The goal of online marketing is to attract traffic to a website and generate leads. This will help businesses grow the by converting these leads into paying customers. Since search engines are the major source of traffic for any website, it is important that we ensure that the website is featured prominently at the top of the search results to achieve maximum exposure.
In order for your website to be featured prominently, your website should come in the first or the second page of the search results. A survey has shown that over 75% of the visitors do not go beyond the second page of the search results at all. Hence, unless your website features at the top, almost 75% of your potential customers might never notice you at all!
The online marketing technique which helps you to rank better in search results is called search engine optimization (SEO). It is one of the hardest and the most important tactic of all online marketing efforts as it requires a lot of strategizing and creativity. So, it is imperative that you carefully select an in-house SEO team or appoint an SEO company to do SEO for your website.
SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC)
SEO is a technique that helps attract organic traffic and it does not require you to pay anything to the search engines in order to rank higher. PPC, on the other hand, is an advertising tool which allows you to pay the search engines to feature your ad in the paid search results. This requires you to run advertising campaigns through programs like Google AdWords or Bing Ads, etc. 8 Powerful Ideas To Increase The Click Through Rates Of Your Website
SEO, being an organic strategy is more competitive and complicated than running paid advertising campaigns. To gain high rankings in the organic search results, you need to optimize your website and provide a good experience to the users.
How Is SEO Done?
The users of a search engine search for certain words, known as keywords. Every company selects a set of keywords that are relevant to its business and thereafter competes to rank high for each of these keywords. However, SEO is not only about choosing the right keywords and filling the pages with those. If the page contains little or no relevant content, the search engines can notice this and will reduce the rankings, or even blacklist the website.
The companies must convince the search engines that they really want the users to get a great experience by visiting their website. They can do this by optimizing their websites by improving the code, putting appropriate titles and meta-tags, writing attractive content and improving the page load speed. All these will help in getting a favorable assessment from the search engines which will help them rank better and get noticed by people who have probably never heard about their business at all.
SEO Is A Continuous Process
You cannot do SEO just once and forget about it. It is an on going process. Like how fuel is constantly needed to powers the engine, SEO is needed to power your website on the search engines to rank higher. You must continue to create great content, optimize the pages and pretty much do everything that SEO involves. Only then will your rankings boost up and help generate traffic and leads.