What is SEO and why do you need it?
The past year, for obvious reasons, can be counted as a period we won’t remember too well. In the business context, entire industries suffered due to the coronavirus, but the exception is the eCommerce industry, which grew by a good 30% year-on-year. As a result, many people have turned their thoughts towards SEO/SEM activities, seeing the Internet as an opportunity for further business growth. So it’s worth going back to basics and reminding once again: what is SEO and why is it worth betting on it? According to the portal 300gospodarka.pl, online trade turnover in Poland has reached 15 billion euros, and our country is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in Europe. So it’s hardly surprising that many people are choosing to set up new online stores, and owners of existing ones are investing in their promotion. SEO is an absolutely fundamental activity in the area of promoting a company website or e-store. Let’s expand on this term. Intuitively, we know that SEO means positioning of a website, but precisely speaking it is an abbreviation of the English phrase: Search Engine Optimization – or in Polish: optimization (of a website) for search engines.
Where can we position ourselves?
Let’s start with the general – SEO activities are carried out in terms of the search engine (most often Google, but let’s not forget that it is not the only search engine in the world) and its organic (or natural) results. Here we are interested in the so-called SERP (Search Engine Result Page), which is a page of results generated for a specific query. It is divided into a commercial area(paid Google Ads) and the aforementioned organic ones, i.e. being Google’s response to the keyword entered. In the case of natural results, the search engine is guided by an algorithm according to which it determines the order of pages in the ranking. It is worth noting at this point that this algorithm is dynamic and records regular updates throughout the year. Thus, the task of the positioner is to follow these trends and follow them to know what rules determine the order of sites in the results (and translate this into actions at the site).
What does positioning consist of?
I talk about SEO as I feel, and I don’t follow encyclopedic definitions, so I treated this post as a conversation with someone who wants to know what my work is about. If we already know that SEO is an activity aimed at getting a site as visible as possible in the search engine’s organic results – and it’s good to be as high as possible here for obvious reasons – then let’s take a moment to consider what exactly these activities consist of. In my opinion, the most general division to start with is:
On-Site Activities
Such activities concern everything we can do with the positioned site itself and everything related to its functioning. Nowadays, this area is much more crucial than even, for example, 5 or 10 years ago. This includes the following issues:
- Is the website responsive (adapted to mobile devices)?
- How fast does it work?
- Does it have unique content and how much of that content is there at all?
- Do keywords typed in by customers appear on the page?
- What is the structure of the content, such as whether there are H1, H2 headings, etc.?
- Are META Tags (Subpage Titles and Descriptions) set / optimized?
- Do the images have ALT attributes completed?
Optimization of a website includes a number of elements that affect the perception and quality of the website.
Generally, if the site is reasonably OK, the most work is related to content, or as we say in the industry: the content. However, the work of an SEO specialist is not just about weaving the right keywords into the texts on the client’s site. At professional agencies, each project should involve several people, including a copywriter who has experience in creating content for specific industries. An editor who knows how to balance the SEO aspect (presence and judicious placement of keywords) with the attractiveness and real usability of the texts is a real treasure. Content that is not created with a real audience in mind, i.e. that does not offer specific information and substantive content will not be effective in terms of SEO. Google takes into account, for example, the time spent on the website i.e. how much the article engaged the reader. SEO is not only about improving the performance of a website in the technical sense, but it is also additional activities related to copywriting and content marketing.
Off-Site Activities
Hooked on the issue of content marketing, we move on to the second major area of SEO efforts, namely Off-Site. In the main, it comes down to so-called Link Building, which can be implemented in a qualitative way along the lines of a content marketing campaign. In the PR industry, specialists often use the term , “opinion-forming” measured by the number of citations in the media. In the case of the SEO industry, such special importance is given to the number and quality of links – i.e. text or image hyperlinks – leading to the site you want to promote. Link building is, briefly, the acquisition of backlinks to a positioned site in order to increase its authority in Google and obtain a better ranking position in search results.
What additional services qualify as SEO in the broadest sense?
Advising a PR agency (how to use its activities for SEO) Technical administration and maintenance of the website Monitoring the status of the site (indexing) in Google Search Console Analytical reports based on Google Analytics Optimization of material on the Youtube channel Administration of Google Maps profile and adding news in it, and much more… In summary, SEO is a whole range of services, which will be provided in a comprehensive way by a whole team and not, for example, a single freelancer. Deciding on a wide range of SEO services is a very good idea if you want to succeed on the Internet. At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind how capacious a term SEO is and how much activity we gain by doing it systematically and in a full range of possibilities.
