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In this digital era, access to the Internet (particularly, Google) is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. Want to look for a nice restaurant for dinner? You do a Google search. Need to know if the food you’re ordering is halal? You do a Google search. Want to find the recipe for the order you just polished off so you can cook it at home? You do a Google a search.
Modern day living is so deeply reliant on Google that it is said to process around 63,000 search queries every second. That’s 5.6 billion searches per day, and a whopping 2 trillion global searches per year.
“If you consider that results on the first page of a Google search get over 90% of search traffic, you cannot afford not to be there, especially if your competitors are.”
Forbes, 10 Key Benefits of SEO For Your Business
Now imagine if your business can capture even just a fraction of those daily searches. Imagine if your brand popped up as the first result on Google when people search for the product or service you provide. Imagine if you could somehow capitalise on the simple act of a Google search and turn it into revenue for your business. Would you want that? I imagine the answer is a resounding “YES.”
Fortunately, there’s a way to actually get your business in front of the people who need or want what you have to offer. It’s called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.
In a nutshell, it’s a way to make your business’s website appear favourably on Google by convincing the search engine that your website is the most logical choice for the searches people are doing in relation to your business.
When done right, search engine optimisation can be an immensely helpful avenue for generating qualified leads and/or customers for your business.
Take note, however, that search engine optimisation is not a “magic bullet.” You don’t just flip the switch “on” and wait for the money to roll in. It’s a long and time-consuming process that needs an investment of time and effort (and possibly, a bit of money as well).
But if you’re willing to put your back into it, we here at United SEO are willing to help you get started with this multi-part blog series on How to Do Search Engine Optimisation on
Your own Website.
So, ready to get started? Let’s get cracking!
Demystifying Google Search and search engine optimisation.
So before we start discussing the HOW, let’s quickly cover the WHAT of it all. Essentially, in this chapter, we’ll briefly look into the inner workings of the Google search engine and how search engine optimisation fits into the equation.
This will give us a solid foundation for the more technical concepts and topics that we’ll be covering later.
Put simply, Google Search is a software system designed to help people find what they need online. It is a fully automated search engine that answers people’s queries by providing a list of results that it deems most relevant or appropriate to their questions. How does it do this? Through a Three-Stage process that involves (1) information gathering, (2) data storage and analysis, and (3) query resolution.
For the Google search engine to provide answers, it must first collect information. This process of data collection is called “crawling.”
Basically, Google has deployed software called web crawlers that endlessly scan the world wide web to find all the web pages that are currently active and online. When a crawler finds a web page on the internet, it downloads all the content it finds, including videos, images, and text. This is Stage One.
The next step for Google is to determine what the “meat” of the content means and to which “queries” or “questions” is it relevant. This entails analysing the raw data that it has gathered (i.e. images, text, and videos) and storing that information in the Google index, which is its proprietary database. This is Stage Two.
For this process, Google utilises a number of key signals, including keyword use and website freshness. As “crawling” is an endless process, the storing of data or “indexing” is also an endless process. Thus, according to Google, the Google Search index now contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.
When a user enters a query in Google, the search engine goes through query resolution or “information serving,” which is Stage Three.
The search engine processes the query to determine what it means, goes back to the Google Search index, finds the webpages that it has determined to be most relevant to the query, and serves that information in list form. This “list” of website links to relevant webpages is what’s called a “Search Engine Results Page” or “SERP,” and it often takes Google no more than a second to serve a SERP after a query has been entered.
Oversimplified it may be, this quick description gives us an idea how the Google Search engine works, and it serves as the fundamental basis of our next topic of discussion which is…
Now that we’ve peeked under the hood (so to speak), it’s time to talk about how search engine optimisation plays a role.
Search engine optimisation or SEO is a process of increasing your website’s visibility for the search engine queries to which you want it to appear. It’s a multi-faceted process that includes optimising elements on and off your website.
How do you properly optimise your website for search? By adhering to “best practices” as approved and recommended by Google. In other words, if you play by Google’s rules, you stand to benefit with improving search visibility.
And as your search visibility improves, you are more likely to gain more trust and attention, which consequently allows you to attract more customers for your business.
This can directly impact your business’s bottom line.
As such, businesses and brands are setting aside a significant portion of their budget towards search engine optimisation. In fact, businesses are spending $5,000 on average on their SEO efforts. This investment is going towards capturing various potential customers, including:
Not only does it allow you to cast a wide net in terms of marketing and visibility, but it also delivers reliable return on investment. Search engines are responsible for almost 50% of all website traffic, and around 40% of online revenue comes from the same. Plus, if you can get to the 1st result on Google for a search query or keyword, you can expect to get more than 32% of all traffic from that keyword.
If you play by Google’s rules and optimise your website for search properly, you can
significantly improve your:
These are just some of the benefits SEO can deliver to your business. If that’s got you interested, follow this blog series in the following weeks, as we talk more about the strategies, hacks, and best practices so you can do SEO on your website!
In the next blog, we’ll talk about Chapter 2. Planning a Successful SEO Strategy and everything that goes into the process of setting up your search engine optimisation campaign for success.
