What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website’s technical configuration, content relevancy, and link popularity so that its pages become more easily findable, relevant, and popular in response to user search queries, and, as a result, search engines rank them higher.
Search engines encourage SEO measures that help both the user search experience and page ranking by displaying material that meets the user’s search requirements. Other SEO best practices include using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1), using descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and using schema markup to explain the meaning of the page’s content.
People use search engines to find what they are looking for on the internet. When seeking for information, whether it’s about a product, a restaurant, or a vacation, search engines are a good place to start. For business owners, they provide an excellent opportunity to drive relevant visitors to your website.
The process of positioning your website to show up higher on a search engine results page (SERP) in order to attract more visitors is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. Typically, the objective is to show up on the first page of Google search results for keywords that matter most to your target market. Therefore, understanding the requirements and desires of your audience is just as important to SEO as the technical details of setting up a website.
How do search engines work?
Search engines return results for any search term that a user types. To do so, they examine and “understand” the massive network of websites that comprise the internet. They use a complex algorithm to choose which results to display for each search query.
Why does SEO focus on Google?
To many people, the phrase “search engine” is synonymous with Google, which controls approximately 83% of the global search industry. Because Google is the major search engine, SEO is often focused on what works best for Google. It’s useful to understand how and why Google works.
What Google Wants
Google is meant to provide the greatest possible search experience to its users, or searchers. That involves delivering the most relevant results as soon as feasible.
The search phrase (user input) and the search results (output) are the two most important aspects of the search experience.
Assume you search “Mailchimp guides and tutorials.” This is a clear and unambiguous search. Google recognizes what you’re looking for and returns a useful page as the top organic result—Mailchimp’s homepage.
From Google’s standpoint, this is a very good search result and a pleasant user experience because the user is likely to click the first result and be satisfied with the results.
How Google Creates Money
Google benefits from customers trusting and appreciating its search service. It achieves this by providing relevant search results.
Google also allows businesses to pay for an advertorial placement at the top of search results pages. The term “Ad” refers to these listings. Google makes money when searchers click on these pay-per-click (PPC) adverts, which you may buy through Google Ads. These advertising will appear on more generic queries, in particular.
Aside from the little label, these search results appear remarkably identical to other search results. Of course, this is intentional, as many users click on these results without understanding they are advertisements.
This is what Google relies on. More than 80% of Google’s $279.8 billion in revenue in 2022 came from advertising. So, while search operations remain its fundamental product, the company’s revenue is derived by advertising.
Anatomy of Search Results
SERPs include both sponsored and “organic” search results, with organic results not contributing to Google’s revenue. Instead, Google provides organic results based on a site’s relevancy and quality. Depending on the type of search query, Google will display various items on the SERP, such as maps, photos, and videos.
The number of advertising on a SERP is determined by the search terms used. If you search for “shoes,” for example, you’ll probably get a lot of adverts at the top of the results. In fact, you’ll likely have to browse down the screen to get the first organic result.
A question like this typically generates a large number of ads because there is a high likelihood that the searcher is trying to buy shoes online, and there are numerous shoe firms prepared to pay for a feature in the AdWords results for this query.
The role of SEO
The purpose of SEO is to improve your rank in organic search results. There are various approaches to optimize AdWords, shopping, and local results.
While it may appear that having so many competing factors taking up real space on SERPs pushes organic listings down, SEO can still be a highly powerful and profitable endeavor.
Given that Google handles billions of search queries per day, organic search results represent a sizable portion of a much larger pie. And, while some initial and ongoing expenditure is required to achieve and maintain organic rankings, each click that directs traffic to your website is entirely free.
