What is SEO?

“Search engine optimisation” or SEO for short, is the practice of improving your website to make it more visible in search engine results such as Google or Bing.

In short, the higher your website appears in organic (free) search results, the more people will see and therefore click on your website listing. The first position on a SERP gets around 30% of all clicks, but this percentage drops sharply the further down the page you go. Less than 1% of users even bother looking at page 2. Focusing on SEO and improving your ranking can therefore have a huge impact on your company’s visibility.

The basics of how search engines work.

Unlike paid listings, which are determined by ad-spend and bidding criteria, organic search results are chosen purely based on the relevancy, authority and customer experience of your site.

Search engines evaluate these factors by visiting sites using web crawlers often referred to as search engine bots or spiders. These bots will navigate through your website with a fine tooth comb. They’ll follow every link made available, storing information about each page in a central database known as an index. This information is then evaluated against a set of criteria, known as ranking factors, to assess the quality of your site relative to other websites within its index and is ranked based on that scoring.

As the web has become more advanced, search engines such as Google have taken to using external sources to evaluate quality too. Tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning now play a big role in how content is evaluated, helping search engines provide visitors with the user experience.