If you are a business owner with an online website, you would have probably heard about the term “SEO” many times. SEO refers to “Search Engine Optimization.” People talk about it like it’s a magical tool that can cause your company or business to gain a massive amount of new customers and viewer hits on your website. 

Is there any validity to this belief? How does SEO even work, and how much of a difference does a search-optimized website actually make for a business’s growth? It is precisely these questions that we are going to answer today. 

What Does SEO Claim to Do?

Before we can truly answer the question of what SEO does, it is important to answer why businesses choose to use such a service. 

Almost every business has one main, singular goal in mind.

Growth.

Conventional approaches to growing a business have included marketing in the form of advertisements of different types and providing quality products or services that outdo the competition at a better price.

Search engine optimization is but one more tool that businesses use to achieve the same goal. However, there is a small difference in the way that search optimization helps.

SEO doesn’t directly lead to sales and growth by talking about the quality and value of your product. Instead, it makes it easier for potential customers to find out and become aware of your business’s offerings.

This aspect of increasing business awareness on the internet is one of the chief goals that search engine optimization aims at. The Internet is a big, big place that’s filled with millions of websites. 

When you launch a business website, you need to remember that you are not competing for visibility with businesses that are just your city or country but from every single part of the world.

Search engines have a number of complex algorithms that they use to decide which websites offer quality content and are able to satisfy users. SEO is a process of optimizing your website so that these algorithms can recognize it as a high-value source of information and raise its ranking amongst other websites.

This has the effect of allowing users to find your website much more easily since it now sits higher up on search results. 

Being higher up leads to more visibility, and more visibility leads to an increase in potential customers. This is essentially the crux of SEO and why businesses pay so much attention to SEO. 

SEO Does Deliver Results but With a Caveat

There shouldn’t be any doubt that SEO provides results. Let’s get that notion straight right off the bat. 

Large businesses and companies spend tons of money on hiring digital marketing teams or on training their own in-house teams, where SEO is one of the core marketing tools. These companies wouldn’t be paying big money for something that doesn’t offer good returns.

Some SEO techniques can really provide amazing results. Local SEO is one strategy that focuses on improving a business’s visibility in a local geographic area and can be extremely effective. 

If you are a business that is based out of a particular city, local SEO service will work on optimizing aspects such as your Google My Business profile, building local citations and local backlinks relevant to your city, and focusing on getting positive reviews from customers.

Businesses that invest in local SEO have a more comprehensive online profile. This is essential as 88% of searches for local businesses convert to a call or visit to the business within the next 24 hours.

Local SEO is but one technique. There are a number of other approaches that each offer unique advantages, such as Technical SEO, On-page, Off-page SEO, E-commerce, and enterprise SEO.

The most important part of getting results, regardless of what type of SEO is used, is the need for quality SEO implementation. That’s right; there is such a thing as good and bad SEO.

The Balance Between Good and Bad SEO

It’s easy to feel scammed when you invest money in SEO but then fail to see actual results. People tend to jump to the conclusion that it is a scam or that its effectiveness has been exaggerated. This often happens when businesses hire inexperienced SEO service providers that implement SEO strategies poorly.

Good implementation legitimately provides great content and helps improve visitors’ user experience of your website. 

This is done by ensuring your website contains well-written and high-quality content that includes relevant keywords, backlinks to reputable and high-authority websites, optimized for mobile users, and other strategies that go a long way in making your website enjoyable.

Poor implementation of SEO, on the other hand, relies on trying to game the algorithm by stuffing keywords everywhere and spamming too many links and advertisements. Bad SEO implementation also has the danger of negatively impacting the website’s ranking, as search engines don’t like it when people try to take advantage of algorithms. 

Conclusion 

SEO is not a box to check once everything is finished but should act as a framework around which quality web content is designed. Businesses that create SEO-optimized content definitely have an advantage compared to those that simply offer a product or service and hope it sells.