What Is SEO And How Does SEO Work?
Is your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) adventure just getting started? You may have heard that SEO can help you rank better in search results and increase website traffic.
With some insight into how AI comes into the situation, we want to clear up any misunderstandings or problems surrounding SEO. After you grasp the basics, you can discover how to use SEO to increase traffic and produce high-quality leads.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s begin by posing the obvious query: what is SEO?
The practice of obtaining traffic via free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines is known as “Search Engine Optimization,” or SEO. It seeks to raise the ranking of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Keep in mind that more people will view a website the higher it is listed.
What are the three pillars of SEO to understand How Does SEO Work?
Getting your brand, website, or business discovered by search engines is a fundamental skill for digital marketers, and staying up to date with the latest developments in SEO can help you stay competitive.
Although to understand How Does SEO Work? is always evolving in little ways, its fundamental ideas remain constant. We can divide SEO into three fundamental elements or pillars that you should understand and consistently implement:
Technical Optimization: The process of carrying out tasks on your website that are unrelated to content but are intended to increase SEO is known as technical optimization. It frequently takes place in the background. Technical optimization can be as easy as submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: The process of making sure the information on your website is pertinent and offers an excellent user experience is known as on-page optimization. It involves using a content management system like as WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify to target the appropriate keywords inside your content.
Off-Page Optimization: The technique of improving your website’s search engine rankings by doing things outside of it is known as off-page optimization. High-quality backlinks, which contribute to the site’s reputation, are primarily responsible for this.
Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
Understanding the distinctions and parallels between paid search and organic, natural search—also known as SEO—is crucial right away.
What are the differences between paid and organic search?
There are five key differences between paid and organic search. Let’s look at each one of them.
- Position
The first distinction is that organic results show up underneath sponsored search results at the top of search engine results pages.
- Time
Time is another important distinction between organic and sponsored search. You can obtain results more rapidly with paid search than with organic search, which frequently takes weeks, months, or even years. Therefore, you must use organic search in a medium- to long-term strategy.
- Payment
You pay for sponsored search traffic using pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, as the name implies.
This implies that each time a user clicks on your advertisement, you are charged a price. Therefore, you purchase traffic for your page by paying Google to display your ad when a visitor searches for your keyword, rather than depending on organic traffic to your website.
Although it does demand a time and resource commitment, traffic from organic search is free.
- ROI
It is significantly simpler to quantify paid search in terms of return on investment (ROI). Part of the reason for this is because Google gives you access to more keyword data in Google Analytics (GA4).
On the other hand, ROI may eventually stagnate or even decrease with paid search. ROI is a little more difficult to gauge with organic search, although it frequently gets better with time. Organic search can provide a very high return on investment in the long run.
- Share of traffic
According to BrightEdge data, organic search accounts for 53% of all site traffic, while paid search accounts for 15%. Therefore, the organic results actually receive the majority of clicks.
It’s not all about differences – there are also similarities between paid and organic search:
- Researching keywords: Both organic and sponsored search engines require users to submit a term. Researching keywords is therefore necessary for both paid and organic search.
- Landing pages: You must make excellent landing pages for both kinds of searches. The landing page must be linked to your website for SEO purposes. The landing page you use for organic search can be used for sponsored search, or it can be a stand-alone page on your website that is entirely different.
- Traffic: One of the main objectives of both sponsored and organic search is to generate traffic. Most significantly, user intent is a component of both organic and sponsored search traffic. In other words, when someone searches for information or asks a query on Google, they are in an active mindset and are therefore more likely to act upon the information they discover.
What is an SEO strategy?
Like anything else in digital marketing, success requires a plan that you can follow, monitor, and adjust. Your SEO is no different.
Optimizing your content to rank as high as possible on search engines—ideally on page one or position #1—is the main goal of an SEO strategy. Its objective is to increase organic traffic so that your target personas may find you.
Maintaining focus on your content is another benefit of having an SEO plan. You will produce high-quality content based on user intent and performance rather than wasting time and money on ineffective content.
