Today’s consumers have the luxury of searching the internet before buying a product or service either at retail level or online. Websites attain prime plots of front page search engine real estate thanks to paid advertising and non-paid organic search known as search engine optimisation or SEO.

SEO is a marketing technique used to improve your business. It is focused on optimizing site content in order to gain higher-ranking organic free search engine results. High-ranking organic results allow a website to become more visible to prospective customers on search engines such as Google. In laymen’s terms, SEO helps the search engine find your site allowing people to easily find your site in the search engine.

Google, the most used search engine on the planet, has a secret algorithm that determines search result order. The algorithm is based on over 200 factors including content freshness, age of the site, quality of content, and even the speed of the site. Google has bots or “spiders” that crawl across the web 24/7, indexing as much information as they can to provide the best search results on the internet.

Most people think that getting onto page 1 of Google is 100% of the battle but remember you’re competing with other relevant results and ads for their attention and click through. Make your listing stand out from all the others.

Here are a couple of ways that SEO helps you to both rank and compete with other organizations:

• Create a list of important, relevant keywords to your business
• Create compelling content that includes your primary keywords
• Obtain links from other sites including social media platforms
• Have a comprehensive sitemap built into your site
• Ensure you have clean code with web standard compression practices
• Make sure you have Title tags and Meta descriptions

Stay up to date with what kind of content your potential customers are looking for. By creating a great site with compelling content that is easy for people to read and share, you will start to see your ranking get higher and website traffic increase.