Matthew Kaminsky | 4 min
Video transcript
Introduction to SEO
Every second, over 70 thousand people around the world search for something on Google. That’s billions of searches every single day. And no matter what type of business you have, if you want your site to show up on search engines, SEO should be an integral part of your business and marketing strategy.
I’m Matthew from the SEO team at Wix and in this video we’ll discuss search engine optimization.
Optimizing for search engines is one of the most valuable things you can do to achieve your business goals, build brand awareness and drive traffic to your site.
What is SEO and why is it important?
Simply put, SEO is the process of improving your discoverability on search results to get quality traffic to your site. The potential here is huge. Think about how many people are already searching for a product or service you offer.
Typically, when we talk about search engines, we’re referring to Google, which is the most popular search engine out there, getting over 90% of all internet searches. And the discoverability of your site is based on their algorithm. To better understand it, let’s take a closer look at how search engines work.
How search engines work
Google and other search engines use bots, also known as crawlers or spiders. These bots travel around the internet 24/7 and crawl web pages to understand what they’re about, their structure, content, and the links connecting one page to another.
The bots then store all this data in the Index, which is basically a library containing information about pages on the web. The index is updated every time a bot crawls a page. This frequency is based on many factors including how important Google thinks your site is and how often you update it.
This is why it may take time before you can actually see changes you made on your site on search results.
When people search on Google, they’ll often see two types of search results on the search engine results page, also known as the SERP. The top results might be paid advertisements of business that pay to have their sites show up first for specific keywords or phrases.
Underneath are organic results which are determined by the search engine’s algorithms. The higher the site, the more relevant Google thinks that site is for a specific search query.
But how does Google’s algorithm qualify a specific page as relevant and trustworthy enough to rank it high on search results?
While Google doesn’t release exact ranking factors, based on research, we do know about some key ones like quality of content, authority and user experience, which all play a huge role. But these are constantly changing based on what Google believes will give people the best results for their search intent.
After all, there’s a reason why saying “Google it” has become second nature. Google works very hard to develop and improve its algorithm to match users with the most relevant and quality results.
Getting started with SEO
Now that we’ve covered how search engines work, let’s talk about how to optimize your site for search engines. When it comes to SEO there are no shortcuts. First off you need to create an SEO strategy.
Every site is different so how you approach your SEO strategy should be tailored to your needs, audience and competitors. Think about your target audience and how you can capture their attention. If your site delivers the best content, navigation and user experience, ranking will come naturally.
Once you have an SEO strategy, Wix has tools to help you set up the basics of SEO for your site, with the flexibility to add more advanced features if you like. But if you’re just getting started with SEO, we recommend starting with your personalized SEO plan.
This plan will guide you through the basics of SEO for your site, help get your site indexed on Google and start optimizing your site performance on search.
Keep in mind that SEO is a marathon not a sprint so it may take time until you see your site ranking on search results. In the meantime, you can check out our SEO learning hub to learn more.
Again, I’m Matthew. Thanks for watching.