SEO – the Guide for beginners and professionals alike

SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing an entire website or individual web-page for search engines, to improve their ranking positions and visibility in search results. The process itself includes going through multiple checking-points which were found to influence a website ranking value in search engines like Google (the leaders in world-wide searches), but also for Bing and some other local engines like Yandex, Baidu and other.

Why is SEO Important?

Is easy to understand why SEO is important as when it is done right, it brings visitors to a blog of ecommerce website, and the more visitors a website has, the better its value. Furthermore, to completely understand, the visitors attracted from search engine results are highly targeted, meaning the users land on a web page which present something they are interested in and looking for more information. This means that for an ecommerce website, these visitors will eventually translate to more sales. In comparison with SEM (search engine marketing), SEO traffic is free, with the search engine delivering organic traffic at no extra cost.

Advantages of SEO

When done correctly, SEO brings many advantages to a website as it can deliver tones of visitors on very specific interests which otherwise would not have landed on that website. And most importantly, it is FREE. While there are marketing options for bringing a website in top results (as sponsored results), these involve higher costs which needs to be in the end covered from the profit margins of the product or service promoted. While paid marketing generates guaranteed traffic, each visitor delivered with this method is subject to a bidding war between marketers targeting the same user base. The costs sometimes can reach the limits of profitability and for those applying with little knowledge, it could soon turn out that marketing costs are simply not covered by generated revenues.

Understanding the Traffic Difference for Top Search Engine Rankings

As stated above, getting better search engine positions in results equals more visitors to the website, delivered for free. But while this statement could easily go by readers as an opinion, adding some real numbers to this statement will surely help in understanding the real value of SEO and top search results. Below figure shows the CTR (click through rate) on search results in Google, according to a 2020 study which analyzed over 80 million keywords in billions of searches.

As we can see, the first position in search results takes an average of 28% of the traffic, the second position takes nearly 16% and the third position receives only 11% of the visitors. That is totaling to over 55% of visitors landing on the top 3 positions in search results. Now let’s take that for a particular keyword/expression there are 10,000 searches per day. This means that top 3 positions rake 5500 of the visitors looking for something that website sells/presents. The results in position 4-10 (in the first page of results) manage to get another 35% of the traffic, which leaves results in second & next pages of the search engine to only get about 10% of users.

How to do Search Engine Optimization

Once we understood what is SEO and its importance, is easier to move to the next step: doing SEO. Google enjoys over 91% of the search market, and this guide to SEO mainly refers to optimizing for Google, but the same process has very good results for other search engines as they operate in a similar fashion. While Google has been particularly secretive about their algorithm around search engine rankings, SEO professionals around the world have managed to identify over 200 ranking factors influencing search results. These ranking factors have been identified over time through AB testing of multiple changes on and off page and monitoring results in search engines.

To start doing SEO, understanding the ranking factors and how any changes we do impact the results is a must, so make sure to follow the above link to start going through the pointers.

SEO Tools Anyone can Use

As SEO has become a real business, we have also seen a surge in tools which can be used to research and help making the right changes for better SEO. There is a range of both free and paid tools, with each one of them impacting on one or more ranking factors identified above. All SEO tools presented on this website have been personally tested and reviewed before presentation.

SEO tools range from free options to paid services, and each one of them was developed to help with search engine optimization.