One of the most common buzzwords in conjunction with search engine rankings these days is without a doubt ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO for short. While most of us have heard the term many of us might not fully understand what it entails.
To shed some light on the question whether your customers can find your website we must look at how people search the internet and how they might end up on your site.
The majority of searches on the internet are done through search engines, in particular, Google (94.19%) as the market leader, followed by Microsoft’s Bing (4.29%) & Yahoo! (0.77%) [Source: Search Engine Market Share in Australia 2016]. Directories such as the Yellow Pages Online, Start Local & True Local also play a role in this process but on a much smaller scale.
The goal of Search Engine Optimisation is to influence search engine rankings in your favour so that your business website ranks high in the search engine result pages. SEO therefore seeks to maximise the online exposure of a website which leads to more traffic and overall more leads which in most cases translates to more conversions.
Organic Search Engine Rankings
As search engines aim to provide the most relevant results for the terms and keywords that people search for, the largest amount of search results is made up of organic results. These naturally appearing results are created by the search engines’ sophisticated algorithms which evaluate thousands of factors to determine a website’s relevance.
The most valuable search engine rankings are the well-positioned organic listings. These listings you cannot directly buy and can be hard to obtain without proper search engine optimisation. That is why businesses spend a lot of time, effort & money on strategising over how to influence their organic search engine rankings to their advantage.
It makes sense wanting to push your rankings up as we know from our own browsing and online search behaviour that we focus on the first few listings on the first results page. Only in some cases, we search through the next few search result pages before we either give up or change our search terms.
Statistics of website traffic back up this behaviour and the drop-off in traffic numbers is steep the further down a particular website is positioned in the results (also read: Why Is A Top Listing On Google Important?).
While business owners & employees often try to search engine optimise their business website themselves it usually turns out to be a very time & resources consuming task. Often the effort is spent better on running your business and to hire professionals like F1RST who have over a decade of Search Engine Optimisation experience. As part of our cost-effective Website Management Plans we develop a long-term strategy and provide you with a continuous SEO effort to get you the best possible search engine rankings.
