What Is SEO and Do You Need It?

SEO is a fundamental element of your presence online, and if you’re interested enough to learn the basics of it, it can totally change the game for your agency, personal blog, or e-commerce store. While getting your name online is one task, a whole other side to it is making sure people see it and visit you. Without that, what’s the point of owning a piece of the web?

In this entry into our blog, we’re going to go in-depth explaining what SEO is and if you even need it. If you are looking to grow your business, make your brand more visible, or want more digital foot traffic, this article acts as the perfect starting point, delivering vital information and pointing you on a path that leads to success in all avenues of the digital era. Though no one likes to be bored learning the absolute basics, without this knowledge, you’re on a downward spiral that leads to nowhere. Soak up this information about SEO and you’ll see an open landscape that is all about organic growth.

What Is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviated term for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing various aspects of a website in an effort to improve the quality and the amount of traffic the website receives. SEO is performed based on the consideration of how search engines work. For instance, how algorithms dictate search behavior, what keywords people are typing into search engines, what they’re searching for, and more. To present an example, there is no doubt that you’ve typed in a product name into a Google search. The results that were displayed to you greatly depend on various factors. Why do you think Google recommended you one site over another first? Website owners optimize based on those factors that Google looks for. Knowing what those factors are is where Marketing Motiv comes into play. Contact us to learn more.

Search Engine Optimization

Once you’ve written an article, built a website, published a video, or even created a social media profile, any of them can benefit from search engine optimization. SEO is about perfecting pieces of the web so that they are more favored by search engines.

Search En-gine

“A program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.”

—Oxford Languages

In an article, you can follow structure guidelines, include just the right amount of headings, just the right amount of content, just the right amount of keywords, and if you’re lucky enough to have perfected these key factors that search engines look for, they’ll prioritize your website and display it first when someone searches for what you’re writing about. When that person searches and they find your article, that is called organic traffic. Organic, meaning it happened naturally and you didn’t pay for them to visit you.

And, it gets more advanced than that. The way you write your article can greatly affect how search engines rank it. For example, we could write this article with a bunch of advanced lingoes that search engines may find more relevant or not. However, we’re not worried about this page ranking high. We know that the difficulty is extremely high and we’re focused more on helping the clients that are already on our site, rather than trying to attract new ones. So, instead of writing for search engines, we’re writing specifically for clients so that they can better understand what we’re trying to teach. And, that’s what you have to decide when adding an article to your website — are you writing for a search engine or your client?

It’s possible to write for both search engines and your viewers, and that’s what we’ve perfected. There are times when we can choose to write for one or the other, or a mix of the two. No matter the case, search engine optimization can be used throughout any addition to the web that you create.

Link Building and Authority

Link building and the authority of your website is yet another key characteristic that goes into search engine optimization. Building links for your website is an indicator to search engines that a website is trusted, has value, or has authority, among many other factors. When a website links to you, it’s like them telling the search engine “hey, I trust this website, they’re reputable, and you should recommend them”. What if another website, with tons of authority and search engines love, recommended you? You would think that searches engines would be more included to recommend you, right? Well, they do, and that’s how link building and authority works. With the right number of links and using a diverse list of links in terms of both relevancy and authority, your website could greatly benefit from it, possibly landing you in the highest rankings.

Don’t just think that anyone can do this without the right knowledge, however. Get too many links too fast and search engines will think that you are buying them, and they definitely do not like for someone to try and cheat their system. Too many spam links (links coming from a site that is marked as spam) or too many links with the same anchor text, and you may even get your site penalized. It’s a tortuous game to play and the only way to win it is by playing by their (search engines) rules.

More Than Just Content and Links

There’s more to SEO than just content and links but those are the major components. SEO also involves just the right meta information, images, ALT text, social media, domain age, registration length, keyword in the domain name, domain history, and relevancy. There is a lot that goes into it, and sure, with the right amount of time, the experience, and the know-how, anyone can do it. Marketing Motiv is a company that was built so that entrepreneurs like yourself (assuming you’re here for SEO services for a business) can focus on the parts of your business you’re best at, while we handle the parts we’re best at. We eliminate the hassle and years of learning SEO to make the process of running your business as seamless and effortless as possible.

Do You Need SEO?

Yes, Absolutely! Anyone that owns a piece of the web can benefit from SEO. Without it, what you’ve created will never be seen. Roughly 93% of all web traffic comes through a search engine, and Google alone accounts for 40-60 billion searches in the US each month. You may get by with the little traffic you’ve generated from social media or word-of-mouth, but there is no comparison when it comes to the traffic that is being funneled through search engines. And, you can even advertise as well but then you’re faced with an ongoing bill. Once you stop paying, that traffic goes bye-bye. And then you’re back to square one. Organic traffic is the way to go, and the only way to achieve that is with search engine optimization.