Search engine optimisation is the science of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services. The more visibility a website has in the search engines, the more likely the brand is to close a deal.
A website’s visibility is usually measured by its placement – or ranking – on search engine results pages (SERPs). And businesses are always competing for the first page where they are most likely to get the most attention.
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What are SERPs?
“SERP” stands for “search engine results page” A SERP is a page that a search engine displays to a user after they have performed a search. Google SERPs usually contain seven to ten links to different web pages that are relevant to the user’s search query, as well as additional information or images.
What role does search engine optimisation play in the digital marketing industry?
In the world of online marketing, search engine optimisation is an effective marketing strategy that primarily aims to increase the company’s reach to target customers. SEO plays a crucial role in digital marketing campaigns and has become an inseparable part of the digital marketing industry. To know more about Digital Marketing and SEO, read our blog High Ticket Digital Marketing: All You Need To Know
The main objective of SEO is to make your website accessible to your target customers. When customers search for specific products or services online via Google or other popular search engines, SEO ensures that a majority of your potential customers reach your website. To ensure this, various website optimisation strategies are used to ensure that your business occupies one of the top positions in the SERPs.
With the development of digital marketing in India, people are gradually understanding the importance of SEO in digital marketing. If you are not yet familiar with the concept of digital marketing, it is a modern marketing technique that uses the internet, search engines, social media, mobile devices and other digital media platforms to reach target customers with products and services.
If you take Google as an example, ads often appear at the top of the page on SERPs. These are positions that companies are willing to pay for in order to secure a position on the first page. The ads that follow are the regular search listings that marketers and search engines call organic search results.
The SEO process aims to increase a company’s organic search results and drive organic search traffic to the website. In this way, data marketers can distinguish between traffic that comes to a website through other channels – such as paid search, social media, referrals and direct advertising – and organic search traffic.
Organic search traffic is typically higher quality because users are actively searching for a specific topic, product or service that a website could rank for. When a user finds that website through a search engine, it can lead to better brand engagement.
How does SEO work?
While there is a way to maximise results, it is almost impossible to completely manipulate search algorithms. Businesses are often looking for the shortest path to ideal results with the least amount of effort, but SEO requires a lot of action and time. There is no SEO strategy where something can be changed today with the expectation of clear results tomorrow. SEO is a long-term project that requires daily action and constant activity.
Search engines use bots to crawl all the pages of a website, download the information and shop it in a collection called an index. This index is like a library, and when someone searches for something in it, the search engine acts as a librarian. The search engine pulls relevant information from the search query and shows the user content related to what they are looking for. The search engine’s algorithms analyse the web pages in the index to determine the order in which these pages should be displayed on the SERP.
Here you will find a short description of how search engine optimisation SEO works.
Which algorithms are evaluated for search engine optimisation?
There are hundreds of factors that contribute to what content from the index is displayed in a SERP. However, they can be summarised into five key factors that determine which results are displayed for a search query.
The relevance of the search query. In order to provide relevant results, the algorithm must first determine what information the user is looking for. This is called intent. To understand the intent, the algorithm tries to understand the language. Interpretation of misspellings, synonyms and the fact that some words have different meanings in different contexts all contribute to the algorithm’s understanding of the searcher’s intent.
For example, search engines would need to be able to distinguish between “bass” as a fish and “bass” as an instrument. Intent would be based on additional search terms, historical search, location search and more to display the correct information.
- Relevance of web pages. The algorithm analyses the content of web pages to determine whether the pages contain information that is relevant to a user’s search. This is done after intent has been established. A basic signal of relevance would be if the webpage contains the keywords used in the search. This includes them appearing in the text or page headings. However, in addition to matching keywords, search engines also use aggregated interaction data to determine whether the page is relevant to the search query. This involves analysing anonymised data from previous searches to match the page to the search query.
- Quality of content. The goal of search engines is to give preference to the most reliable sources available. The intelligence built into the algorithms can identify which pages have expertise, authority and trustworthiness in relation to the search intent.
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