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What is SEO and how does it work?

It’s okay if you still don’t know what SEO is. You are not alone. 

In fact, over 50% of small businesses don’t have an SEO strategy too. And it’s not too late to start learning and using SEO for your digital marketing strategy.  

And even though most businesses have websites already, they thought they would rank better on Google just because their websites are “SEO-friendly”.

So in this post, I will try to explain what SEO is, how it works, and how it could benefit your small business. 

This post is for beginners who want to understand the basics of SEO without getting into complex strategies and technical details. 

Let’s get started.

What is SEO

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of making a web page rank better on SERPs (search engine results pages) like Google. 

So for example, when you try to search “car insurance philippines price” on Google, Google then provides two types of results, which are organic and paid listings.   

Organic results are unpaid listings that appear in SERPs and are by using SEO. And paid results refer to listings that advertisers paid for such as PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or also known as paid Ads.

The organic listings that appear on the first page of Google Search, don’t just magically appear on top and get selected by Google randomly in its database. 

It’s a result of optimization efforts which resulted in better rankings on search engines. And not just Google. There’s Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines out there.     

But is it really worth taking the time to optimize your site for search?  In the next section, I will share why everyone wants to get involved in SEO and why you should too. 

Why SEO is important

SEO plays an important role in digital marketing because you can reach lots of potential customers online. In fact, Google receives 8.5 Billion searches per day and is the largest search engine in the world.

Let’s take one of my projects, Magpainsure.com as an example.

If we were to rank our CTPL page on the first page of Google, we could potentially reach an average of 5,000 monthly users searching for CTPL insurance in the Philippines.       

How did I know that there are users looking for CTPL Insurance? By simply looking at Google Keywords Planner.

Now imagine if your business gets to the first page on Google and gets the top 1-3 rankings, that could mean more potential sales organically.

And the best part is that SEO is free. Unlike PPC, where you need to invest a substantial amount of marketing budget running ads.

But while SEO is free, it’s not totally free because it will cost you time (lots of it) and possibly investing in Premium SEO Tools to speed up the optimization process.  

And in some cases, if you don’t want to do SEO yourself, you can outsource it, and it can get very expensive to hire top-notch SEO Agencies. And still won’t have guaranteed results of a better ranking.

But if SEO seems to be a lot of work, is it all worth it? Absolutely. 

Here’s why.

When SEO efforts start to kick in, user traffic tends to be growing over time. And even the pages you’ve published for years already, could still rank very well on Google and bring you consistent traffic unlike PPC, where your traffic drops to zero once you stop paying ads. 

So does this mean that you should focus only on SEO and avoid PPC? Not necessarily.

Combining both SEO and PPC may be the best SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy that you should do for your business.

So for example, PPC is a great way to bring traffic to your website in the short term and to start getting traffic right away, while SEO can bring more sustainable traffic in the future.

How does SEO work?

In order for Google and other search engines to show your web pages on SERPs, they need to discover your pages through its web crawlers or spiders, and then save them on its database. 

Source: ECREATIVE

While search engines are great at discovering web pages on the web on their own, helping search engines would make this process faster and improve your rankings better. 

To better understand how SEO works, there are 3 types of SEO that you should know and that are all equally important for SEO strategy.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website such as crawling issues, site speed, and mobile responsiveness.

So for example, even if you have written the most compelling copy for your landing page, if Google can’t crawl it, no one is gonna find out about your product or services. 

And by simply following Technical SEO’s best practices such as submitting a sitemap on Google Search Console, could help Google understand your website structure better and index your pages. 

Here’s a checklist that you need to know for Technical SEO:

  • Submit a sitemap on Google and other search engines.
  • Make sure your website looks good on mobile devices.
  • Broken links – find and fix broken links.
  • Improve site speed –  Slow speed impacts user experience. You can improve site speed such as compressing images to reduce their size. 
  • Remove duplicate content – Having identical pages confuses the search engine on which page you want to rank for.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO may be the most impactful of all types of SEO because it focuses on optimizing the content itself. It’s where you publish high-quality content not just for people but also for search engines to understand as well.

Here’s a checklist that you need to know for On-Page optimizations:

  • Write unique and original content.
  • Break long paragraphs into short sentences for better readability and easy-to-digest.
  • Avoid keyword stuffing – It’s basically forcing keywords repeatedly even if it reads unnatural. This practice is called black-hat SEO. You should avoid doing this or else your site will be at risk of penalizing your site on Google.
  • Avoid using intrusive interstitials – These are things that cover your content making it harder for users to read like Ads and pop-ups.
  • Optimize your meta tags – Meta tags are snippets of text in a webpage’s HTML that provide information about the page’s content to search engines and website visitors, such as titles and descriptions.
  • Write alt text for images to help screen readers for visually impaired users and to improve image search on Google.
  • Internal linking – link pages to relevant topics within the website to improve site structure. 

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is a type of optimization that doesn’t happen directly on your site but impacts your rankings on Google. 

This is where you build a good online reputation by being a credible source and building relationships with other websites to improve domain authority

Domain authority is the measurement of your domain strength by acquiring links from other websites linking to your web pages also known as backlinks. 

Keep in mind that not all backlinks are good. There are spammy links that can do more harm than good to your site,  and you should avoid getting them.

Here’s a checklist on how to get good backlinks to your site:

  • Guest blogging – By writing for other websites, most website owners allow you to link back to some of your pages. This is a win-win for both parties because they get to have free blog posts and in return, you get a backlink that would help improve your domain authority.
  • Broken link building – This strategy involves finding broken links on other websites and identifying relevant content on your own site that could replace the broken link. You do this by approaching website owners and asking if they could replace the broken link with a link to your content.  
  • Write quality content – By simply writing high-quality content, your pages would get backlinks naturally over time without actively acquiring backlinks.
  • Avoid buying links – The practice of buying links is manipulating the search engines according to Google. Avoid buying links to prevent your site from penalizing partially or permanently.

Who should use SEO?

SEO is not exclusively reserved for big enterprises. What’s great about digital marketing is that it levels the playing field for all of us. So no matter the size of your organization, you have the same access to online tools and resources as the big guys. 

You should learn and do SEO if you:

Have a small business – You can improve local visibility and attract more customers searching for your product or services on Google.

Have an online store – eCommerce retail sales were estimated to exceed 4.1 trillion USD worldwide in 2024. And that’s a lot of stuff from people buying and selling online. 

You too can potentially reach a customer on the other side of the world with just a click of a button. Having an online store and optimizing for search engines would help you achieve more sales online. 

Starting a Blog – No matter how good your blog is, whether you are blogging for business or for personal growth, if you don’t rank better on Google, no one will discover your post. When blogging, always blog with SEO in mind.

Start a Digital Marketing Agency or Freelance Work – Most companies don’t have the time to learn and do SEO themselves. So if you want to help businesses by offering SEO services, then you need to learn SEO.

Start a career as an SEO Professional – While most people are not into starting a business, you can start and have a great career in SEO. And according to Indeed, the average monthly salary of SEO Specialists in the Philippines is ₱37,367.

Promote Nonprofit Organizations –  Having an optimized site for search engines is a cost-effective way to promote and gain visibility for your causes and initiatives. 

How to learn SEO

There are different ways to learn how to do SEO. You could start your own blog, take online courses, binge-watch on YouTube, join SEO communities, and read industry blogs like Search Engine Land.

Learning SEO seems to be a complex topic and doesn’t have to be. It just takes some practice. 

And don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results immediately. 

Keep in mind that it takes 3 to 6 months to start seeing results on search engines like Google.   

And when you start doing SEO for your site, the work never stops. Because once you reach the top spot on SERPs, you need to do ongoing optimizations by tracking progress and looking for areas of improvement. Or else, competition might overtake your place.  

Final thoughts

Now that you have a better understanding of what SEO is and how it works, stay tuned for more practical tips with SEO.

SEO has already helped countless small businesses with this cost-effective digital marketing strategy. And it’s never too late for you to join the party. 

What’s the next digital marketing topic you’d like to learn next? Share your thoughts in the comments below.  

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