What is SEO and how does it work?

Would you like to get more visitors to your website? Do you want to rank on the first page of Google or other search engines? SEO can help you to achieve incredible results.

You have likely heard of SEO and the amazing impact it can have on your website and business, but maybe you are not sure what it is or how it works.

Here we will help you to understand SEO and the benefits of SEO better. Before we go into how SEO works, let us first explain to you what SEO actually is.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. SEO is the process of optimising your web content so that it appears higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), resulting in increased and improved quality of traffic to a website or specific webpage.

When you search for a term on a search engine, such as Google or Bing, the top results are usually paid ads. The results below the ads are referred to as organic search results.

SEO can help to put your website on the first page of a search engine for relevant search terms, and improve your rankings in the organic search results, without having to pay.

Zero Limit Web reported that, in 2021, less than 29% of searchers continue past the first page, and 67.6% of clicks on the first page were on the top five organic search results. So, not only is it important to have a presence on the first page, but also ideally within the top five results.

How does SEO work?

Search engines use algorithms or a set of rules to determine the order in which pages are shown in search results. They take into account hundreds, or sometimes even thousands, of factors to determine rankings.

The main three components that come into consideration are:

• Links from other websites. These act as a sort of testimonial for your business and help your site to gain authority, trust and reach, especially if the sites they feature on have a high domain authority (DA) themselves.
• Written content. Search engines analyse the contents of pages to determine whether it will be relevant, reliable and useful to searchers for any given search term. You need to ensure that your content is keyword-rich and factual.
• Page or website structure. The code that makes up a webpage can have an impact on a search engine’s ability to analyse a page. All websites should have a sitemap to help search engines navigate the site, and all pages should have meta descriptions.

Page structure – The third core component of SEO is page structure. Because webpages are written in HTML, how the HTML code is structured can impact a search engine’s ability to evaluate a page. Including relevant keywords in the title, URL, and headers of the page and making sure that a site is crawlable are actions that site owners can take to improve the SEO of their site.

SEO is about making changes to your website or individual webpages. These changes are often small and may seem insignificant but, when you combine these improvements, they can have a significant impact on your search rankings, traffic, user experience, and conversions.

When it comes to SEO, it is a case of ensuring that you have all of the essential ingredients that make up an effective website, and are making the most out of them.

SEO involves many different activities, including:

• Researching and identifying keywords with potential for good search traffic
• Creating high-quality, optimised content that is useful to your target audience
• Having relevant inbound and outbound links, to and from sites with a high DA
• Continuously measuring results, monitoring, analysing and adapting

Many leaders in business do not have the time or knowledge to implement an effective marketing strategy, but that does not mean that they cannot reap the rewards. You can enlist the help of professionals such as ourselves to improve your SEO.

The SEO specialists at DBS have a huge amount of knowledge, experience, and skills which they have gained from helping businesses for over 10 years. They stay up-to-date with algorithm changes and know what actions to take to make search engines love your website.

It takes time to establish strong rankings on Google, especially if your website is new, but the benefits of doing so should not be overlooked.

Once set in motion, a strong SEO strategy will improve your organic rankings and the number of visits to your site which will in turn lead to more conversions.

Avoid getting left behind by your competitors with our professional SEO services. To speak to a digital marketing expert, call 01522 811688 or email hello@dbs.digital today.