How SEO Works: A Comprehensive Overview
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a set of practices and strategies that expand your business’s website visibility by ranking higher for organic results in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In short, the higher your website sits in SERPs the higher the click-through rate will be, increasing the opportunity to capture conversions.
The primary goal of SEO is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website by optimising its content, structure and technical elements to align with what search engine algorithms are looking for. SEO aims to improve both your ranking position and your website’s visibility. Your ranking position will determine where your website sits in SERPs for specific keywords or search queries. Whereas your visibility will be reflected by how many keywords your domain shows up for in search results. SEO is a crucial aspect of digital marketing making your website more accessible to potential visitors.
Digging deeper into what SEO is, it’s about striking the optimal balance between satisfying the search engine (SE) like Google, as well as satisfying the end-user, your prospective customers. To be successful with modern-day SEO, you’ll need to gain a strong understanding of your target market and the personas within that market, getting to grips with what your customers are actually searching for, the keywords being used as well as their preferred content types. Achieving the right formula that ticks all the boxes will enable you to connect with searchers online and direct them to the solutions your business offers.
SEO is now a much tougher task due to the overcrowding and extremely saturated marketplaces online. However, this difficulty isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Back in the day it was easier to manipulate search results so that the biggest sites or the ones with the most links, achieved through ethical or unethical means, would win every time. Thankfully it’s getting more difficult for people to manipulate search engines today because of the increasing complexity of SE algorithms and their emphasis on user-focused, quality content. The better you genuinely serve your customer’s needs online, the higher your website will rank. This is also why consulting an SEO expert is essential; they will help you understand how to improve your rankings and visibility the right way.
How Does SEO Work? The Three Elements of SEO
SEO works by optimising your website’s content, structure and authority to improve its ranking in SERPs and attract more organic traffic. This involves identifying relevant keywords and strategically incorporating them into the website’s content, meta tags and headings, as well as enhancing the site’s structure and technical performance. It also includes building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to establish the site’s authority and trustworthiness. Search engines use complex algorithms to assess these factors and rank websites accordingly. By aligning with these algorithms, SEO aims to enhance your website’s organic ranking, drive more traffic and improve its overall online presence.
To understand how SEO works, it’s commonly split into three different elements that all work together.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on elements that search engines use to crawl, index and rank websites, ensuring that they can access and understand the site’s content effectively. This encompasses various factors, including website speed and performance, mobile-friendliness, site architecture, XML sitemaps, robots.txt files and canonical tags. It also involves optimising for structured data and schema markup to provide search engines with rich context about the content, which can lead to enhanced search results, such as featured snippets and rich snippets.
An essential component of technical SEO is ensuring that a website is free from crawl errors, duplicate content issues and broken links. Additionally, it includes optimising the website’s server and hosting setup, implementing HTTPS security and improving website loading times.
When all of these website elements are configured correctly and optimised for SEO they’ll begin to build up your authority and trust, and in turn, your website’s visibility. It’s also a good idea to use SEO service providers, as they can help you optimise all of these technical elements without you having to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript and many more.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO not only ensures that search engines can understand and interpret the content on your web pages, but also that your customers have a great experience on your site. This multifaceted approach involves creating high-quality and relevant content that caters to the needs and interests of your visitors. It’s also about the strategic use of keywords in content, headings and meta descriptions to signal your relevance to search engines.
It’s essential to start by conducting comprehensive keyword research to identify the search terms and phrases that your potential visitors use, which are then seamlessly woven into your content. It’s also crucial to craft compelling meta titles and descriptions that both contain keywords and encourage user clicks, as this can improve click-through rates.
Additionally, on-page SEO encompasses technical aspects such as optimising images by ensuring they are properly sized and compressed for faster loading times, and providing descriptive image alt text for accessibility and SEO benefits. It involves structuring user-friendly URLs that include relevant keywords to accurately describe the page’s content. Internal linking is used to strategically connect to other pertinent pages within the website, thereby enhancing navigation for your visitors. The design and layout of the page must also contribute to a positive user experience, as this can indirectly affect search engine rankings. Mobile optimization is another key component, ensuring the page is responsive and functions seamlessly on mobile devices.
Effective on-page SEO aligns a website’s content with both search engine algorithms and customer expectations, ultimately resulting in higher rankings, increased organic traffic and improved visitor engagement.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO revolves around efforts outside of your website to enhance your online authority, reputation and visibility. It primarily focuses on building high-quality backlinks, which are links from external websites that point to your site. These backlinks serve as a vote of confidence in your content and can significantly impact your search engine rankings.
In addition to backlinks, off-page SEO involves reputation management and online brand building. Positive mentions and reviews on various online platforms, as well as active engagement on social media and forums, can bolster your website’s credibility and influence its search engine rankings. The overarching goal of off-page SEO is to establish your website as a trusted and authoritative source in your niche or industry, which, in turn, can result in higher search engine rankings.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is crucial for attracting, engaging and retaining online visitors, which then increases brand recognition, customer acquisition and business growth.
68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. 67% of all these search engine visitors click on the first five results. Your website needs to be ranking here for you to reach almost half of all customers. See how important SEO is now?
Firstly, SEO is important because it significantly enhances the visibility of your website. By optimising your site for search engines, you increase the likelihood of it ranking higher in search results, making it more likely that users will discover and visit your website. This heightened visibility can translate into more organic, non-paid traffic, which is valuable because it consists of users actively searching for information, products or services related to your site. Additionally, websites that rank well in search results are often perceived as more credible and trustworthy by users, building trust around your brand.
Furthermore, SEO contributes to a better user experience. It involves optimising your website’s structure, content and performance, which makes your site more engaging and user-friendly. A well-structured, fast-loading and easy-to-navigate website is more likely to retain visitors and keep them engaged.
SEO also provides a competitive edge in the digital landscape, where most businesses have an online presence. It ensures your website remains discoverable and competitive and it’s a cost-effective way to reach a broader audience compared to traditional advertising methods.
Optimising for search is one of the key digital marketing tactics that, when correctly set up, grows stronger over time. If you can successfully rank for your desired keywords this traction can accumulate in the long term. SEO is a more sustainable approach compared to paid search tactics like PPC, in which you’ll be required to consistently top-up your spending to ensure a sustainable flow of traffic to your website.
Overall, SEO is important as it not only increases your online visibility but also enhances credibility, user experience and competitiveness while providing valuable insights through analytics, making it an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
Do You Need SEO?
At one point or another, you may have contemplated whether you really need SEO, the answer for almost all businesses is that you do. Unless you’re in a very unique position in the market with little to no competition for your services or products; safe to say that today that’s unlikely. SEO is ultimately the lowest cost tactic you can implement into your long-term marketing strategy and businesses of all varieties across all sectors can benefit from effective SEO.
SEO at Loop Digital
SEO can be a complicated process to implement yourself with many moving parts in play at any one time, some elements with search optimisation can also be volatile if not implemented correctly, leading to Google penalties and other sanctions. SEO can also take time to yield positive results and is unlikely to deliver quick wins; those that say that it can are not being honest with you.
At Loop Digital, we leverage the latest techniques to increase visibility and ultimately deliver growth for our client partners. With access to a host of industry-leading tools and years of experience in the world of SEO, our team is more than equipped to support your business and provide real, tangible results. If you’re interested in building your business’s visibility online and start to grow a steady stream of leads and customers, get in touch with our team today for your free consultation.
