What is SEO anyway?

You have no idea how many times I get asked this, and the different ways I have tried to explain what it is, and why it is so important. In fact, in some cases I've just given up. My mum, for example - I just let her believe I work for Google, and leave it at that.

But I'm kind of worried people think SEO is just some buzzword, like "Web 2.0", which by the way in my opinion sounds like a mysterious disease, like colic or IBS. You can just imagine your doctor saying "I'm sorry Sir, you have Web 2.0".

Back to the point: SEO is NOT a buzzword, it's not something you possibly should do to be keeping up with the Joneses. No, no, no sir! If you are serious about your online presence SEO isn't something you should consider - it's something you should most definitely do.

Ok, before you think I have totally lost my marbles and I get lost in a tangent, let me start with the basics, defining SEO:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it describes how you adapt and moderate a website specifically so that it is indexed and ranks highly within a search engine's organic (free) listings. See below for where the organic listings are.

To optimise (modify) your website to get traffic through the search engines (mostly Google as they own over 80% of the UK search engine market share) you need to know a lot about how the search engines work, and more importantly how the search engines' algorithm (the mathematical equation) determines which web page is more important than another. Now I'm not going to go into details on these techniques here, as that's a totally different tangent.

But WHY should you do SEO?

In essence, by ranking highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for keywords that are relevant to your business, you will get relevant and targeted traffic. Optimising your website for search engines is the simplest and most powerful way to reach an audience that is actively looking for your product or service. Now this is a really important part, yes they are already LOOKING for your product or service by searching through the search engines for keywords that describes YOUR business. How's that for already doing half the sales job!

Some stats

• 80% of Web users visit a search engine every day
  
• Search is responsible for 49% of online purchases
• In B2B, 93.2% of customers use the internet to research a purchase or service

Now, why you need to rank Highly!!

Just being listed in the search engines is NOT enough. If you are position 56 on Google for a chosen keyword you are not likely to get any traffic. Why? If you think about it, when you use the search engines yourself, how often do you go past the first page of Google when you have done a search? Exactly! You are probably more likely to change your search query/keyword before you venture to that horrible "next page" button. Who has time for that, right? Here are some stats on exactly that:

• 93% of users won't go past the first page of a search
• Less than 1% goes beyond the 2nd page of a search
• The top 3 positions in the organic results receive 80% of the clicks

Here's a diagram from a company called Enquiro visualising the click distribution of the organic search engine listings: