SEO means Search Engine Optimization
🔎 SEO Optimization is an advanced digital marketing strategy focused on increasing the visibility and dissemination of websites, online stores, blogs and portals, by leveraging keywords related to Google searches about the products, services or information presented on your website.
How does SEO work?
📊 In practice, through SEO techniques we will be able to increase the number of people who visit your website (real people who are really interested in what you present on your website) and become aware of the existence of your business.
As a result, we will be able to obtain an increase in the number of customers and sales, including phone calls and real visits, if your project is not only online.
🥇 The SEO optimization service and its various techniques make it possible to improve the position that your website appears in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others, putting your business ahead of your competition.
Step-by-step SEO: learn about the main cycles.
1. On-Page SEO:
Optimizations performed on each page of the site, in order to improve the overall user experience, improve the content and consequently improve visibility in search results.
These are improvements to titles, texts, images, layout and other elements that directly impact the user experience and the quality of a page for search engines such as Google.
2. Technical SEO:
Optimizations and corrections done on the server and on the website in order to improve the performance, speed and security of the project.
Technical SEO optimizations are almost always ignored by all agencies and freelancers, who deliver “beautiful” websites but full of mistakes invisible to the average user. Many of them are not even aware that they are making such mistakes.
Technical and performance errors are often responsible for making your site “disappear” from search results. After all, Google doesn’t like poorly designed, slow, and dirty websites.
How do I know if my site has technical problems?
If you think your visibility in Google is suffering, take the test in this tool from Google itself, called PageSpeed Insights:
3. Content Marketing with an SEO Focus:
We know content marketing as planning texts to be displayed on your website. When we align content with SEO strategies, we can transform simple texts into true sales pages, with the potential and relevance to appear at the top of Google results
4. Off-Page SEO & Link Building
Strategies performed outside the website, which involve several actions in other partner websites and blogs, influencers, business directory sites, social networks, among several other external channels that can be used to enhance the visibility of your project online and offline.
These are just a few of the many steps in an SEO project, some of them one-off, others that need to be performed constantly to increase results.
Want an SEO proposal? Click here.
SEO Glossary:
Now we will explain other important SEO-related terms.
What is a keyword?
Keyword in SEO, is nothing more than a very important word or phrase related to a business, product or service. We can also describe keyword as that text that the user types into Google search. See the practical example below:
To get to this article about SEO that you are reading, let’s assume that you searched on Google for the following: “what is seo“. That term “what is seo” is a keyword, also called a key term or keyword phrase, because it is composed of more than one word. Therefore, a keyword can be either a single word or a set of words.
One more example of SEO in Portugal using keywords: 🍕
Let’s suppose you want to eat a pizza and you live in London. You open Google’s website and type in “pizzerias london“, right?
“pizzerias london” is a keyword, which generates as a result in Google a list of several restaurants that make pizza in the city of London.
Still in this example, let’s suppose you don’t eat meat, but love pizza… What keyword would you Google to find the pizza of your dreams? If you thought “vegan pizzeria london” or “vegetarian pizza london“, you got it right!
Ok, but how does this list of results appear there? Who defines the order? Why does Homeslice Neal’s Yard appear in the first results and several other excellent pizza restaurants in London do not? Well, it is all due to the use of SEO strategies (or the lack of use of them)…
In this example about pizzerias, even more specific for geo-location, the responsible for the success is a sub-strategy of the SEO service that we call “Local SEO”, because the keyword has a location indicator (london) and can thus potentiate local results. But this is a topic for another article…
Alright, we understand what a keyword is! Let’s now understand what organic traffic is and how it relates to SEO.
What does traffic mean in marketing?
Traffic is the technical name we give to the people who visit a website. Thus, the daily traffic of a website means the number of people who enter your website in one day. Likewise, the monthly traffic of a site, means the amount of visitors that have entered your site in that month. Easy to understand, right?
Organic Traffic in SEO: What does it mean?
Well, there are several types of traffic that we explain in this article, but when we talk about organic traffic we are only talking about the traffic that a site receives from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, among others.
The sites mentioned above are categorized on the Internet as “search sites” or “search engines,” because they are sites that users use to search and find the answers within other sites.
So when users search on Google and eventually discover and enter your website, they are generating organic traffic. This is the most important traffic used as a KPI of an SEO optimization project.
What are the other types of traffic in marketing?
As said before, there are several types of traffic that generate visits to your site. Besides organic traffic, which we have already talked about above, the other most common and well-known ones are:
- Referral Traffic: happens when someone accesses your site through a click on another site (excluding clicks on search engines). For example, if a blog talks about your product, service or company, and links to your site, this is a link that refers to your site, so it generates referral traffic.
- Paid Traffic: is the traffic generated from online ads, Google Adwords Ads for example, or ads on social networks as well. Simple as the name says, it happens when someone clicks on a text ad or a banner ad, and when they click, they come to your site. By “winning” this visitor to your site, you have to pay for the click that was given in the ad channel.
- Social Traffic: people who have come to your site through natural posts made on Facebook, Instagram or any other social network are considered “social traffic”.
- Direct Traffic: if someone knows your site’s address and types it directly into Internet Explorer, without going through any “search engine”, it will be considered direct traffic. It happens a lot when we hand out a business card or flyer where we have the website address written on it (example: www.thekeyseo.com) and the person types this address directly into the browser.
- E-mail Traffic: as the name implies, it is traffic generated from clicks on an e-mail. Do you know when you receive those newsletters from online stores with products and click to see the promotion? Well, by clicking, you are generating e-mail traffic.
- And there’s more…
However, at this point, we are not going to explain each of the traffic types in detail, because they do not matter for you to understand what SEO is all about…🙂
But it is good to know that SEO is related to strategies made for all kinds of traffic and not only organic traffic, as they say.
What are conversions in marketing?
To keep it simple, Conversion or Goal is the name given to a goal realized by a user, who enters your site and does some action that was already supposed to be done by them. This is an action expected by whoever planned the site’s marketing strategy and inserted, in the site’s code, ways to track that the goal was completed.
Look at this example: I am an SEO Consultant and perform website optimization services. So, my business goal is for a user to come here to my site, read an explanatory text like this, get interested in SEO services, and then fill out the contact form or call my cell phone for a quote.
Well, above I just set two goals:
- fill in the contact form
- call my cell phone
If a user accomplishes any of the above goals, he becomes a conversion.
In other words, the simple website visitor was converted into a potential customer.
Another simple example of conversion exists in online stores, which sell various products through online ATM payments, referrals and others.
The goal of the online store is to sell a product.
If a visitor enters the online store, reads about the product, likes the product and makes a purchase, it becomes a conversion, as they have been converted from a visitor to a customer.
Now, can you understand better what SEO is?
Returning to my initial explanation, now that you know other terms related to SEO, we can say that SEO is an advanced marketing strategy to promote your website online or your physical business on the internet, through the enhancement of keywords (related words to your business, product or service).
As a result of the strategies of an SEO service, your website will rise in positions on Google (or any other similar search site), it will appear at the top of the results, surpassing the competition, generating more traffic and more conversions, in other words , turning visitors into real customers or sales.
