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According to 99 Firms, nearly 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines. Search engine marketing has the potential to generate awareness of your brand among potential customers.

The two types of search engine marketing are paid search marketing (typically using Google Ads) and search engine optimization (SEO). 

Interestingly enough, one statistic reported by SmallBizGenius states that 70-80% of internet searchers ignore paid search ads, making SEO a very powerful marketing tactic.

When done correctly, SEO has the potential to drastically increase your website traffic and, in turn, boost your conversion rates over time.

What is SEO?

If you’re a business owner that has never heard of the term “SEO” before, keep reading. If you’re a digital marketer, you may cringe at the mention of the term. It’s a subject that many marketers find difficult to fully understand.

At its core, SEO is the process of ranking your website to show first in the organic search results section of search engine results pages (SERPs). Scroll down to see an example SERP layout to see what I’m talking about.

In order to understand how to optimize your website for search engines, it’s important to first understand how results are ranked.

How do search engines rank results?

Simply put, search engines like Google or Bing aim to provide the best answer to search terms. Their main focus is user intent.

When you search for something in Google, the results page will look something like this:

As you can see, there are paid advertisements that show up first. These ad spaces are purchased by companies that bid based on certain keywords. Right now, we’re more focused on the results that show after these spaces: organic results.

Search engines crawl websites for content and catalog the information to be used at a later time. Then, when a search query is entered, the search engine will display results and order them based on a number of factors. The list of these factors is very long and ever-changing, but they can really be summed up in four “pillars” of SEO, according to Leanne Wong:

• Website / Page Content: When it comes to developing content for your website, the most important thing to remember is to create content based on user intent. This is more than just using keywords that you think potential customers will type into Google (which can help, but isn’t as important). Google will favor pages that it feels are most relevant and that answer the question that the searcher is asking. Additionally, it will use your website’s meta data, which are words and phrases found within the code of your website, to rank results.

• Website Authority: Google ranks websites based on their authority. Authority is based on a number of things, but one way to boost it is through backlinks. A backlink is when another website links to yours organically. You can build backlinks by simply creating awesome content that people want to link to, or by doing a guest post on another blog and hyperlinking to your own website.

• Technical Factors: This is where things get a bit more technical. There are a number of things you can do to ensure that Google can find your website in the first place. You need to make sure that Google can crawl your website by having a sitemap readily available. Also, make sure there aren’t any pages on your website that don’t have a link to them (these are called “orphaned pages”). Along the same vein, make sure your website contains no broken links, which are links that lead to pages that no longer exist.

• User Experience: This pillar focuses more on making your website more appealing to humans, but is just as important. Things like page speed, bounce rates, and time spent on pages typically correlate with SEO performance.

If you’re feeling kind of lost on how to implement these recommendations, don’t sweat it! I have a great list of tools to help you improve your SEO here.