What Is SEO? a Beginner’s Guide

Google, the most popular search engine in the world, processes over 3.5 billion searches per day. This means users are looking for billions of different things online and search engines give results for these searches.

If terms like search engines, keywords, and ranking factors confuse you, this guide will help you understand SEO better.

So if you’re wondering what is search engine optimization, how it works, and if you should use it in your business, keep reading to discover the answers.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and content to rank higher on search engine pages. In other words, SEO means improving the visibility of your website to gain more traffic, clicks, conversions, and sales.
If you don’t have the time, money, or knowledge for search engine optimization, consider hiring expert help, i.e. specializing agencies to help them rank higher.

SEO Marketing

Using SEO as the main component of ad campaigns, marketing materials, or achieving marketing goals is called search engine optimization marketing. It’s essential to digital marketing because most users search the internet with the intent to purchase something.

For example, if you sell luxury watches, the best way to get found by customers who are in the market for a new watch is to use specific keywords. You can use keywords in blog posts, website content, product descriptions, images, and even videos.

The higher your website ranks, the more people will click on it and buy from you. But you need to provide an excellent user experience for them to keep them on your website longer.

SEO and Keywords

In the beginning days of SEO, it was all about the keywords and using them a lot in all website content. This led to ‘keyword stuffing’ where website owners would ‘stuff’ as many keywords as possible into a piece of content, making it hard to understand or read.

Articles were becoming useless for the users, which is why search engines started penalizing websites. Today, keywords are important to help search engines rank your content, but if the user doesn’t find what they need and leave, your website won’t rank high.

Local SEO

You’ve probably searched for a restaurant, a hairdresser, or a store nearby and used those exact keywords. Based on your location, the search engine gives you results without you even typing your street or town.

So what is local SEO? It’s a search optimization marketing strategy to help businesses appear among the first on search engine pages when users search for stores ‘nearby’ or ‘near me’.

Local SEO is especially useful for brick-and-mortar businesses that want to get ahead of the competition. It’s also for businesses that want to be found easily in a busy area, or appear as first results for specific keywords.

Use SEO To Build Brand Awareness and Attract New Customers Online

If you’ve been asking yourself “what is SEO and how does it work?”, now you have a clear, accurate guide to search engine optimization. You can use SEO to build brand awareness, boost sales, attract new customers, and get noticed online.

Want to learn more about the importance of SEO for your business? Explore some of the other posts we have on this topic and stay tuned for more tips and updates.