SEO is one of the most popular methods of effective online marketing. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine having a website and not taking care of its high positions in Google. Nevertheless, the topic is still not fully understood. Here are some of the most important facts about SEO and the reasons why it’s so essential to use it in your strategy. Consider them carefully.

What is SEO?

The word SEO stands for search engine optimization and is also known as web positioning. It’s a complex set of actions both on- and off-site that lead to bringing your website higher in unpaid, organic search results using the most relevant keywords. A professional SEO campaign can significantly increase the traffic on your website which translates directly into more leads and sales.

What are the advantages of SEO?

Google gets billions of searches every hour and some of them may refer to your offer. SEO that’s using very specific, relevant keywords can bring you an amount of new customers you could only dream of. What’s more, the traffic will be high-intent – it will consist of potential clients eager to buy your products or use your services. Today, people search for nearly everything via the internet channel – it doesn’t cost anything, it’s convenient, easy and quick. That’s why you should use it for your advantage and provide them with what they’re looking for.

What’s important, SEO will give long-lasting results, even after you’re done with the whole positioning process. An additional advantage is also a well optimized website that’s more user-friendly and interesting from your target audience point of view.

Technical, on-page and off-page SEO

Search engine optimization can be divided into three main categories:

1.   Technical SEO

It includes the visibility of your website for the Google robots and considers factors such as: crawling, indexing, page speed, site and URLs structure, schema, and more.

2.   On-page SEO

It involves all of your website’s content – the one visible for your potential customers: texts, images, videos, as well as the one visible mostly for search engines: structured data or HTML tags.

3.   Off-page SEO

It’s all there is to be done off-page in order to grow your website’s trust and authority. One of the main activities is linkbuilding, but there’s also social media marketing, PPC campaigns, and many more.

Why is SEO better than SEM?

SEM, which is search engine marketing, includes all of the paid ads that are displayed before the organic search results in Google. Sometimes it’s good to implement them into your overall online marketing strategy, but remember that they work totally differently than SEO. Web positioning results stay with you months or even years after you stop your campaign. Ads on the other hand, vanish as soon as you stop paying. It has also been established that the internet users prefer to click on the organic results more often than on the paid ones. They seem more trustworthy and give an impression of higher quality content.

By Eddy

Eddy is the editorial columnist in Business Fundas, and oversees partner relationships. He posts articles of partners on various topics related to strategy, marketing, supply chain, technology management, social media, e-business, finance, economics and operations management. The articles posted are copyrighted under a Creative Commons unported license 4.0. To contact him, please direct your emails to [email protected].