What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And How Does It Work?

Let’s start by asking an obvious question: what exactly is SEO? 

Well, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position on search results pages. 

Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.

SEO Perth is not just an organic ranking factor. SEO can be paid. From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search. 

Position

The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine 

results pages and organic results appear beneath them. 

Time

Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you get near-instant results, sometimes in minutes; whereas, with organic search, results take more time – often weeks, months, and even years. 

Payment

When it comes to paying, well, as the name suggests, with paid search traffic is paid. You pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. What that means is, that you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. And with PPC ads you can set up campaigns based on keywords or topics relevant to your business so that when someone searches for those keywords or topics, they see your ad at the top of the results page(s).

ROI

In terms of the return on investment or ROI, it’s actually much easier to measure with paid search. That’s partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics. However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.

Similarities between paid and organic search

Keyword research: You use a search engine for both paid and organic searches, and both require a user to enter a keyword. So, you need to do keyword research for organic search and paid search.

Landing pages: Both types of searches require you to create landing pages. For local SEO Perth, the landing page needs to be connected to your website. For paid search, it can be the exact same landing page you use for organic, or it can be a completely separate stand-alone page that sits off your website.

Traffic: Generating traffic is a major goal of both paid and organic search. Most importantly, both paid and organic search traffic includes user intent. That is, someone is asking something specific like “find cheap flights” or “buy my favorite brand of chocolate”. You might think of these as very different types of traffic (e.g., one being travel-related), but they have one thing in common: 

They’re all driven by users looking for something specific within your site or product offering!

How Do Search Engines Work?

Step 1: Crawling

Search engines crawl web pages by following links they’ve already discovered. So, if you have a blog post and it’s linked from your homepage when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link to follow and may follow the link to your new blog post. In general, the more links on a page the better. This means that Google loves websites with lots of inbound links from other sites.