What is search engine optimization and why should you care?

How does your website rank on the search engines? Is it at the top of the first page? If not, you are probably missing out on a lot of potential customers, revenue, and increased brand awareness. This post will teach you what search engine optimization (SEO) is, how to optimize your site, and why you need to care if your site isn’t already ranked at the top of the first page on Google’s results list when someone searches your product or service.

SEO vs SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as natural, organic, or earned results. SEO isn’t an exact science, but it doesn’t have to be. As long as your content is relevant, easy to read, and contains keywords that are highly searched for on Google, Bing and Yahoo!, you will see results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) typically refers to using pay-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads with your PPC campaign management company in order to drive paid traffic from online search engines directly to your site.

Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console is a free tool that provides you with insights about your website’s search performance in Google Search. It also enables you to make adjustments to your site’s structure, content, and link strategy to improve its visibility in search results. Once signed up for GSC, it will give you access to a range of reports related to how your site performs on Google Search. If there are any errors or problems with the site that may be having an effect on search visibility, these will show up here. You can use the information provided by GSC to make changes as required.

Google Trends

This free tool can be used to see what people are searching for in any given place or at any given time. Google Trends provides a snapshot of how a particular topic has been developing over the past years, where it was most popular, and which search terms were the most popular. It can also be used to determine the popularity of different search terms at different times of day on different days of the year.

The data gives more weight to recent trends, so if you’re looking for more historical perspective, Google Trends might not be your best bet.

Google Search Central

Google Search Central (formerly Webmaster Tools) allows you to see how your website appears in Google Search results. It also provides useful data about your site, like who links to it, what keywords are used in search engines to find your site, who visits the most pages of your site, and more.

You can use Google Search Central to submit a sitemap for sites with a large number of pages or images. A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website in XML format.

Google Search Central also offers a variety of tools that allow you to find broken links on your site or discover which webpages people are using Google Search to visit.

Keyword Research

Search engines are the most important tool to drive traffic to your website. The trick is to get your site ranked higher than the competition. One of the best ways to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO).

Simply put, SEO optimizes your content for search engines in order to increase your site’s ranking for a given set of keywords, which can lead to more traffic coming from various sources including search, social media, and referral sites.

The first step in SEO for any business should be identifying what keywords they want their website to rank for. This can be accomplished using keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or similar. Once you have identified what terms you want your site to rank for, it’s time to start optimizing!