Search Engine Optimisation - What It Is and Why It Matters

Chances are, you landed here today because of a search engine.

Google is of course the largest of these; in its 24 year existence, the leviathan search engine has grown to corner over 70 percent of the market, racking up a mind-boggling 8.5 billion searches per day!

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of a search engine to your business. When a potential customer decides to search for the product or service you are offering, you want your site to rank highly. If not, it will be drowned in a sea of countless other sites, and you will be invisible to your potential audience which, of course, means losing that vital sale to a rival business.

All straightforward so far, then, but how you go about ensuring your site appears near the top of the screen in a search engine result is not quite so obvious. This is where search engine optimisation comes in.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process by which you equip your site so that it ranks highly in online searches, therefore directing a higher traffic flow to it. This, in turn, increases your website’s popularity by means of the search engine’s algorithm. Sounds great. So how is this achieved?

A specialist in SEO will use several tools to achieve that high ranking. One of the most common is to use keywords in the text of your website. When your potential customer types those words into their search, your website will be among the first of those shown in the results.

Furthermore, websites with unique and original content tend to be ranked more highly by search engines than those which are more mundane, or show less originality. The SEO expert will work to ensure that your site features good, strong content, to ensure a higher ranking.

Good optimisation is a win for you as well as your customer: you benefit from an increase of website visitors - which will increase sales and keep those tills ringing – and the customer benefits from being directed quickly to a business which offers the goods and services they require.

Once your website is optimised, the results tend to be fast – you can generally expect to see a higher rate of visitors to your site within the space of three weeks.

At Swifsco, we have proven expertise in SEO. We ensure that the websites of our clients rank highly on Google and other search engines, making them more visible to their desired audience. If this is a service you’d like for your own website, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you soon.