What is SEO?

Website optimization – or SEO – is the practice of structuring your website’s pages to make it easier for search spiders to crawl your site, create an optimal user experience and provide unique information or helpful resources on a topic that searchers are looking for. This is all done in order to drive higher ranks in the SERPs – or search engine results pages. When you create content that is unique, informative, educational and optimized, you will likely find your pages naturally rising in ranks in the SERPs. This will drive both new traffic and more traffic to your site. 

Why do I need SEO?

As more businesses, more products and services, more education, etc. move online, there is a growing interest in learning SEO techniques and strategies with the hopes of ranking higher for important pages. We did some research via Instant to learn more about what users are hoping to understand about SEO. Below are some examples of growing search trends for topics surrounding SEO for beginners. We will answer these questions in the content below.

As you can see, there is an increase in interest around the basics of SEO. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely interested in performing SEO yourself and learning what exactly goes into the initial steps for optimizing pages of a website.

Statistics show that 28.5% of users click on the first organic SERP, 15.7% click on the second, and 11% click on the third. Less than 10% of searchers click on paid advertisements. Why? Because users don't trust them. Because of this, SEO is absolutely vital to the success of your website. 

Not only does SEO help the success of your site, though. Optimizing your site provides users with an overall better experience. For example, when you focus on page speed, a search engine ranking factor, Google will reward your site for loading quickly. On the other hand, search engines will also penalize your site for loading slowly. Slow loading pages, pages that don't provide valuable answers but are stuffed with keywords, an unresponsive website and more will get your site penalized and dropped in rankings via search engines.

Focusing on the overall health of your site will give search engines the opportunity to rank your pages well in the SERPs. 

Why is SEO important?

So, you might be wondering why SEO is important and if it is, is it important to your industry or business? The answer is yes. The organic channel makes up 53% of all web traffic and is expecting to rise above other search traffic, year after year.

Not only is the organic traffic channel growing, but there is no media cost for SEO. If that weren’t enough to interest you, SEO can provide substantial ROI. By creating unique content that is also well-optimized, you can increase your ranks. As they increase, you will drive traffic. The more traffic, the better your chances of converting a user to a customer.

While the organic channel continues to grow, it’s important for SEOs and digital marketers to grow with it. Learning the basics of SEO is imperative but also understanding the “why?” behind it is as well. Search engines like