What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. More importantly, it is about understanding your potential customers’ search intent and providing them with relevant search results.
Properly utilized SEO will make your website attractive to the right audience and compelling to visit by ranking your page higher on search engine results and increasing the visibility of your site.
What are organic search results?
Organic search results refer to the non-paid search results generated when a potential customer initiates a search on the web via Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines.
Organic search results are web page listings that appear on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and most closely match the users’ search query and are also considered by the search engines as being most relevant to their users.
Why is organic traffic important to your business?
Users who type a search term into a search engine are looking for something specific—they have a problem that needs to be solved. When a website offers the information or product that a user is looking for, it can convert those users into visitors or even customers.
🍂 Organic Search:
- Your website is discovered from a list of web page links displayed on the search engine results
- Non-paid results
- Free, but does require a commitment of time and effort
💰 Paid Search:
- Traffic to your website is attributed to links found in an advert or sponsored link
- Appearing as one of the first several links on a search query is the result of paying for display ads
Organic search results appear more credible to savvy searchers and receive more clicks than paid advertisements.
Five reasons why SEO is especially key for Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs) during the pandemic and recovery:
- As a result of travel restrictions, consumers are looking for nearby businesses. Often, the first place your customers look for up-to-date information is online.
- SMBs will benefit from consumers looking to support smaller or local businesses.
- SEO is how SMBs can stand apart from competitors by building long-term brand equity.
- It is a cost effective marketing strategy but does require a commitment of time and effort.
- People have become more comfortable with online shopping. According to KPMG, 66% of Canadians increased their online shopping during the pandemic in 2020.
What is SERP?
After you type your search query into the search box, the resulting display is the SERP. The SERP includes a mixture of organic results and paid ads in addition to other information, such as knowledge graphs or the answer box on Google. The organic results are curated by search engine bots.
🤖 Search Engine Bots scour content across the Internet, indexing and organizing content related to each URL they find. Once this content is discovered and managed, it is ranked on how well it will answer a searcher’s query.
Why do you want your webpage to rank high on SERP?
Your website’s ranking on SERP determines if people can easily find your website. If you haven’t maximized the visibility of your site and people are struggling to discover your organization through search results, they’re likely heading to one of your competitors instead.
Ranking high in organic search for relevant keywords drives traffic to your website, with a spot in those top ten results being optimal for conversion.
Think of someone standing on a busy street corner. They are looking for a particular product, such as coffee. You own a coffee shop. But your shop is hidden, around the corner and down some steps and no signage. How will the potential customer find you? Ranking lower than 10 on the SERP means that most users will never see your listing and will go to the competitor with the visible storefront on the main street.
We’ll leave you with one eye-opening stat on the importance of getting your website on the first page of a Google search result: 75% of people never even make it to the second page!
Stay tuned for our next blog on how you can make SEO work for your business.
