Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it’s commonly known, is the practice of driving more, quality, traffic to a website through high organic search engine results.
With over 60,000 Google searches every second, businesses must do everything possible to be listed not just on the first page but also high up the search results even to begin being competitive.
There are several ways for businesses to drive traffic to their website.
Direct Traffic
If your existing customers know your site well, or perhaps they’ve seen your web address on a piece of offline marketing, they may type your full domain into the search bar and be directed straight to your site.
Direct traffic is probably less common for smaller businesses but the best kind as it’s free and more likely to be high quality.
Referral Traffic
If a link to your website is listed somewhere else, for example, a third-party site, and users click from there to you, this is called referral traffic. I
f you wanted to go into more detail, Google Analytics segments this even further into Social or Email categories. Referral traffic is still of reasonable quality because it’s unlikely your website will be listed on entirely irrelevant sites.
Bought Traffic
If you have the marketing budget available, you can promote your website through Social Media or Google Ads to drive higher traffic levels. The quality of this traffic will depend on how accurate your campaign targeting is, but it is a quick way to get a good volume of website visitors. However, it’s essential to avoid wasting budget, so in this case, quality would be more important than quantity.
Organic Traffic
Last but by no means least, Organic traffic is made up of users who visit your website based on organic search results. Organic traffic is directly linked to good SEO and is a budget-friendly way of driving high-quality traffic to your site.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines have a crawler that spans the web and gathers information on all the content available. This information is then fed through an algorithm that ultimately matches search engine queries with the best possible results. There are several factors that go into the algorithm, and each of them has a different ranking of importance.
The optimisation part of SEO is the process of producing and uploading content to websites that make it easy for those crawlers to find and understand. Essential areas of optimisation include internal links, meta descriptions and title tags that are informative and of suitable length.
Why is SEO Important?
There are two reasons SEO is important, and it’s not just about driving any old traffic to a website, it’s driving high quality and high quantities of traffic.
Quality Traffic: it doesn’t matter how big your business is; you still want to know you’re driving the right kind of traffic to your website. Quality traffic from good SEO could save you marketing budget in the long run.
Quantity of Traffic: quality over quantity is important but, once you have nailed your content and an increased volume of the right quality of traffic coming to your website, it makes all those hours optimising your website worth it!
How Can SEO Help With Digital Marketing?
SEO will make up most of a business’s web traffic and therefore, should be the starting point of any digital marketing strategy. Digital Marketing is all about planning and implementing content to spread awareness of your company and building online brand reputation and exposure to generate sales.
SEO and Digital Marketing go hand in hand. Part of any SEO strategy is to create engaging and fresh content, and the same content can be used across your Social Media and Email Marketing campaigns. Furthermore, any SEO keywords businesses utilise can also influence their PPC activity to align their strategy better.
SEO is an integral part of digital marketing as it increases your websites organic visibility and enables a higher potential exposure in search results against competitors.
We all know web browsers are more likely to trust and click on one of the top organic search results (over Ads) so by increasing visibility, and therefore traffic, there is a better opportunity to increase conversion and ROI.
Don’t forget, search engine algorithms, and therefore, SEO is an evolving concept to master.
Hence, you must keep up to date with the latest insight and best practices or outsource it to a professional otherwise all your previous hard work could quickly unravel.
To conclude, where’s the best place to bury a body?
On the second page of Google.
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