Understanding SEO – How it works

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which involves setting up your website, digital marketing, and online accounts to show up higher and, ideally, at the top of online search results for your target customer. SEO tactics to improve your page ranking on Google include content creation (including keyword use), technical improvements to enhance usability, and link building.

How Does SEO Work? 

Google aims to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” More people in the United States use Google (approximately 88%) than any other search engine (including Yahoo, Ask, and Bing).  

Ranking in Google is important because people use Google to find products and services they need. 78% of people research a product or service online before they buy it. Suppose your business doesn’t show up in search. In fact, for searches where people are looking seriously to buy products, the CTR click-through rate is estimated to be as high as 65%! This suggests that Google makes money from two out of every three visitors.

How does Google dominate the industry so wholly? Because it provides the best search results. When people use Google, they are more likely to find what they are looking for, and web pages are more likely to be mobile-optimized (an essential factor, as approximately 60% of all searches are performed on mobile devices).

SEO boils down to positioning your website to consistently show up in the search engine results by having the best content, the best user experience, and the most authority, which is Google’s perception of how vital your site is. Talented SEO professionals formulate strategies and execute various SEO tactics to help you achieve better placement for search engine results. 

Search engines use three factors to find, analyze, and rank content:

• Accessibility: Search engines crawl the Internet and read over the code and content for each URL they find.

• Usability: Search engines store and organize the content found in an index during crawling.

• Credibility: Search engines deliver content on the search engine results page (SERP) most relevant to a user’s query.

Tactics fall into three buckets:

1. helping you tell Google what you do 

Each page of your website allows you to tell Google what you do. Does this use text and other assets, such as images or videos, to explain your services in detail? It stands to reason that it will be challenging to appear in search results if you don’t tell Google what you are doing. Our SEO strategists will help you adjust your content and other web page elements to ensure you tell Google about all your products and services.

2. Improve user experience. Next, ensure your website provides a great user experience. It should render well on mobile devices, load quickly, and be free of significant mistakes. And, of course, it shouldn’t block search engines from accessing it. We can help you eliminate technical issues that affect your user experience and any barriers that might prevent Google from discovering all your pages.

3. Improving Google’s perception of the importance of your site. Google views links from one page or site to another as digital votes of confidence. However, not all votes are created equally. Google thinks links from sites and pages have more authority, i.e., are more critical and count more. Google prefers that you earn your links. You do this by writing high-quality content that people choose to reference and link to.

Ranking Factors

Google can rank your page in hours, days, weeks, or months. Several factors determine how long SEO takes to work, including content popularity, technical considerations, and crawl budget. 

On-page SEO refers to the SEO elements you control on your website. SEO ranking factors can significantly impact your page’s ranking if optimized effectively. Content, tags, and URLs are the most significant page factors that affect search engine rankings. 

1. Content 

The content of your website page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It is what the user comes to see, and thus, it is essential to search engines. From an SEO perspective, all good content must supply a demand and be linkable.

Ideal content pages should be particular to a topic—usually a product or an object—and be hyper-relevant. Each web page should have all of these elements: 

• Title tag

• URL

• Content of page

• Image alt text

2. Title Tags 

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO after content. Title tags must include the content’s subject. 

3. URL

Along with intelligent internal linking, SEO works by surfacing the website in search engine results for specific categories. 

URL structure is crucial because it helps search engines understand relative importance and adds a relevant metric to the page. It is also helpful because people are more likely to link to the appropriate page if the URL includes keywords.

Off-page SEO (External SEO) refers to activities you want to rank outside the webpage. Off-page SEO often refers to building links but can also include activities such as social media, brand awareness, and PR efforts. 

Your website’s popularity, relevance, authority, and reviews all help to establish ranking within search engines. Having other websites link back to your website indicates that others find your pages valuable and trustworthy, lending your business more authority. Google reviews heavily affect search engine rankings in local results. 

• Site structure: Is your website easy for users to navigate?

• Page speed: Slow loading kills your ranking. Google will not suggest slow websites.

• Content: When you post quality content and use keywords, search engines will know how and where to look for your content.

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