Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ranking a website on the search engines to increase its visibility when users search for relevant keywords and queries. As you can increase the ranking of a site across a range of keywords, you will begin to see an increase in the organic traffic that it receives. Organic traffic is that which comes from Google's natural listings, rather than paid ads.

Yes, your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimization offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click. When you run PPC ads, you'll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). If you're able to rank your website at the top of the search engines, you'll benefit from a stream of traffic that won't have click costs associated with it, and that won't stop when ads are turned off. Rank organically, and you'll enjoy 24/7 visibility.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work? Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and these allow the search engine's algorithms to rank websites based upon the relevancy and authority of their pages. As Jason Barnard comments: Google is striving to recommend the most relevant answer from the most trustworthy source in the most appropriate format for its user. To succeed at SEO, you need to ensure that your content is the most relevant result for a specific search query and that your website is seen as a trustworthy source.

If you see your site’s web pages listed, you know that your site is indexed. Reasons why your website isn’t ranking could be that: Your site is new and hasn’t built up sufficient authority to rank for competitive search queries. You can’t launch a website and expect to rank for your target queries overnight; you need to demonstrate that you deserve to rank. Your content doesn’t match the searcher's intent or lacks in-depth analysis or quality compared to the pages that rank for the queries you’re looking at. You need to ensure that the pages you serve are at least as good as, ideally better than, what’s already ranking. If you don’t see any of your website’s pages listed, this means that it has not been indexed. Reasons for this could include: Your website is blocking search engines from crawling it (usually in your robots.txt file) or is instructing them not to index it (generally using noindex tags). Resolve these blocks, and you should see your site indexed. Your site has launched very recently (within a few days), and you have not submitted the site to Google or linked to it from anywhere, meaning it hasn’t yet been indexed. Set up Google Search Console and request indexing. Your site has received a sitewide manual penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is rare and unlikely. However, you would need to have been using some seriously black-hat SEO tactics for this to happen.

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends. Long gone are the days of launching a website, optimizing your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can't launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority. You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there. A good answer is somewhere between six months and one year, but this is very much based on the level of resources you allocate to your strategy, the level of competition, and what others who compete for the same queries are doing. It might only take a few months to rank for a local term (e.g., plumber in [location]), whereas it could take years to rank a new website for, let's say, the term "laptops."

Back in 2016, Google confirmed its top 3 ranking factors as links, content, and RankBrain. And in reality, optimizing for these factors means creating great content that other websites want to link to and that Google can understand as the best result for any given search query. But various ranking factor studies have delved deeper into Google’s algorithm to shine a light on those areas that have the most significant impact on organic performance.

A question that's always asked is whether a business should invest in SEO, PPC, or both. It's the age-old SEO vs. PPC debate. In an ideal world, a business should balance multiple marketing channels to avoid a reliance on any single source of traffic (and conversions). But, especially for smaller businesses, budget is often a challenge, and resources must be allocated efficiently. Funds aren't endless. Even in this instance, it's essential to balance a long-term SEO strategy with a small but targeted PPC campaign.

There's a common misconception that posting on social media helps increase your website's rank on search engines. Social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, but the links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure. Your shares across social media sites have no place in SEO rankings. Still, when more people share your content throughout social media, it generates social signals that indicate your posts are useful to your target market. While social media doesn't directly increase your search engine rankings, it indirectly affects and helps build your brand.