Why businesses need to master SEO
If you want search engines like Google to find your website, you need to do high-quality SEO, or search engine optimisation.
In Australia, the top four search engines are Google, Bing, Duckduckgo and Yahoo. Most of these search engines work the same way, but since Google dominates, let’s focus on it.
How does Google work?
Google’s bots crawl the web all the time. These bots collect the information you publish on your website, including backlinks and keywords, and store it in a database.
Keywords are the words or phrases used in a search. For example, someone searching for a mortgage broker in Sydney may use the words “best mortgage broker in Sydney” or “Sydney home loans”. Your website has a greater chance of being found if it contains those keywords.
Backlinks are links from another website to yours. If the backlinks you receive come from high-authority sites, it raises your website’s authority. The higher your domain authority, the better your website will start to rank in searches.
When someone uses Google Search, its network of computers access this database to find relevant entries and instantly present pages of results.
The first page
When doing an online search, 75% of internet users say they never scroll past the first page of search results, according to HubSpot.
So if someone searches for a buyer’s agent in Byron Bay, and you’re a buyer’s agent in Byron Bay, there’s a chance your website will appear on the first page of the search results.
But it might not. That’s because a buyer’s agent in Sydney might have included Byron Bay in the areas they buy properties in. If their website is more popular, they will be listed first. The same could apply to buyer’s agents all across Australia, which means simply being a buyer’s agent in Byron Bay might not be enough to be listed on page one.
So how do you get on, or at least close to, Google’s much-coveted first page?
The answer is to create a good SEO strategy. The more meaningful content you have, the more the search bots will crawl your site and the more database entries there will be on your website. This increases the chances of your website appearing in search results.
Once your website starts appearing, and your information is validated by users clicking on your listing, it will further increase your website’s ranking, because the search engines will now record your site had a good answer to the search query and show it to more users.
The more that happens, the more chances you have of a potential client being shown your website.
