It's quite likely that you found yourself engaging in an online search today, perhaps in pursuit of information, a specific product, or even answers to a burning question that piqued your curiosity. After entering your query into the search engine's browser bar and clicking "search," the browser's algorithm began to work, producing the results. The first few results were paid advertisements, followed by the top organic search results. The organic results earned their ranking through effective search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a complex strategy that encompasses various techniques and best practices aimed at improving a website's visibility on search engines. In this blog article from Huddle Business Capital, we explain what SEO is, how it functions, and how it can help increase your business's organic search traffic and attract potential customers.
As mentioned above, SEO is a complex strategy used to enhance a website's visibility on search engines like GoogleTM, BingTM, and YahooR. It involves a combination of on-page content writing and off-page techniques aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Effective SEO targets search engines and focuses on creating a more user-friendly experience, ensuring that visitors can quickly and easily find valuable and relevant information.
It is essential to understand that SEO differs from paid advertising. SEO involves optimizing your business's website and content to improve organic search rankings and attract unpaid traffic. Conversely, paid advertising requires bidding on specific keywords with the goal of placing your website pages at or near the top of search results.
This difference underscores the importance of building a sustainable online presence through SEO rather than relying solely on paid advertising. Over time, reliance on paid advertising can exhaust your marketing budget, whereas SEO is a more cost-effective way to market your business.
Every search engine has a complex algorithm with various ranking factors that determine the search results. For instance, Google's algorithm uses over 200 ranking factors. The following are some of the most important ranking factors:
Content quality: Original, well-written content that is informative and relevant to users can help landing pages and blog articles rank higher in search engine results.
User experience (UX): A website that loads quickly, is responsive across all devices, and provides easy navigation can achieve a higher ranking because it enhances the user experience.
Good design: A website with ample white space, easy-to-read typography, and appealing colors can enhance user engagement and improve SEO.
Technical SEO: This refers to off-page tasks, such as adding 301 redirects to prevent "page not found" errors, indexing the website with the search engines, adding security (HTTPS), configuring a robots.txt file, and ensuring there are no duplicate versions of the website online.
Backlink profile: Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are hyperlinks from one website that direct users to another website. Backlinks play a crucial role in SEO as they act as a vote of confidence and trust from one site to another. A quality backlink profile should be developed organically, as search engine algorithms can detect manipulative or purchased link-building techniques.
Improving your website's SEO is a complex task that often requires expertise in various areas, so you may need to hire multiple external sources if they aren't on your staff. These professionals typically include a marketing director, a digital content manager, a content writer or SEO specialist, and a web administrator.
One important strategy is to audit your company's website to identify errors, such as broken links, slow page-load times, missing images, inadequate meta information/alt text, excessively large images, unoptimized mobile design, and poor website navigation. A website audit can be conducted by your marketing director, SEO specialist, or information technology (IT) manager. Once your website audit is complete, review the results with your team and develop a plan to address any identified errors.
Another helpful strategy is to optimize your website's landing pages and blog posts by ensuring they have title tags, meta descriptions, concise URLs, and images and icons with appropriate alt text. Headers also play an essential role in SEO. Each landing page and blog post should have an H1 header at the top, and H2 headers should be used before paragraphs to improve organization and readability. H3 and H4 headers can be used in complementing sections on pages and posts, if needed.
Finally, the amount of information on your landing pages and blog articles can impact SEO, making content writing or content revision a sound strategy for improving your online presence. Longer, well-researched, and well-written content often ranks higher because it provides more information and value to users.
Launching a new website, revising an existing one, and hiring an SEO content writer or digital marketing agency can be costly. However, investing in digital marketing and SEO can yield significant benefits for your business. One way to fund these initiatives is with a working capital loan. This type of loan allows you to invest in your website and SEO efforts without compromising your cash flow.
This Huddle Business Capital blog article is purely educational and contains general information and opinions; it is not intended to provide advice or recommendations of any kind. Huddle Business Capital is not affiliated with nor endorsesthe companies mentioned in this blog article.