What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And its a practice of optimizing websites, blogs, and their content to improve their visibility and ranking or listing in search engine results pages for specific keywords or phrases.
The aim of SEO is to increase organic traffic to a website by making it more attractive and relevant to search engine users.
SEO Techniques can include: on-page optimization such as improving website content, meta tags, and URL structure, as well as off-page optimization such as building backlinks and social media marketing.
How does SEO work?
Search Engine Optimization works by improving a website's relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines. such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo that use complex algorithms to determine which website or content are most relevant and authoritative for a given search.
There are several parameters that search engines consider when determining the relevance and authority of a website including:
- Site structure: How well the website is organized, including its Internal linking, URLs, and metadata.
- Content quality: The relevance of a website's or blog's content to the user's search query.
- User Experience: How easy is it to navigate and use the website/blog.
- Keywords: The presence and proper use of relevant keywords in the website's/blog's content and structure.
- Backlinks: The number and quality of other websites linking to the website.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO
Just like any other marketing channel, investing in SEO has its pros and cons.
Advantages
1. SEO is great for reducing CPA-Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) is not easy to control, however, as you scale your advertising, you have to target a bigger and broader audience and this starts increasing your CPA. At some point, your CPA could become so high that you are no longer profitable and forced to scale down.
2. You get almost free traffic to your website 24/7/365 days a year- Once your articles start generating free organic search traffic, they can continue to do so for months and years even when you are no longer actively working on these articles.
3. SEO can act as a powerful conduit for your business- Yes it takes time to generate a considerable amount of traffic via SEO. But once you have done that, you end up building a powerful SEO conduit for your business. Therefore organic search traffic is not something that your competitor can just buy from a shop. They will actually sit down and grind really hard for months and years to compete with your organic search traffic.
Disadvantages
1.SEO takes a very long time to show results and a positive ROI-SEO is not like paid ads which you can launch today and by the end of tomorrow, you start generating sales and positive results.
2. With SEO there is no guarantee of almost anything-A website search engine ranking can fluctuate or change any day, any time because of the ongoing changes in the ranking algorithm, SEO efforts made by your competitors, or both.
3. SEO is not really for Startups- SEO works well for businesses that can really afford to invest significantly upfront without expecting returns for months.
To understand SEO here are the 4 steps of the SEO process
- Find a keyword to target.
- Get your technicals right.
- Create an optimized page.
- Build links to it.
NOTE: SEO is along-term process that sometimes needs to be revisited. so it's always a good idea to know exactly what you want to achieve before you invest your resources.
