SEO Brief

SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization and the SEO strategy or SEO implementation is referred to as just SEO in digital marketing.

What is SEO?

Is the process of optimizing the content and website, and implementing specific set of things on the website in order to make the website search engine friendly, so that your website will have an opportunity or becomes eligible to rank for several keywords related to the product/service or content on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and more.

What is expected out of SEO?

Search engine optimization is mainly oriented towards achieving the following:

1. Drive free traffic to the website from search engines
2. Optimize website for Users and Search engines
3. Improve the user metrics or make the website more engaging for audiences/customers
4. Optimize website for all business searches/keywords
5. Place the website on top of Google first page
6. Improve the website crawl frequency & crawl rates

SEO Significance in Digital Marketing

SEO takes the highest priority in digital marketing as it deals with the optimization of a website for users mainly, a website optimized for users becomes the most suitable platform for all kinds of marketing activities and the kind of benefits it brings is insane.

• Organic presence of a website on search engines is the most sustainable support for the business
  • Get a lot of free traffic
  • Generates leads
  • Generates sales
  • Builds trust- Being always available on Google is perceived as the most authenticated business
• It’s very hard to beat the businesses by the competitor’s when the organic presence is strong.
• The organic(SEO) performance of the website plays a prominent role in the valuation of the business
• The organic search results get high-quality traffic (Usually the conversion rates will be very high) compared to any other source of traffic

After knowing all these you would definitely implement it for your business as well, but then you have to make sure you access first if that works for your business category or not. For many business types, it may not work.

The basis of Search engines and how they work? (How SEO Works)

Many business owners are not sure why is google ranking a specific website on top and not theirs, and also many of the SEO professionals who implement SEO for the websites are also struggling to understand what else needs to be done in order to be a number one player over the competition. SEO works on three metrics. When it is satisfied over these three you are the winner and you will be placed on top of the search results. Wondering which is those three? Don’t think much, here it goes!

1. Crawl frequency and Crawl rate of the website (crawl stats)
2. Click through rate of the web pages/content
3. The engagement on the web pages/content

The above three factors decide the website performance on search engines. You cannot see your:

• Keywords ranking high
• Keyword covering increasing
• Traffic growing

unless your website achieves the best/highest status over those three metrics. Many SEO professionals do various kinds of implementations to improve over those three without even knowing what needs to be done to improve or what is the outcome of implementation done. It is a lot more than crawling and indexing, which is the vague answer that you get from most of the digital marketers (SEO professionals).

The functionality

Here is how the search engines work, explained technically the why a specific website ranks on top of Google when there are so many other players or tons of content is found on the internet. SEO starts working only when your content gets crawled and with this alone you would not see progress as it can only make your website eligible to come to the first page. When your website is already eligible to come to the first page it now becomes eligible to see improvement in its keyword rankings (Moving to the top positions), only when it secures the best CTR. The highest CTR will give the webpages an opportunity to move to the top, but then this doesn’t assure the URL/webpage being in that position until the engagement is great on the webpage. Users should find value when they land on your webpage, they should prefer to explore the webpage and thereafter continue exploring the website, they should perform the intended action on the webpage or they have should prefer to stay on the webpage.

The technicality of How search engines work?

1. Search engines have a program, which is called as small machines or bots.
2. The bots go to the internet server and crawl all the content that is not restricted or allowed for access
3. After crawling or reading it bring a copy of that content, webpage/website to its server. (From the internet to Google server)
4. Google server now will have an organized storing of such content from various websites found on the internet servers
5. Whenever a user queries on the front end of Google, Google gets all the relevant content and serves it to the user. Ideally speaking this is how most of the search on website or a query to normal DB works.

What is that something different than now assigns priority to the website which one

to rank first and which to rank second? That’s when the functionality plays a role,

• When search bots can read (Crawl) your content a number of times, they index and make you eligible to appear on Google search results at some position or on some page.
• When users tend to click more on your webpage/URL google understand that it is very useful or interesting to the user and prioritizes to show you in better positions
• Finally, the user engagement on the webpage coveys the user purpose is served or the objective is fulfilled and that’s when the webpage will have stabilized rankings on Google when it perceives the webpage is serving the user purpose.

The SEO thumb rule!

There is a detailed article from Manjunath in kandra.pro on how to implement SEO for website and you can explore and follow the best practices mentioned there in order to see progress happening on your website.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.