What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

You own a website and you want to be seen on Google. The only way to appear as number one in the search results is to do SEO.

**What is SEO?** Search Engine Optimisation is organising your website so that it is search engine and user friendly — and in return, search engines rank your website higher in search results. SEO helps boost your visibility in search engine results, and in turn, helps your customers find you right at the time they have the highest intent to purchase.

More specifically, SEO is a series of tasks you as the website owner does on and off your site to make it easier for search engines to understand what your site is about, how popular and credible you are, how relevant it is to the search, how up to date it is, where you are, what you do, and whether users like using your site.

## Why do I need to do SEO? What are the benefits of SEO?

- **Be visible to new customers.** Google receives 60,000+ searches every second. By doing SEO you may be visible for some of these searches. - **SEO builds brand awareness** and helps you reach new customers without paying for advertising. - **SEO helps to build brand credibility** through networking. - **SEO helps provide useful information** to your audience at the right time — like answers to questions, or contact information. - **SEO improves the user experience** for everyone. - **SEO helps to maximise your other marketing activities.** If you plant a seed but the customer can't remember your name, SEO makes it easier for them to locate you.

## How does a search engine work?

Ever wonder why the internet is called the "web"? The internet is nothing more than a series of clickable links between web pages and other websites — and if you were to draw these links, it would look like a web.

Search engines use web crawlers called spiders to move around the web, documenting and saving everything they find. The spiders follow hyperlinks between web pages to discover new pages, content, article updates or newly new sites. Once a site is saved in their database, they use their sophisticated ranking algorithm to return and rank the best result for any user's search query, from most relevant to least relevant.

## How to do SEO without wasting time or money

To do SEO effectively, you need to understand why search engines like Google need you to do SEO and how the search engine business model works.

Google's business model is to show users the most relevant, high-quality results for any given search query. The better Google's results, the more people use Google. The more people use Google, the more Google can charge for advertising. So Google is highly incentivised to rank the best possible content.

This means: **create genuinely useful, well-structured content for real people**, and Google will reward you for it.