What is SEO and why is it important for business websites?

January 22, 2021

Search engine optimization or SEO is basically a set of keywords and protocols for optimizing a website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines, and essentially appear on the first page of the search results.

SEO is important for the success of any online business. It is the process to follow to increase the visibility of any website in search engines and get more traffic – without which a website may be outranked by other similar websites that will show up in the results when the keywords related to the intended website are used.

This is a crucial step for websites that are “live” or about to go “live” on the internet, especially the ones intended for business, because SEO helps the website developer and owner(s) understand what users and their potential customers are searching for online – this helps them decide how the existing content can be updated, to satisfy the users’ requirements.

Following good SEO practices is also a great way to increase the quality of a website by making it much more user-friendly, faster, and easier to find and navigate.

Apart from helping in identifying what users are searching for that is related to your products and services, making use of SEO to create content will also help in connect better with users’ requirements, and providing the right signals to search engine algorithms through various optimization techniques.

There are many search engines available today, and they serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their queries. People only have to type in few words to get results they need – and these words are crucial for the search engine to understand requirements and produce matching results.

So in simple terms, the websites which match these results or keywords will be those which have the right (SEO) tools to be able to match the users’ keywords with theirs and reach out to the search engine so that the search engine will pick these websites and include them in their results.

Now, according to research, the majority of search engine users (at least more than 70%) are likely to click on one of the top 5-10 suggestions in the search engine results, which will appear on the first page. Relatively, very few users click on the 2nd, 3rd or later pages of search results – as it is believed that the lower the result is, the lesser the accuracy.

Hence, the stronger and more precise the used keywords are, the higher the website will rank on the search engine’s results, and are likely to be found or clicked on by the users – and this depends fully on the way the SEO is done, and whether the right techniques and keywords have been used.

So this way, for any website, blog, or online store, SEO can help get free “targeted traffic” from search engines, and this in turn will increase the visibility of the website. For this reason, it is a crucial step for any business website or online store, to serve the purpose of business and digital marketing.