What is Search Engine Optimization and How Does it Work?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art and science that helps businesses increase their visibility and attract potential customers. Learn what SEO is and how it works.

What is Search Engine Optimization and How Does it Work?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting webpages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. SEO is a powerful tool that can help businesses increase their visibility and attract potential and existing customers. In its simplest form, SEO is anything you do to improve a website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). The goal of most companies is to increase the visibility or traffic of their website and to rank high for specific search terms or phrases in search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO focuses on unpaid traffic (known as natural or organic results) rather than direct or paid traffic.

Unpaid traffic can originate from different types of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. Once you do some basic research related to how and how often your audience uses multiple search terms, you can prioritize the terms you want your website to appear in search engine results. The algorithms then analyze the pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of factors or ranking signals, to determine the order in which the pages should appear in the search results of a given query. In particular, special attention should be paid to Google, which accounts for 92% of the global market in terms of search engine results. Higher visibility and ranking higher in search results than competitors can have a major impact on your bottom line. Also note that features such as rich results and knowledge panels in search results can increase visibility and provide users with more information about your company directly in the results.

With Google Chrome, check the top SEO metrics instantly for any website or search result as you browse the web. In other industries, such as real estate or insurance, the value of search engine traffic is significantly higher. If you pay for a tool, consultant or marketing agency to help you optimize your web content, your bill can vary greatly depending on the number of services you receive. SEO is done because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the SERP. Pages that are not normally crawlable include specific login pages, such as shopping carts, and user-specific content, such as search results from internal searches. Let's keep things simple and quickly address the most important points so you can leave feeling relieved and excited about your journey with SEO for marketing. If you're completely new to the world of search marketing, start at the beginning and read the updated Beginner's Guide to SEO.