What is Search Engine Optimization?

As a new or small business, it can often be difficult to determine which actions are most important to take on a weekly or even daily basis. We’ve all felt the pressure of there just not being enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you’ve recently created a website for your business, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization. But what is search engine optimization and why is it an important piece to consider when managing your business online? 

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. By “quality of traffic”, we mean people that are actually interested in buying what you’re selling. And by “organic search engine results”, we mainly mean results generated from someone asking Google about your product, service, or industry. 

Since most search engine results begin with Google, we’ll continue to use it as our baseline. Google has what they call “crawlers”, which go out and crawl the internet looking for the most relevant information and deciding how each website, page, and article rank in terms of quality, which they call indexing. This rank determines the order you see websites show up in a search, and essentially determine whether someone will see your content or not. As we all know, no one typically makes it past page 1 of search results on a search engine. This is why SEO is so important. 

The other thing to note here is that organic search engine results are free! It’s a way to drive traffic to your website without paying for advertising, or an event, or a trade show, in order to get leads. If done well, it can actually sustain the majority of your business leads!

Search Engine Optimization Factors

You might be wondering, what are the elements of SEO? What do I need to consider when putting my website together? There is a reason why SEO has become an entire job title in our digital world. The search engine optimization process can take a long time, and it involves hundreds of different factors. We’ll give you a few examples of these factors to get you started thinking about it.

Technical Search Engine Optimization: This type of SEO involves the aspects of your website that you have direct control over, and therefore should be addressed first. It involves factors such as speed (Google wants to drive people to a website that loads quickly), mobile-friendliness (make sure your site is optimized for mobile use), code quality, and security.

Content Optimization: Every piece of content you put on your website should be optimized for SEO, whether it be the About Us section, the homepage, or a blog. Google will search for meta titles, rich content, and internal linking, in order to determine the quality of the content.

Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO refers to factors outside of the website that can affect its ranking. These include inbound links (relevant websites that link to your website), social signals (people sharing your website on social media, giving it legitimacy), and even unlinked brand mentions, where your brand is mentioned elsewhere online without even needing a link.

Bloomtools can help to get you started on your Search Engine Optimization journey with our SEO services like performance audits and strategy development.

Learn more and talk to us about how we can help your business with its SEO marketing needs today.