What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which means increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Simply, it means improving your site’s visibility for relevant searches. The better your pages’ visibility in search results, the more likely you will garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
To understand the true meaning of SEO, let’s break that definition down and look at the parts:
- Quality of traffic. We can attract all the visitors worldwide, but if they’re coming to our site because Google tells them we’re a resource for Apple computers when we’re a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead, we want to attract genuinely interested visitors to your products.
- Quantity of traffic. Once we have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
- Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
What is a SERP feature?
A SERP feature is any result on a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that is not a traditional organic result. The most common SERP Features are:
- Rich Snippets which add a visual layer to an existing impact (e.g., review stars for product ratings)
- Paid Results that are bought by bidding on keywords (e.g., AdWords or Google Shopping)
- Universal Results that appear in addition to organic results (e.g., image results, new results, featured snippets)
- Knowledge Graph data which appears as panels or boxes (e.g., weather, Celebrity Knowledge Panel)
In the early days of Google, every result on the SERP looked the same, and these traditional organic results have not changed much in appearance over the years.
Why should we care about SEO?
SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches yearly, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of brand digital traffic and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than our competition can impact our bottom line.
Lots and lots of people search for things or any manner of things directly related to our business. Beyond that, our prospects also search for things that are only loosely related to our business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them. That traffic can be compelling for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic but because there is a lot of particular, high-intent traffic.
The search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites. Also, note that features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase visibility and directly provide users with more information about your company in the results.
How does SEO work?
We might think of a search engine (SE) as a website we visit to type (or speak) a question into a box that magically replies with a long list of links to web pages that could potentially answer our question.
The O part of SEO—optimization—is where we write all that content and put it on our sites, guessing that content and those sites up so search engines can understand what we’re seeing and the users who arrive via search will like what they see. Optimization can take many forms. It’s everything from ensuring the title tags and meta descriptions are informative and the right length to pointing internal links at pages we’re proud of.
Many more aspects must be considered when we manage the SEO for our website, but this is the main idea. Using SEO, we will optimize our website’s content so the site to be found easier on Google or other search engines. It is done by optimizing the website’s title and content and using keywords people type into Google to find a solution or service they need. In a nutshell: we must have keywords written in our title and content so that when Google does a specific search for a subject, our website will appear as a result of that search.
SEO | Google vs. YouTube
When you talk about SEO, you probably think of Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, and it is easy to understand why–Google is the most powerful search engine. However, not by a long shot, Google is not the only search engine. Some say that some search engines can be more powerful than Google; they are not as big nor as famous.
But if you tap into other search engines, you can boost your search presence and conversions. Here’s the thing: less popular search engines fill specific roles. So, for example, if you do Bing SEO, you can reach an audience you cannot get on Google. And if you ignore other search engines, you are doing your business stagnation and backwardness.
I don’t have to tell you that Google is the biggest and most used search engine ever created. It is used every day by millions of people, and you’re probably one of them too. The word ‘Google’ became a verb because we often use it (‘let me google that subject,’ for instance). Likewise, millions of people use YouTube, the second largest search engine, dailies maybe you’d think Bing or Yahoo are the ones to take the 2nd spot, but it’s YouTube.
It might sound weird to think of YouTube as a search engine, but that is precisely a search engine for videos. A search bar smack dab drives the entire site in the middle of the page. It’s similar to Google’s video search results you want to get your site high up on the SERPs, and you want to get your videos high up on the YouTube SERPs. Because YouTube is its search engine, it has its own SEO best practices. Therefore, YouTube SEO is slightly different from regular SEO, and it might take a little while to get used to.
In my brief conclusion, if we expect an answer like Google is the best for SEO traffic, we shouldn’t use YouTube; we’ll be disappointed. The truth is that both platforms are excellent in their way, and we should use both if we can. But if we want to go with one out of the two, consider this:
Google is best if you look for targeted and quality traffic in one package. You can use it to achieve this goal because Google works differently from YouTube. Google ranks websites and other search results based on their potential to be the best source of information regarding the subject someone searched for.
YouTube
YouTube is best if you have a website that comes with video content as well. You can create a personal YouTube channel directly linked to your website. This way, when somebody views a video on your channel, you can send them to your website. As a result, you can get more SEO traffic using YouTube instead of Google.
Think about this, for instance: If we search on Google for the best method to assemble a PC, for example, Google will give us, as the first result, the webpage that is indeed addressing this subject efficiently and helpfully. YouTube is different. As a first result, we will get the most popular video regarding PC assembly, not necessarily the constructive one.
The best way to get more SEO traffic would be to use both Google and YouTube. There are many successful websites online that do this. We can be one of them if we properly use both Google and YouTube for SEO.