You can hardly imagine it, but before the age of the internet you were almost obligated to physically advertise if you wanted people to notice your company. You had to hand out flyers, rent a billboard, place advertisements or hire someone who walked around with a billboard. Nowadays, it's all a little different. A website has become a must-have and SEO is your new best friend.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a collective name for all the steps that are necessary to score high in search engines such as Google. It is a strategy and technique that allows you to format pages on your website in such a way that they appear as high as possible in the search results.
Search engines collect and index information about every page on the web and help people find exactly what they're looking for. So, in order to get more visitors to your website, it is important to get to the top of the search results of all major search engines. That ranking is determined by a number of factors that you can influence with SEO. For example, each page should contain a specific keyword that is relevant to your target audience, a meta-title and metadata, unique text and valuable content, internal and external links, clear page titles and other relevant information in the HTML code of your website. With all this information, the search engine will refine the results to show the user those search results that contain the most relevant factors.
Why is SEO important?
SEO is important because it is easy to measure. Through Google Analytics you can set goals for your website and follow them up. In this way you can check whether the investment in optimization pays off in the number of visitors and conversions on the website, and you can easily make adjustments.
By using SEO, you can increase your brand awareness and make your company visible to a larger group of (potential) customers.