SEO is the short form of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. In simple terms, it is the process of making your website or blog appear on the first page of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
We shall use Google to represent the search engines on this article as it is the most popular of them all.
SEO is a process that involves linking your website with the phrases (Keywords) people are using to search for products/services on Google.
For instance, if am a Travel Agent, I would optimize my website with keywords/phrases such as ‘Honeymoon in Mauritius’. This phrase would help me attract honeymoon goers looking to visit Mauritius.
In a few words, SEO is the process of answering to questions people are asking Google and making it possible for Google to pick up the answer from your website.
Now that you understand what SEO is, you might want to know why you really need it.
The reason why many people don’t understand SEO is because they view it from a technological perspective. SEO in itself is a marketing tool which is used to drive traffic to your website. Your website should then be able to convert the traffic to prospects and thereafter buyers.
In every business, growth is usually driven by the marketing efforts employed by the department in charge. SEO should be among the efforts to drive this growth.
Studies have shown that a website is a revenue stream capable of bringing in 10 to 15% of revenue.
With this numbers, marketers and business owners can only ignore SEO at their own peril.
Most if not all serious businesses in Kenya are already online – meaning they either have a website running or have a presence on the various social media platforms.
This in effect has brought about a bigger challenge. How will my business be visible when many of my industry peers are on these platforms? How do I get the attention of my target audience from the noise of the internet?
Marketers and entrepreneurs are grappling with these among other questions in their pursuit to drive growth in their enterprises.
Therefore, the growth of your business is the sole reason why you need SEO as a strategy to increase your revenue through your website.
There are two main ways to optimize your website namely;
Am sure you have come across the word AdWords, if not, you will get to know it in a moment. Paid SEO is the process of bidding for keywords/phrases associated with your industry.
Once you bid for these phrases, Google will link them to your website. The top bidder of a specific phrase will appear on the first page of Google.
AdWords are the paid phrases/keywords submitted to Google via bidding.
Google gives priority to AdWords or paid keywords when showing results after a search. These results will have an ‘ad’ sign just before the link to the website.
If you keenly take note, the results with the ‘Ad’ sign are quite few. This means that to appear there you must bid higher than your competition.
Paid SEO therefore is the process of bidding for a keyword/phrase on Google Ads. The higher you bid the higher the chance of appearing at the top of the results.
Paid SEO is a very capital-intensive way of optimizing your website. At Lepoa, we recommend it only for short-term marketing campaigns.
Organic search engine optimization is the natural way of growing your website to the first page of Google. You might ask what we mean here by ‘the natural way’?
The natural way is using any means of getting to first page other than paying Google to show your website on the results.
Before we dive deeper in the workings of Organic/Natural SEO, let’s first crack some very important statistics.
Did you know that 70% of all visitors to Google and other Search Engines click on Non-Paid (organic) results instead of ads at the top of the page? These visitors have a disdain for adverts and consider them too pushy.
90% of all visitors will only browse the results listed on the first page of Google. About 60% of these will only visit the top 3 results.
From the above statistics, it is clear that being on the first page of Google is very important if you want to tap into the online market.
You will recall that we defined Organic SEO as the natural way of optimizing the website. The question begs, how do we actually achieve this? Below is the process involved in optimizing a website organically.
First things first, you will need a website. Just recently, Google algorithms changed and now user experience is one of the key factors in ranking websites. This therefore means your website must meet the user experience threshold set by the search engines.
A website with a great user experience will load faster, its design will allow the visitor to find information easily, will be responsive to all devices and much more.
Once your website is ready and hosted on your domain, then the SEO process can start.
The process will have to start with keywords research. The research will inform us on the most used phrases by visitors during search on Google and other Search engines. These keywords can be as many as possible. The important thing is to list all the possible variations.
As we proceed, think of Keywords as questions people ask Google in a particular topic.
Once we have the keywords ready, we now can ask ourselves of how to provide the best possible answers to these questions.
To do so, we have to create content that contains the best possible answer to the questions. This content can be in the form of an article, video, audio or infographics. A combination of all the content types is the best strategy.
Am sure you have heard of the term CONTENT MARKETING. The above process is what content marketing is all about.
During creation of the content, researched keywords/questions must feature prominently for Google to link the question with the answer.
Other processes involved in Organic SEO includes on-page optimization, off-page optimization, URL Structure among others.
Now that you have an insight of the various types of SEO, you may want to know which one to implement in your marketing efforts.
Your choice will be determined by a number of factors. If your marketing endeavors are for the short term, then paid SEO is your best bet.
For the medium- and long-term marketing, organic SEO is by far the best choice.
If you are marketing for the medium and longer term and cost is a factor, then organic SEO is something you might consider.
All in all, we would highly recommend organic SEO for SMES mainly because its much cheaper and as we found out earlier on, many people prefer organic results over paid results.
It can take from a minimum 90 days to a maximum of 12 months for your website to appear at the mountain top of Google and other search engines.
The difference in duration from one website to the another depends mainly on the competitiveness of the keywords associated with your industry. Other factors include the geographical scope of the target audience and the frequency of your SEO efforts among others.
Unfortunately, we do not have a definitive answer. This is because there are a lot of factors that will determine the cost of Organic SEO such as the ones listed above.
What we can state here is how the cost is structured. Normally this service is costed on a monthly basis for the duration estimated it will take to reach the top page of Google.
Once this goal is achieved, the client is at liberty to terminate the service or continue to engage us to maintain the results.
At Lepoa, the longest we can take to reach the desired results is 12 months. To get an actual estimate and duration, please fill in the form on the link below.
This is a common question we are usually asked. Yes, there is a return on investment from SEO marketing efforts. The only disclaimer is that you should consider SEO – especially Organic SEO as a middle to long term marketing strategy for your business.
As we had earlier indicated, your website can bring in 10 – 15% of all revenues only if its optimized well for the search engines.
Now that you understand what SEO is, you can now be able to make an informed decision on which type of SEO to undertake.
If you are still quite unsure, we are open for a face to face meeting where we shall take you through the entire process and answer your pertinent questions.
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