What is SEO and how does it work?

Even small businesses need to make marketing a priority. If you want to increase your sales, you need to market to potential customers. One of the best strategies is to utilize search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is probably a term you’ve heard frequently but maybe don’t really know what it is or how it works. In this article, we’ll explain both those things.

SEO explained

Search Engine Optimization refers to the art of helping potential customers find and connect with your business by having your content appear in search results. Basically, when someone searches for a product or service like yours, you want your content to among the businesses listed.

Here’s the thing, though: search engines aren’t listing random results, they’re ranking them.

Search engines scour the internet, discovering and understanding the purpose of webpages, then plugging them into an index for ranking. When someone performs a search, the search engine tries to present the options starting with the best or most relevant.

Think about when you perform a search. You probably scroll past the paid ads at the top and click through a couple of the results below. Do you ever go to the second page or beyond? If you’ve said no, you’re like 75% of the population. The majority of people never scroll to page two.

The goal of SEO is to increase your ranking in relevant search results so that visitors find your website and become potential customers.

How SEO works

As I mentioned earlier, search engines rank and index websites by relevance. There are many factors that their algorithms look for when evaluating a site. This is the role of SEO, optimizing for as many factors as possible in order to increase your ranking.

So what should you focus on in order to help your ranking? The following are three things Sites by Geeks always starts with on any page.

Keywords and phrases

Keywords are the phrases your potential customers are entering into a search engine in order to find products and services like yours. By using the same keywords in the content of your webpages, you can help it rank for that search.

Use the keywords and phrases naturally. You don’t need to use them in every other sentence. You only need to use it a few times in key places like the title, the headings and in the content.

There are tools like this keyword explorer to help you find related keywords for your business.

Page speed

Internet users tend to be impatient. They want websites that load quickly. They actually want them to load in less than three seconds. In fact, this is so important to visitors that search engines use your load speed as a factor in your ranking.

Search engines can detect when visitors leave or bounce from your site before it loads. If it occurs often, they’ll presume the page isn’t helpful for that particular search which lowers your ranking.

Using clean code, optimized images and caching will keep your site loading quickly. These are things that your website provider and/or hosting company should be doing for you.

Mobile-friendly

According to all reports, mobile is the most preferred way of accessing the internet. More than 50% of visitors are using a mobile device when performing a search. Because of this, search engines are using mobile-first indexing for the whole world wide web.

What does that mean?

In a nutshell, it means websites that are fully optimized for mobile searches are prioritized and ranked higher.

This makes it important to have a responsive design that’s mobile friendly. If potential customers can’t read the content easily or fill out your contact form from a mobile device, there is a high probability that they’ll abandon your site.

Optimize your SEO

That’s SEO explained in simple terms and it certainly doesn’t cover everything that goes into optimizing your SEO. If you would like some assistance with your SEO, Sites by Geeks can help. Our SEO services includes support in implementing the tips above and much more.

If you’re ready to get started, just give us a call at 1-855-920-2210 or fill out our contact form.

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