What is SEO?
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 4:59 am
If you are new to digital marketing, you have probably already heard a lot about SEO, but do you really know what SEO is?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the “art and science” of driving targeted traffic from search engines to your website. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating quality content and optimizing it through specific keywords and generating backlinks.
In this post you will find:
Why is SEO important?
Organic traffic vs paid traffic
On-site SEO
Off-site SEO
How do search engines work?
And as a gift...a piece of advice!
Why is SEO important?
I'll be clear and concise: it's a huge source of traffic. Below I show you a crypto email database list graph of how web traffic has been distributed during the first half of 2019.
SEO-Q2
As you can see, 94% of searches are done through Google.
Let’s look at the importance of SEO with an example. Let’s imagine that your company is an office supplies company. According to Google, there are around 5,000 people in Spain searching for the term “office supplies” every month.
Now, if we consider that the first result on Google gets almost 20% of the clicks, that would mean that 1,000 people would visit your website every month “just” to be in the first position.
But let's quantify this, how much do those 2,200 visits cost?
Advertisers spend on average around €0.64 per click for this term (office supplies). This means that the traffic from those 2,200 people is worth approximately €640 per month. And this is just for that search term or keyword. If your website is SEO-friendly you can rank for hundreds and even thousands of different keywords.
Organic traffic vs paid traffic
The search engine results pages, in this case Google in particular, are divided into two distinct sections: organic results and paid results.
Organic search results (SEO)
SEO-Office-Supplies
Organic search results (sometimes referred to as “natural” results) are results that are ranked 100% on merit. In other words, there is no way to pay Google (or any other search engine) to rank higher in organic search results.
The search engine ranks organic search results based on hundreds of different ranking factors. But in general, Google considers organic results to be the most trustworthy, relevant, and authoritative websites or web pages on a particular topic.
The important thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about SEO we are talking about positioning your website as high as possible within the organic search results.
Paid Search Engine Optimization (SEM)
SEM-Office Supplies
Paid search results are ads that appear above (or below) organic results.
Paid ads (positions) are completely independent of organic positions. Advertisers in the paid results section are “ranked” depending on how much they are willing to pay for a visit. That cost is called cost per click (CPC) in advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the “art and science” of driving targeted traffic from search engines to your website. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating quality content and optimizing it through specific keywords and generating backlinks.
In this post you will find:
Why is SEO important?
Organic traffic vs paid traffic
On-site SEO
Off-site SEO
How do search engines work?
And as a gift...a piece of advice!
Why is SEO important?
I'll be clear and concise: it's a huge source of traffic. Below I show you a crypto email database list graph of how web traffic has been distributed during the first half of 2019.
SEO-Q2
As you can see, 94% of searches are done through Google.
Let’s look at the importance of SEO with an example. Let’s imagine that your company is an office supplies company. According to Google, there are around 5,000 people in Spain searching for the term “office supplies” every month.
Now, if we consider that the first result on Google gets almost 20% of the clicks, that would mean that 1,000 people would visit your website every month “just” to be in the first position.
But let's quantify this, how much do those 2,200 visits cost?
Advertisers spend on average around €0.64 per click for this term (office supplies). This means that the traffic from those 2,200 people is worth approximately €640 per month. And this is just for that search term or keyword. If your website is SEO-friendly you can rank for hundreds and even thousands of different keywords.
Organic traffic vs paid traffic
The search engine results pages, in this case Google in particular, are divided into two distinct sections: organic results and paid results.
Organic search results (SEO)
SEO-Office-Supplies
Organic search results (sometimes referred to as “natural” results) are results that are ranked 100% on merit. In other words, there is no way to pay Google (or any other search engine) to rank higher in organic search results.
The search engine ranks organic search results based on hundreds of different ranking factors. But in general, Google considers organic results to be the most trustworthy, relevant, and authoritative websites or web pages on a particular topic.
The important thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about SEO we are talking about positioning your website as high as possible within the organic search results.
Paid Search Engine Optimization (SEM)
SEM-Office Supplies
Paid search results are ads that appear above (or below) organic results.
Paid ads (positions) are completely independent of organic positions. Advertisers in the paid results section are “ranked” depending on how much they are willing to pay for a visit. That cost is called cost per click (CPC) in advertising.