need a creative team to build you a brand-new website or you’re interested in seeing how our SEO team can help grow your online presence, we’d be happy to help. Contact us today to get started!