The term SEO is one you surely would have come across in the digital marketing field. Like it or not, we are all progressing towards a digital age, and our search engine is our best friend. At work, at play, we search, all day.
With the rise of popular use of search engines, companies now realize the importance of investing into optimizing their digital presence on these search engines so that it increases revenue or meets the type of strategic goal they’re driving.
Thus, search engine optimisation (SEO) is born! As the name suggests, it is literally the process of optimising how a brand appears on a search engine, like Google, for example. There are many ways to improve the discoverability of a given brand on a search engine. However, most search engines and social media platform these days run on ever-changing algorithms which feed into your SEO analytics.
How SEO?
This is done using the help of crawlers by search engine companies, which gather all the information they can on the internet about a given brand, and then this data is translated to binary 0s, and 1s which is fed into the search engine and an index is built. This index runs through an algorithm of the search engine, which matches the internet data to the user query.
Well, if that didn’t confuse you, there’s more! There are organic results and inorganic (paid) traffic, which further feeds into the algorithm to impact the visibility of a given brand of a search engine.
As such, there is a need for digital marketing professionals to stay on top of the SEO game constantly. This can be done by improving content, using keywords, paying for ads, and many more strategies. However, it can still be challenging to understand and differentiate between what is considered to be healthy SEO versus something that will pull your SEO down. So, how does one identify the variances in the SEO advice they get?
SEO Traffic
Well, let’s look at the three major components that are behind all the SEO data.
1. Quality of traffic – Let’s face it, if it’s on the web, anyone can access it. However, not everyone matches the quality of your intended target audience. For example, if I sell a cool brand of sweet orange juice, I wouldn’t want hits from my traffic to be those who are looking to watch the Netflix show “Orange is the new Black”. They’re completely unrelated, and it would indicate that my digital presence needs to be optimized further to get related traffic from the search engine.
2. Quantity of Traffic – You want the more hits and bounces to your website, as this increases your rankings within the search engine pages. This can be done by doing backlinks on blog posts or advertisements.
3. More Organic Traffic – As mentioned earlier, organic is unpaid traffic, and this is preferred for SEO — the quality of traffic when organic is usually better.
The human mind wants things easy and quick. The attention span and interest into search results usually drop sharply after scrolling through the first page, and users tend to modify keywords to get a better hit.
SEO is powerful, as it can direct traffic from millions of searches around the world daily to specific parts of your brand. It’s time to tweak your digital presence and get on the right side of the SEO algorithm.