Why does my website need SEO?
When people search the Internet for a product, service or information, which your website provides, you want your website to be found, and found quickly. While there are hundreds of Internet “search engines”, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are most popular, with Google dominating the search market. The percentage of their search market share fluctuates, but as of this writing in 2016, Google enjoys about 80% of all searches, Bing — 10%, Yahoo — 8.5%; AOL — 0.85%, DuckDuckGo — 0.41% and all other engines — 0.65%. Although social media, advertisements, word of mouth and other sources of publicity can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary driver of user traffic. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information, or anything else.
Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic — they direct people who are looking for what you offer not only to your website, but also to the websites of your competitors. When competitors' websites have higher ranking with the search engine, the links to their websites are displayed first. If search engines cannot find your site, or do not add summaries of its content to their databases, or when your website receives low ranking – you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site. If people are looking for what you provide, but find other websites, what good does your website do for your marketing? On the other hand, if people see your website first in response to their search queries, not only do they browse it, but it also gives them confidence in your company, its products, services and information and suggests that your products are the most popular.
Search queries — the words that users typically type into the search box looking for your specific product are of extraordinary importance. The goal of SEO is to optimize your website for such typical queries, making it not only visible, but ranking highly among other websites vis-à-vis such queries. Let’s face it: if you are a lawyer, there are tens of thousands of lawyer websites. The same is true for just about any profession, product or service. How to differentiate yourself, how to drive targeted traffic to your specific website is the Art and Science of SEO. Search engine traffic can make or break an organization's success. Targeted traffic to a website provides publicity, sales, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.
Why does any website need SEO?
Major search engines are continuously improving their algorithms to crawl the web at large and return better results to Internet users. However, the Internet is incredibly competitive, and those companies who pay attention to organizing and building their websites with SEO in mind, and who put them through rigorous SEO reviews and improvements will have a decided advantage in the numbers of visitors to their sites, and most importantly – in the number of customers they attract.
There are hundreds of text-books, guide-books and video training courses on SEO, the art and science of which is continuously evolving. These guides detail SEO strategies, techniques and tricks, and there are also software tools to help SEO practitioners to analyze website content, analyse the competition, relative ranking and many important statistics. We, at PcLabs.net, give SEO a proper consideration at the very early stages of website design and building. In this regard, website design and SEO are intertwined. But SEO, is, nonetheless a distinctive discipline, which has a specific primary focus – enhancing website content and its promotion, which will result in greatly increased numbers of visits.
The point is that without a serious consideration given to SEO, and especially when poorly designed vis-a-vis its SEO, a website is likely to exist in obscurity. In other words, the website is not of much use when – in response to relevant queries – it is displayed by Google on page 100, behind thousands of other sites. While boosting the sites ranking to page 1 is not always possible, an objective measurement of the effectiveness of SEO would be ranking improvement of the site over time for the relevant keywords. Search engines use algorytms which evaluate hundreds of variables and Google and other SE teams keep these algorythms evolving and changing, so while a basic understanding of the SEO process on the part of the website owner is a good idea, a do-it-yourself approach may not yield the best overall results. For most business owners and sole practitioners it makes business sense to focus on their own core competency, while turning SEO over to SEO specialists, which is usually a lot more cost-effective.