What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Part Science, Part Art, Part Intuition
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an essential aspect of any Internet Marketing strategy. SEO techniques help to ensure the high-performance of your website, maximising sales potential by:
- Achieving high search engine rankings for a range of relevant search terms
- Attracting the most appropriate searchers to the site – and successfully converting them into customers
- Building sustainable search engine results, ones which live long beyond the initial SEO campaign
SEO ensures that a company’s website is doing all it can to attract both high quantity and high quality traffic. Its aim is to make the internet a fertile breeding ground, where customers are pulled towards your product above all others through the effective exploitation of the most popular search engines.
Organic search engine results – Build your site’s authority
Search engines use mathematical principles to score the importance and relevance of each website for a particular search term. These organic or ‘natural’ results are then ranked by score, with the highest scoring websites being awarded the top positions.
SEO focuses on improving organic search engine results, using a range of techniques to ensure that your website is accorded the highest importance and relevance in the rankings. Organic results have a number of advantages over sponsored listings, where you pay for results. Firstly, organic results are sustainable, guaranteeing a strong presence well beyond the period of an SEO campaign. Secondly, research shows that searchers have implicit trust in websites which achieve a high ranking in organic search engine results. Improving your organic results reinforces the authority of both your site and your product, leading to better sales and a stronger brand.
It is not possible to buy a high position in a search engine’s organic results. Therefore, SEO is the most effective way of boosting your rankings, while saving money in the long-term.
High search engine rankings – Multiply website traffic
A high ranking has a major effect on the number of people who will both see and click through to your site. A focused SEO campaign aims to win your site a place, and ultimately, the coveted number one spot on the first page of the search engine results for a range of targeted, high traffic search terms. SEO can, therefore, lead to dramatically improved sales through increased visibility for your website, and your business.
Research on search engine rankings shows that:
- Most people do not look beyond the first two pages of search engine results.
- Searchers would rather modify search criteria than explore beyond the top 30 listings.
- Top search engine results generate 100 to 1000 times more traffic than results on the third page.
Qualified traffic - Turn searches into sales
The quality of the traffic reaching your website is as important, if not more, than the quantity. Achieving top search engine rankings will in turn deliver high quality, or ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. Qualified traffic represents those visitors who can be most easily converted into customers. This is because they have been referred from organic search results, meaning they are actively searching for the products and services that your website promotes.
SEO works to guarantee that only the right people find your website. If you only get high quality traffic clicking through to your site, you can be sure that searches will be easily converted into sales.
Why does your business need SEO?
Why? For all the reasons above, and more! SEO has a number of advantages over alternative Internet Marketing techniques, details of which you can find on the benefits of SEO page.
The bottom line is that SEO ensures that the potential of your website as a marketing tool is exploited to the maximum. A targeted SEO campaign is a cost-effective, sustainable method of giving your site the edge over your competitors. For more details on the technical aspects of SEO, visit our 'How does SEO work?' page.
