Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines via natural search results. The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your site through high-ranking searches that are relevant to your business and its offerings. Although there are many ways to rank highly in search results, SEO has proven itself as an effective way to achieve this goal.
How can you get your website to show up on the first page and at least the second page of Google search engine result pages? You should thrive to be on the first page of search page results for your category or industry results in your locality, otherwise, you will be losing out on a lot of web traffic and potential revenue.
It is not enough to have a website, it is equally important that your website is visible online and specifically on search engines. This will ensure your business can be discovered and can connect to potential customers or users. When people use Search engines such as Google they usually have a high purchase intent. Though other Search Engines such as Bing, Duck DuckGo , Google is so dominant having monopolised the industry with over 90% of search queries occurring on Google Search and YouTube is the fastest growing search engine.
Search Engine Optimisation is a pillar of your digital marketing efforts. Now let’s look at how SEO works. The key to Search Engine Optimisation Engine just like any good marketing endeavour is to first understand deeply your target audience. You got to understand the language they use when describing their problems, pain points, challenges, and possible solutions. This will ensure that you get your keywords right.
Google is inspired to be a more helpful Google, thus when someone inputs a search query into their search engines, Google will present back search results that it judges as the most relevant and helpful to the search query.
There are a lot of factors that determine how Google ranks web pages. Broadly they can be classified into two groups is Technical SEO as well On-Page Optimisation.
Technical SEO factors entail how your website is structured, user experience and how readability. Google has AI robots (crawlers) that patrol the internet and read website pages and make sense of the content before indexing and ranking these pages respectively. Thus how your website and its content are structured, arranged, and designed is important, since when Google crawlers can’t access, read and understand your website and its content, cannot be indexed and is poorly ranked.
On-Page Optimisation has to do with the content on your web pages. The page titles, headings, sub-headings, content paragraphs, images, videos have to be appropriately relevant to keywords. The content on your website has to match the search queries of the people (potential customers/users) that are conducting searches on Google.
Thus knowing and understanding the keywords (key search terms, words, phrases) that your target audience will most use on Search Engines is the starting point to a successful SEO. For the search result pages for each search query, Google ranks the pages according to how well a page matches and answers that specific query. The content on your website has to be trustworthy, relevant, unique, readable, and comprehensive enough because Google strives to be a more helpful Google, thus wants to present relevant, complete, and trustworthy search results to each search query.
Other factors affect relevancy and authority of pages including mobile-friendliness, location, branding, social signals, links, and we shall look into these in detail in another article.
Blessing Mation is a Digital Marketer and Brand Strategist @ Regal Digital Solutions
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