Discover how to attract more relevant web visitors to your business site and improve conversions. You can appear higher up on search results if you learn how SEO (search engine optimization) works. Or hire a trustworthy expert to do it for you.
SEO stands for "search engine optimization" and refers to work on your website so it appears higher up on search engine results pages. In order for web users to find your business on Google, Bing and Baidu organic search results (the non-paid listings), your website must have useful content and a sound technical structure.Professional SEO services involve keyword research, competitive analysis and backend work to flag to search engine bots that your website is high quality. You'll also need to secure backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche: this involves careful PR work. Whatever you do, don't pay for black hat SEO services that promise links for cash.
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Search engine results differ between users depending on who is searching, where they are located and how the search query is phrased. Search engines return results in a list based on how useful each webpage will be to the user. It ranks the results based on algorithms, which are complex sets of rules. Nobody knows exactly what the rules are. However, there's a set of best practices that SEO specialists can apply to your website.
Search engines periodically send out bots (known as "spiders") to crawl (scan) every web page on the internet. Gathering information about what's on the web page, how well it's structured, and whether or not it's plagiarized, the spiders then "index" the page. This means they give it a score and add it to a big long list of webpages in a central database.
If you try to "game the system" and attempt to force Google to rank your website highly, that can result in a penalty. This will likely see your web traffic drop down.
Some bad habits that can harm your SEO include:
To avoid these you should only ever hire a reputable agency or professional using white hat SEO tactics.
If you're weighing up what SEO services involve, you're probably wondering if you can do it yourself. Here's some examples of search engine optimization:
As you can see from the above, SEO involves a highly technical set of skills. Most of the above tasks can only be carried out effectively using professional tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, Moz and the like. The more investment you're willing to make in professional SEO services, the more in-depth data you'll have access to about the performance of your own website versus those of your competitors'.
SEO services are broadly divided into "on-page" and "off-page". The former means making improvements to your website, such as redirecting broken links or editing text to attract web visitors searching for certain phrases (keywords). It can involve making changes to your website in the front-end or the back-end, including technical SEO.
Off-page SEO, by contrast, refers to work that is done outside of your website to improve its ranking on search engines. It's the process of using PR and networking to convince other websites to include URL links to your website. These are known as "backlinks". It's best to aim for backlinks from well-established websites that are relevant to the topic areas of your own website, because it'll signal to search engines that your content is worthwhile.
If you want customers to be able to find your website through search engines, then you need SEO services. Given 51% of shoppers use Google to research an online purchase, business leaders who neglect SEO are losing out. Ecommerce brands, businesses in competitive markets, websites that are monetized, and professional services looking for new clients are the top sectors in need of SEO services.
Basically, if you need web visitors to land on your website and convert to a product purchase, email sign-up or similar then SEO services can help boost these numbers. It's an essential way to stay competitive; for example, if you own a luxury tea brand with an online store and you only get 20 web visitors a month, that spells trouble. However, if you hire an SEO expert and make critical website improvements, you could start to appear on the first page of Google results for search queries such as "buy green tea giftset" or "ceylon multipack". But remember, SEO services do not provide instant traffic. Rather, you'll need to invest in long-term improvements for at least six months to two years.