There are around 1.18 billion websites globally at any given point in time. However, 91% get little to no traffic from Google, according to a study by And only 5.7% ranked among the top 10 search results within one year of being published.
Why does this happen? How can you prevent this from happening? And, how do you ensure that your page is one among the minority that gets regular search traffic from google?
One of the popular ways to get traffic and keep people on your website is with SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to optimizing your web pages to improve organic traffic. This helps boost your search results ranking and increase your visibility.
Search is still one of the most effective ways for people to discover your content. And hence you need a good SEO strategy to improve the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your website. This includes:
● Creating quality content
● Gaining backlinks by magnifying your content
● Maintaining a local presence in search results
● Monitoring your website’s health
Why is SEO Important?
The main benefit of SEO is to route free traffic to your website, week after week and month after month. Search is by far the largest source of traffic to websites. According to Backlinko, about 60% of the traffic to your website comes from search engines such as Google. So, if your website is SEO-friendly, you can rank for multiple different keywords.
Organic Search Results
Search results are the listings on a search results page that the search engine finds relevant to the user’s search query. Keep in mind that ads also form a significant portion of the results.
Organic search results are different from the ads because they result from the search engine’s algorithm, while the ads are based on the bids by advertisers.
Quality of Organic Traffic
The quality of organic traffic depends on how relevant the search query is to the content on your website. It doesn’t help if your website is in no way pertinent or valuable to the user. High-quality traffic refers to the visitors interested in your website's service, product, or information. SEO helps ensure that you rank for the relevant keywords and have the content to back it up.
Quantity of Organic Traffic
Quantity of the organic traffic refers to the number of visitors you get through the search results. Websites ranked higher on the search results page get the most visits. Proper SEO strategy helps to rank your website as high as possible.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO works by optimizing your website to rank on the search engines, namely, Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Youtube. It also ensures that the search engine ranks your website for the relevant keywords. They rank based on the algorithm, which considers the context, relevancy, authority, loading speed, backlinks, and many more.
Google alone has around 200 ranking factors in its algorithm.
Search engines have crawlers, otherwise called bots or spiders, that crawl all the pages on the internet and gather the information they can find. They start from one known source and crawl from page to page through the internal and external links. The search engine uses the content of the pages and the context of the links to index the pages.
When a user searches for a keyword, the algorithm pulls out what it thinks to be the most relevant content. It can be from plain text to surveys, images, videos, news articles, or local business listings.
Furthermore, search engine algorithms are updated constantly to keep up with the changes in user behavior. And also to adapt to the latest in machine learning. So your SEO strategy should be adaptive enough to keep up with the changing algorithms.
If you would like to increase your SEO rankings or improve your SEO, please contact us at info@shelleyssocialmedia.com or check out our SEO Services.