SEO seems to be a buzz word these days and gets flung around like it's something everyone understands in depth and prioritizes as much as marketers and web developers do. As a digital marketer and web designer I often fall into this trap myself more often than not...so you won't find me on a any high horse any time soon!
What is website ranking?
Website ranking refers to how high your website ranks in search engine results. Simply put; if someone searches for something related to your industry the search engine will provide them with a list of results relating to their search, website ranking refers to how high up on that list you appear.
Why is website ranking important?
Let's be honest; how often to you go to page 3 or 10 of search results when you are looking for something? That's why every website owner's goal should be to appear on the first page of search results. The higher up you appear on the list the more likely you are to get visitors to your site that are actively searching for your products and services. On average only the first 8 top performing/most relevant websites appear on first page search results and those include paid adverts. Having a great website that ranks low on search results is like having an amazing car that you leave parked in the garage-no one ever sees it and you get no benefits from it.
The good, the bad and the ugly...
Competition for the top spot is TOUGH. For example if I search for car dealerships in South Africa I am provided with 5 140 000 results...no typo here, you read correctly. Statistically less than 10% of website globally, across all industries, achieves first page ranking in the first year of the website being launched. So I kickstarted this with what my seem like the bad and the ugly and suspect you may be ready for the 'good' bit. The upside is that with focused, effective and continuous effort and investment your site can rank on the first page and provide you with amazing return on investment
What does SEO have to do with all of this?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and encompasses all efforts relating to increasing the quality and quantity of website visitors through organic search engine results. Search engines crawls all content on the Internet and builds an index which is then fed through an algorithm that matches data with queries. There are more factors that impacts this indexing than I can cover in detail in this one article but some of these includes website loading time, structure, content, keywords, meta descriptions and title tags. SEO is like washing dishes, it is a task that needs to be performed regularly and consistently for the life of the website as user behavior and algorithms keeps changing.
The short and the sweet of it...
Having a website is the critical first step, but it does not mean that it will yield results simply because it is there. It will likely yield very little results, if any, if it was launched and left at that. The sweet part is that once you have it, it can prove to be VERY profitable for you on condition that effective SEO forms a core part of your ongoing marketing strategy and budget.
Stay tuned, folks...
Now that we have established what website ranking is and that it is really, really important you may ask what to do next? Stay tuned, we will provide another article in the near future with easy and cost effective ways to increase your website ranking.
You are also more than welcome to contact us if you find that you simply do not have the time or resources to perform this task in-house and we will be honored to be of assistance.
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