What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a web content strategy whose objective is that our pages appear, in an organic way (without paying ads), in the first results of search engines like Google.
By working on our content based on SEO, we will be helping search engines to understand what our pages are about and, in this way, will know in which user searches to show them.{{cta(‘bb2971b9-bf36-4c36-8edc-75223dba5208’)}}}Create content for your users.
Since SEO was born, we could say at the same time as search engines in the early 90’s, there have been many changes that have forced us to stay constantly updated on new algorithms, as was the case of Penguin or Google’s Panda. And these updates have meant that SEO has little to do with what it was in its beginnings, although its objective remains the same: to appear in the first results of search engines.
As we have said, SEO has changed a lot since it first appeared until now. In the beginning, creating content for the sake of creating content was enough to appear in Google’s results. Duplicate content was not a problem and Google bots simply did not have the ability to crawl information as accurately as they do today. What the engines wanted at that time was content, regardless of its quality.
That is, a website with content, whatever it was, even if it had nothing to do with the website’s own business, worked for Google. Today, search engines have evolved to the point of understanding synonyms, search intent and even trends.
We could say that used to create content for Google and now we create it for users. Today SEO is about creating content for the user, for our audience. And our user is the same as Google’s user and, the search engine par excellence, lives off them. That’s why he wants to offer you the best results!
Relevance and authority. Key SEO factors.
There are many factors that determine whether or not a page will appear among the first results. Is it a mobile-friendly website? Is the off page SEO well worked? Does it contain videos or images? And a host of other conditions.
But what we want to make clear to you today is that the relevance of your content and the authority of your website are two key factors that Google will take into account to position you among these top results.
- Authority. The more popular (more visits) a website has, the more Google will understand that it is a website of interest to its users and that it responds to their needs. It is the fish that bites its own tail, the more visits, the more visits. The authority of a website is based on the user’s own experience. Based on this information, you must be very clear that it is important to share content of interest to your users, answering their questions and needs. Your users are in charge.
- Relevance. It is about how related a web page is to a certain search. If we have a shoe company, but to position in the first results we talk about another topic that we believe will have more hook, what will happen? Exactly. When a user clicks on our content thinking that he has found what he was looking for and sees that, in reality, what we sell are shoes, he will quickly leave our website. This will make Google understand that our content is not relevant to that particular search.
In short, work correctly the content of your website and your blog, focusing on responding to the needs of your target audience and following the necessary SEO techniques. You can’t miss it!
Difference between SEO and SEM
There are two types of SEO. On the one hand, we can work on a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy by creating content of interest to our target audience based on keywords (keywords) that they are looking for on the network. This is also known as organic positioning.
The objective of an SEO strategy is to appear in the first search results of our potential customers. Ideally, you should be in the top three organic results or at least in the top ten (first page). Rarely will a user go beyond the first page of results.
On the other hand, SEM positioning (Search Engine Marketing) consists of investing in ads (Google Adwords), betting on certain keywords to appear in the first positions of certain searches. This investment in Ads can be sustainable in a short period of time or for a specific campaign, but it is not a strategy that can be used in the long term unless we are talking about large companies with a very high investment capacity. There is more and more competition in Google Adwords and the cost per click can be very high for certain keywords of interest.
If we were to stay in that first result for a long period of time through pay-per-click (Google Adwords), we could end up spending thousands and thousands of euros per month. All this multiplied by each of the keywords we want to keep in that first position.
Finally, I would simply like to point out how an Inbound Marketing strategy worked through SEO will present an always gradually ascending curve of visits. This is what we know as the Inbound curve.
On the other hand, if we were to look at an SEM curve, we would notice large peaks in visits at certain times (when we are investing in Google Adwords) but, as soon as we stop making this investment, the downward spike is just as drastic.
In this article Inbound Marketing Guide for SMEs’. you can learn more about Inbound Marketing, a methodology that works with a SEO positioning strategy to attract users to the website, convert them into leads (sales opportunities) and, finally, into customers and promoters of your brand. We encourage you to continue learning about this topic!
