All webmasters have the same goal – getting as much traffic on their websites as possible. They are targeting the unpaid results, also known as natural or organic, and they use different techniques to achieve them.
SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a tool of the utmost importance for getting the unpaid results. It is defined as the process of affecting the online visibility of a website in a certain search engine.
SEO targets different kinds of search, such as image search, video search, academic search, news search, etc. Essentially, in order to create a decent SEO for a website, an expert will adjust the site in accordance with a search engine’s algorithm that determines its rank in the search results.
For example, if a business wants to improve its site’s visibility in Google results, it will hire an SEO expert who will adjust the site’s content, loading speed, responsiveness to mobile devices and other requirements which have to be met in order for Google’s search algorithm to show it among the top results. It’s definitely worth reading some SEO statistics to understand how and why the aforementioned aspects influence rankings.
3 Must-have SEO Tools to Explode your RanksOne part of SEO is Local SEO. It is similar to the general SEO described above, as both have the same goal – manipulating the visibility of a website. Local SEO dates back to 2003-2005 when search engines tried to provide people with results within their vicinity.
It plays a big role for local businesses. According to Forrester via WWD.com, by 2021, mobile devices alone will influence $1.4 trillion in local sales.
There are many factors which affect local ranking.
- Link signals – Inbound anchor text, link domain authority, link domain quality.
- On-page signals – Presence of NAP, keywords in titles domain authority.
- Behavioural signals – Click-through rate, mobile clicks to call, check-ins.
- Personalization
- Citation signals – IYP/aggregator NAP consistency, citation volume.
- Review signals – Review quantity, review velocity, review diversity.
- Social signals – Google, Facebook, Twitter engagement.
Google uses three main criteria in its algorithms to show the best match for a search.
- Prominence – how well known a place is in the offline world.
- Relevance – surfacing the listings that best match the user’s query.
- Distance – return listings that are closest to the location of the user.
Scroll down and take a look at the infographic to learn about more than 72 stats about SEO in 2018
20 On-Page and Off-Page SEO Techniques: A Checklist
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What is search engine optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation is basically a set of rules that can be applied to a website or even a blog. This is done to ensure that the established search engines recognise these tactics helping them to rank online.
Not really a theoretical concept at all, SEO done right makes it easy for search engine crawlers to read your web pages and then keep indexing them. With more pages getting indexed, greater are the chances of your website appearing on search result pages when a relevant enquiry has been submitted in the search box.
What is free organic traffic?
SEO is the route to generating awareness of your brand, its products and services through targeting organic web traffic. Efforts to enable Spiders to crawl your website makes it possible for the property to attain high rankings on search engines. With rankings increasing on search engines it is easier to attract free organic traffic who are credible prospects looking for products and services online.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, includes both SEO and options to use paid techniques such as Pay Per Click promotions on Bing, Google and social media profiles to generate traffic. However, results are directly proportional to the budget that you can spend on these platforms.
Is SEO expensive than digital marketing?
To achieve results in SEO, you need to hire the services of an SEO specialist either on a freelance, monthly retainership basis or as an in-house resource. From a cost perspective, the only expenses that the business incurs are the fee or salaries of the hired resources.
In terms of digital marketing, the cost of activities is much more as you need several types of specialists to be involved when you design and execute the plan. The cost can range from a few thousand rupees to lakhs depending on how exhaustive your digital marketing plan is.