Why Is SEO Important?
In short: search is a BIG source of traffic.
In fact, here’s a breakdown of where most website traffic originates:
As you can see, nearly 60% of all traffic on the web starts with a Google search. And if you add together traffic from other popular search engines (like Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube), 70.6% of all traffic originates from a search engine.
Let’s illustrate the importance of SEO with an example…
Let’s say that you run a party supply company. According to Google, 110,000 people search for “party supplies” every single month.
Considering that first result in Google gets around 20% of all clicks, that’s 22,000 visitors to your website each month if you show up at the top.
But let’s quantify that – how much are those visitors worth?
The average advertiser for that search phrase spends about 1 dollar per click. Which means that the web traffic of 22,000 visitors is worth roughly $22,000 a month.
And that’s just for that search phrase. If your site is SEO-friendly, then you can rank for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of different keywords.
In other industries, like real estate or insurance, the value of search engine traffic is significantly higher.
For example, advertisers are paying over $45 per click on the search phrase “auto insurance price quotes.”
Organic vs. Paid Results
Search engine result pages are separated into two distinct sections: organic and paid results.
Organic Search Results
Organic search results (sometimes referred to as “natural” results) are natural results that rank based 100% on merit.
In other words, there’s no way to pay Google or other search engines in order to rank higher in the organic search results.
Search engine rank the organic search results based on hundreds of different ranking factors. But in general, organic results are deemed by Google to be the most relative, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages on the subject.
I have more details how search engine algorithms work later on. But for now, the important thing to keep in mind is:
When we talk about “SEO”, we’re talking about ranking your website higher up in the organic search results.
Paid Results
Paid search results are ads that appear on top of or underneath the organic results.
Paid ads are completely independent of the organic listings. Advertisers in the paid results section are “ranked” by how much they’re are willing to pay for a single visitor from a particular set of search results (known as “Pay Per Click Advertising”).
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