SEO for Beginners

Digital Marketing is the first marketing strategy that new start ups are considering. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is one of the most cost effective ways to get your business some exposure.

Search Engine Optimization is enhancing your company’s website to be visible in organic (unpaid) search results. This is done by optimizing your website (it’s content) and digital imprint to be easily found by search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

 
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The first question - How do Search Engines work? This is a three part answer to that question:

  1. Crawl & Index - Basically, the search engines crawl the internet with “robots” from website page to page and index as much information as possible. They store this information in their servers as an index.

  2. Ranking Results - Then with this information, a user goes to the search engine (i.e. Google) and searches a term “widget” Google combs through their search engine index and brings up all the relevant pages to the search term “widget”. Then, they rank the relevant pages. This is done with a highly sophisticated algorithm with over 200 different ranking factors.

  3. Serving Useful Content - Once search engines have analyzed all relevant pages and parsed them them through their ranking algorithm, they will return the pages in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP), ordered from most relevant to least.

If you are wondering which search engines are the most important, it is Google. Here are the numbers as to why:

Google has the market share by device

  • Desktop - 79.88%

  • Mobile 94.53%

  • Overall 85.82%

Google has a monopoly over the search engine market - and it is not going to change any time soon. Therefore, your business needs to focus their attention to the Google algorithms.

So what effects your rankings? Here are the two main factors:

  1. On-Site (Occurring on your website) - This includes the content on your site, the words that you use, how technically accessible your site is, how fast it loads, how good your user experience, site architecture, and design is, and so on and so forth.

  2. Off-Site (NOT Occurring on your website) - Whether or not other websites link to your site, social media, other digital marketing, online and offline PR, and overall chatter about brand, site, etc. Most importantly content and links.

And finally, we want to address - Is SEO successful?

You won’t like this answer— but, this depends on several factors including:

  • The scope of the site and the engagement (because they’re different)

  • The complexity of the brand and website

  • The level of maturity of any legacy or current marketing campaigns including past or current SEO strategies

  • Any time needed to undo legacy recommendations and/or penalties

  • The speed of strategic development and execution

  • The complexity of implementation of recommendations

  • The amount of red-tape any recommendations have to pass through

  • The expectations of what success looks like (which can vary)

Generally speaking, with a clear runway, an SEO strategy should begin bearing fruit in 6-12 months which may seems like a long time, but when you consider in some cases the barriers and sweat equity that can be involved, the timeline begins to add up.

Keep following our blog to find out a more in-depth look at SEO.


Source Credit: https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/seo-for-beginners?__hstc=219066822.bffc4000e1d6a895baf27e2a7582ca88.1618865738742.1618865738742.1618865738742.1&__hssc=219066822.1.1618865738743&__hsfp=685900345

Mary Margaret EppsRed Canary Marketing