Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for increasing traffic to your website organically without the use of Google AdWords. Simply put, the way SEO works is through specific ‘keywords’ on pages within your site, however, there are also other aspects to SEO like the way external sites link to your web page. SEO can often be rather simple, by structuring your web pages in such a way that Google can Crawl or Index them easily.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimisation is the use of specific keywords, external links and content structuring, to drive organic traffic to your website. When users are in need of a particular service, product, or any form of query 9 time out of 10 they will use a search engine to find their solution.

The user will type into the search bar which is called a search query, each word the user types is a ‘keyword’ and once the user has searched their query, the search engine will crawl all websites to find the most relevant search results.

If your website matches the search query and has effective SEO your website will be organically displayed as a relevant search, without the use of paid AdWords. The more often your website is shown and clicked into, the more often the search engine will recommend your website for relevant searches.

Why do I need SEO?

When users land on your website, the majority of this traffic is driven by search engines. Google is the biggest source of website traffic accounting for 95.39% of the Australian market share. Nowadays, we have social media at our disposal to help drive traffic and generate visits to your website, but search engines still reign supreme for overall traffic.

Users can reach your site through Google by searching for keywords that relate to your particular service, product, information or any form of value your website will provide. SEO is a great method to introduce if you’re looking at increasing traffic to your website, as SEO can provide free targeted traffic without the use of AdWords.

If you don’t implement an SEO strategy, search engines will have a hard time finding your website, and you’ll be missing out on potential sales and opportunities as users are unlikely to scroll through endless pages of Google search results to find your site. Targeted keywords and clever website content can increase traffic to your site, investing in SEO can have an incredible ROI for your business.

Indexing and crawling

The world wide web is like a massive roadmap with each destination being a website, the search engines have two main functions – Crawling and building an Index. These functions help Google and search engines find your destination and displaying relevant website listings for search queries.

This is because once a search engine finds your site, they store all the pieces of content and keywords you have on your site into massive databases, to be displayed when needed. Once a user searches a query, the search engine will provide the most relevant answers by sorting through the databases, these results are displayed instantly.

Do I need to appear on the first search page?

The simple answer is yes. A 2014 study from Advanced Web Ranking states that more than 67% of all users will click the top 5 site listings displayed on the first page of results. Research also shows that the first page will receive almost 95% of all web traffic, leaving a measly 5% of traffic for the remaining pages. Once a user is presented with their most relevant search, it likely the user will click through to that website to find an answer to their query, and this can potentially lead to a purchase of the product/service etc.

You want your website to appear at the top of the page, to increase the likelihood of visitors clicking onto your page to get in contact with you, not your competitors. Users don’t want to scroll to search for more results, so the higher your website is in the organic search results, the higher your click-through rate will be.

Now you have the understanding of what SEO is and why SEO is so important for organic traffic, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have it. Here’s a little tip to get you started, when it comes to introducing SEO to your website, design for both end users (Humans and Bots) to ensure maximum SEO results.