What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the natural search visibility of a website without involving paid advertising. In the early early stages of the Internet, there were hundreds of different web search engines, such as Alta Vista, Webcrawler, Lycos, and Excite, just to name a few. Today, most search optimization efforts revolve around Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can get the most impact for your website visibility from just these three major players. If you really want to get the most for your money, most SEO will work with Google alone. As of October 2011, Google commands a market share of 82.4% of desktop search. You can expect most of your search traffic to come from Google.
Why does my business website need SEO?
As illustrated above, most of the traffic to websites is generated through search results. If your website and its content are not visible to the search engine crawler, you are missing out on a great opportunity to drive visitors and more importantly potential customers to your website.
Are search engines not smart enough to see my website without SEO?
While search engines are constantly improving to better understand the content of your website, they are still limited by machine intelligence. For example, you might have a great sale poster on your website, but because it’s an image, no search engine today will do OCR on the image to see what it’s about. There are many other aspects of a website that can affect a search engine crawler’s ability to read your content.
SEO vs. Paid/Sponsored Links
When considering between paying Google to display sponsored listings in your search results and paying an SEO company to improve your website’s natural search visibility, you need to look at what you are trying to achieve with your website and in what ways. time frame.
SEO is a slow process that will not produce immediate results because beyond doing what is required on the part of the SEO consultant, much of the process depends on how long it takes for Google to crawl your website as well as the websites that they lead. backlinks to your website. Backlink issues will be discussed in a separate post, suffice to say what Google takes to represent the popularity and legitimacy of your website.
Despite not being able to see immediate results, SEO is still preferable for a business website because in the long run, minus the initial cost, having your website naturally listed in search results won’t cost you anything. As an internet user, I also tend to trust that an organic search result is more likely to lead me to a site with something I’m looking for.
On the other hand, sponsored link marketing providers like Google AdWords are extremely useful for startups or websites that need to gain immediate visibility. The sponsored link philosophy behind AdWords is a pay-per-click system where you can specify how much you’re willing to pay each time your website appears on a particular keyword search and a user clicks on your ad. You can read more about Google’s sponsored link advertising service on this blog.
While AdWords makes search visibility accessible to small or startup businesses on a budget. You may find that maintaining a sustainable flow of visitors to your website can get expensive very quickly.
What route should I take?
Therefore, a common strategy that businesses employ would be to start with a sponsored listing at the beginning to get some traffic flowing. At the same time, they start working on search engine optimization in parallel. When SEO starts to show results in the form of organic traffic, you can reduce your sponsored listing budget or stop altogether. There is no fixed strategy for every company, as it largely depends on the nature of your business or website. A capable SEO consultant will be able to advise you on which course to take after assessing your business needs.