More Visibility, Traffic & Sales with SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) has long since become a vast and rather important discipline in online marketing for anyone who has a business to manage online. It has the goal to let own relevant contents appear on prominent positions and improve visibility and findability on search engines.
Why is SEO so important?
Firstly, for many companies Google or search engines are the most important channel for attracting users to their own website. Users who come via search engines are usually highly motivated to reach the desired goal on your site. After all, the users have entered a search term that led them to your website.
This means search engine optimization is most likely the most important channel for acquiring new customers. Sustainable search engine optimization usually also leads to sustainable sessions. A once achieved position for a search term is usually very stable, if the search engine optimization was built sustainably and user-oriented.
When users come to your site, this is called traffic. The traffic that comes to your site through paid advertising is called paid traffic, and the traffic that comes from unpaid activities is called organic traffic. In both cases, users have searched for a term on a search engine. In the case of organic traffic, however, they then clicked on one of the non-paid search results.
This unpaid organic traffic is what SEO is all about, because being found on Google with your page on a relevant topic can bring you a lot of visitors to your website. Especially if you are in position 1 or 2 on Google for a frequently entered search term that describes your product or service with as little wastage as possible.
In addition to the ranking and the search volume on the term, it is therefore crucial how high the match is between the search term (keyword) selected by the user, the search result presentation (snippet) and the relevance of the landing page. Search engine optimization is sustainable when the user can efficiently solve his task on the website.
The goal of search engine optimization
The goal of SEO is therefore not simply to be at the top. Search engine optimization has the goal to be represented with relevant pages on good positions in the relevant search engines for relevant search terms.
So the better a website ranks under a search term, the better its visibility, the higher the click-through rate, the more visitors can be recorded and, ideally, the greater the turnover. And in the end, it’s all about optimizing sales or at least increasing awareness. In order to not get lost in the pool of billions of websites and to be noticed at all, one uses search engine optimization.
The different areas of search engine optimization
SEO is multifaceted — just like all disciplines of online marketing. The measures of search engine optimization are roughly divided into on-page and off-page optimization.
On-page optimization includes everything that should be considered when designing, creating and maintaining a website. This includes, for example, the URL structure, meta information such as title and page description, the marking of headings, keyword density, alternative texts for graphics and — very important — mobile friendliness.
Off-page optimization includes all external factors that influence the ranking. These include above all the number and quality, i.e. relevance, of incoming links and social signals, i.e. mentions on social networks.
In terms of content, with SEO you deal with the content of the pages themselves, their headline structure and text-based optimizations, as well as meta data (title tag & meta description), general page architecture, use of media such as images and videos, internal linking and local SEO for companies that want to improve their online presence for specific locations.
From a technical point of view, the optimizations often focus on the user experience. So the technical part deals with the optimization of the loading speed (page speed), the optimizations for mobile devices and the efficient crawling and indexing of your pages by the search engine crawlers, so that everything lands in the index that should land there.
The various optimizations then represent either direct or indirect ranking factors, i.e. they flow to varying degrees into the evaluation of the relevance of a page by search engines such as Google or Bing. Both sub-areas go hand in hand and always pursue a common goal — better rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
