What is SEO and what is its importance for online business?
Today, having an online presence is crucial for any type of business. The employ of the Internet by users to search and obtain information on products or services is the most common. That is why companies, startups and large brands, struggle to position themselves in the web world through SEO.
What is SEO?
The term SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the process carried out to improve the quantity and quality of the traffic of a website, through the results of the search engines.
In other words, it consists of improving a website so that it is positioned on the first page of search engine results such as Google, when users search for services or products related to your business. This will also improve the visibility, and therefore the traffic of your website.
The more visibility your website has, the greater the chances of attracting new and potential customers.
This process is not paid, therefore the visibility of your website will depend on how you carry out the process of improving your content. Search results of this type are known as organic (they are not paid).
How does Search Engine Optimization work?
SEO has two key factors for its operation: people and search engines.
On the one hand, you must understand what people are looking for when they are online, what are the responses they want, what type of content they want to consume, and what are the words they use in their Internet search. Knowing all this will allow you to offer your services or products in the best way.
On the other hand, you must structure the content of your website so that you can deliver it in such a way that search engines can easily find and understand it.
Search engines process
Once the user enters the words of their search, the engines proceed to review billions of content evaluating thousands of aspects to identify the content that can best answer the query made.
Search engines take into account all kinds of available content such as websites, images, videos, PDF files, etc., and use bots to crawl these pieces of information on the web, collect data from them and place them in an index.
Subsequently, the algorithms evaluate the pieces of the index considering thousands of classification criteria, to define the order in which these pieces will appear in the search results.
The algorithms used for the search are developed to give users a satisfying search experience by presenting authoritative and relevant pages.
Why is SEO important?
There are several reasons why SEO is of great importance for any business with an online presence. We describe the most outstanding ones:
- It is the most effective source of online traffic. Although social media and paid advertising drive traffic to websites, it is search engines that lead the generation of web traffic.
- Organic search results are more reliable. On the one hand, they cover more digital content, and on the other hand, they are more reliable for users. That is why they receive more clicks than paid ads.
- SEO is approximately 20 times more likely to generate web traffic than a paid ad. This applies to both mobile devices and personal or desktop computers.
- It is an effective online marketing channel. If you properly configure the SEO of your website, it can pay dividends in the long term. Whereas with paid advertising, you must continually invest to get results.
Although search engines are constantly making improvements, it is still essential that you optimize your website for SEO. This will allow you to provide better content to the search engines, so that it is positioned in the first results of the search.
