Web 101: What is SEO and why your site can’t win without it

The world of online marketing is full of acronyms, and SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, ranks up there with the best (for those that already know what SEO is, please excuse the pun).

Acronyms save time remembering and pronouncing all those long words, and make experts feel important as they drop capital letters like Liz Taylor drops husbands (for the record, she’s up to number 7, 8 if you count Richard Burton who she married, divorced, married, then divorced again)…

Google is the royalty of Search Engines, known to those in the online industry as Google Almighty. The other ‘little engines who wish they could’ include Yahoo! and Microsoft, but since Google is the most used search engine on the web, online marketers judge the success of SEO by how sites rank in Google.

Dare question the overarching popularity of Google? According to a recent survey by Compete.com, Google owns 69.4% of the US search market with Yahoo at 14.8% and Microsoft coming in 3rd at 10.2%. I don’t know about you, but I have a secret crush on graphs, like this one that somehow makes Google’s monarchy even more impressive:

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving traffic that comes to your site from search engines. Not just the volume of traffic, but also the quality of traffic, so you attract more people interested in your product or service. The same could be said for the helpfully obviously named Pay per Click. Even short words get acronyms in this industry and this is another well-known one – PPC. Pay per Click brings you highly targeted traffic and gets you on page one fast (if done right!) but a click gained through PPC will cost you.

I’ve never liked the saying ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ … ‘the best things in life are free’ is more up my alley – rainbows, a Tui’s song - and SEO (tell me your favourite free things in life by adding a comment below). You don’t pay a search engine for clicks earned through SEO. Although - considering the vast difference it can make in how well your website fills your wallet - you might like to pay an SEO specialist.

There are two types of results visitors see when they search: paid and organic. Paid results are PPC ads or ‘sponsored links’. Organic (or ‘natural’) search results are SEO. For you visual people, here’s the difference:

Where do you rank?

One study showed people are 6 times more likely to click on organic results versus paid ads. To attract the most visitors, you want to be one of the first organic results visitors see. Where you are listed on the page decides your ‘ranking’. A typical Google search result page includes around 10 sites, so a ranking below 10 should see you on page one. If your ranking is 11 when someone searches for your best-selling product, then welcome to no-man’s land (ie: page two).

Even more impressive is what a page one ranking does to your traffic. That same US study showed traffic tripled in the first month that a site made it to the first page on Google, and doubled again to more than six times the traffic in the second month, when compared to before a site gained a first page position.

The study also reported an impressive 42% increase in the number of visitors that become buyers rather than just lookers, and that was just in the first month a site made it to page one. To find out how well you rank for your keywords in comparison to your competitors, you need a Ranking Report, a service provided by SEO experts such as Exceed.

Attract bugs to your site

If you want to improve your site’s organic ranking, the first step is to have a search engine friendly website. Search engines such as Google *author respectfully bows*, use crawlers to find pages to display as search results. Search engine crawlers are the bugs you want to attract. Like moths to that light you always forget to turn off at night, spiders are sent out to crawl your site. Also called bots, robots, scutters, ants or even worms; crawlers index your pages. If your site isn’t search engine friendly, those spiders have a hard task of indexing your site, resulting in a lower rank than your search engine friendly competitors. 

Boring is your new best friend

Successful SEO relies on optimising boring things such as page titles, meta tags, heading tags, copy, inbound links and natural links. You can still create a great looking site without getting the boring bits right - but what’s the point if no-one can find you when they search for your brand, product or service?

The boring stuff doesn’t look pretty, so most companies ignore it, however Google doesn’t care about pretty, so ignore them at your peril!  Your competitor, who may have the ugliest website in the industry, could be making much more money than you just because their site is search engine friendly.

There are a growing number of website suppliers talking the SEO talk, but very few who can walk the walk when it comes to creating truly search engine friendly websites or fixing sites that were built without the boring bits.

So if the person holding your site’s purse strings wants a pretty site but isn’t investing in SEO, send them a link to this article, then suggest they contact an SEO specialist instead.