What is SEO and what kind of business needs it
What is SEO?
When you enter any query into the search bar, the results you see are not random. Search services compare pages based on many parameters and offer the user the best ones. You can influence the search results by “persuading” the search engine to place your site on the first page. Optimizing a website for search queries is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO refers to marketing. Its goal is to get targeted traffic and monetize it into leads. But unlike other areas of marketing, SEO has a heavy emphasis on technical specifics because an SEO specialist works with search engine algorithms.
Another global goal of SEO is to better understand your audience. Based on how and what a person searches, you can gain valuable insights for creation and development of a product.
Why SEO is necessary for any website?
Any website is created for some audience. Without visitors, a website is meaningless. SEO is the only source of free traffic that, once set up, can work for many years and passively bring in visitors.
It is important to understand:
The first 3 search results receive 75.1% of all clicks.
Only 0.44% of users go to the second page of Google.
This means that if the site is not on the first page of the search, then for this specific request it is as if it does not exist. Therefore, it is extremely important that your site gets into at least the top ten for important queries. The more competitive the niche, the more difficult it is to do this.
What affects a site’s position in search results?
Search engines compare user queries with the content on website pages, but their position in the search results is influenced by many factors. For search engines, the main thing is that the page is useful, convenient and responds to the user’s request.
SEO includes:
Working with the technical part of the site. For example, high page loading speed and adaptability for different types of devices. For search engines, this is an indicator of convenience.
Site hygiene. Broken links, duplicate pages, and blank pages negatively impact SEO.
Text optimization. That is, the adaptation of texts to specific search queries. And also uniqueness, structure, literacy.
User behavior on the page. The more the user is on the site and active, the better. This is how search engines are convinced of the usefulness of the page.
External optimization. The key here is link growth. That is, the more often your site is mentioned by other high-quality sources, the higher its authority for the search engine.
Brand reputation online in general. A lot of positive reviews on different sites have a positive effect on the site’s position in search results, while a lot of negative reviews, on the contrary, hinder promotion.
Link growth is a controlled process. Get partners, negotiate publications - this way you will attract a new audience to your project and make SEO a little better. For non-competitive niches, placement in website directories and creating accounts on social networks are suitable. Transitions from social networks are read by search engines and have a positive effect on SEO. However, mentions can be bad for SEO if they are from dubious sources.
Is it necessary to hire an SEO specialist for your team?
The answer to this question depends on the number of pages on the site, the number of languages and subdomains, the competitiveness of the niche, and your expectations from SEO promotion. But in most cases, a full-time SEO specialist is not needed. It is much more profitable to delegate SEO to an agency.
At sol.agency, we begin working on SEO with a site audit, after which we provide a work plan and determine the required number of hours of work for an SEO specialist per month. By the way, website audit is also one of our express services.
Not sure if SEO is worth investing in or if it's right for you? Don't know where to start? Contact us and get detailed information about the state of your site at the current stage, what work needs to be done to improve your position in the search results.
