In simple words, Searching Engine Optimization is a marketing tool to help your website, personal brand, or social media platform increase visibility online.

In the digital era, more than ever, small businesses are transitioning into having online stores and SM platforms. This is an advantageous way to educate potential clients and business partners about the products and services, finalize the purchase, or help them locate their business. You do not need to be on every platform, but being active on targeted social media platforms can increase your reach to a bigger market.

For instance, Instagram and WhatsApp have become a cost-effective system to do customer service while simultaneously build up a customer database through people’s inquiries and chats. There are more than 4 billion active social media users today, according to Statist.

Do you know that you can create a Business Profile on Google Search and Maps at no charge? This is a massive brand exposure for your busines because a very large number of people locate and evaluate it. Most people who search for a local business “near me” tend to visit the business within a day. In addition, your business will build up an online identity through reviews, citations, pictures and content, which will also drive a higher ranking on the algorithm. The more searches, the more important your site will seem for the algorithm.

Searching on the internet gives us thousands of results. However, most people only look at the most relevant results displayed on the first page. So, if your website, social media platform, or online store does not rank on the first page, you are most likely invisible online. 

For career growth, it is also vital to start investing in a personal brand to establish trust and credibility and open up new work opportunities. The most significant changes we have since in 2019 are the freelancing growth and employers reaching out to individuals in platforms like LinkedIn and Fresherworld. This means that more recruiters are interested in reviewing your Online Profile before making a job offer.

Therefore, you need to learn how to generate organic traffic to your platform, or website to get “popularity” and benefit from having an online presence.

Google is the most popular search engine, with a 90 % global market share. If you are like my husband, who uses Duckduckgo or Baidu, let me tell you that these browsers only have 1% of the market share (StatCounter).

Thus, a way to start is to improve your ranking and visibility on Google and generate real business opportunities. If you do not have a business or personal branding; I am sure understanding more about SEO will still be helpful for you.  

How do we do it? 

First, let’s talk about how search engines work. Search engines follow links that connect the words you type on the browser with all kinds of pages, videos, and documents. To offer users the best search results, the search engine or browser analyzes all the obtained information through algorithms or programs called spiders. Here are some of the steps of how the search engines work: 

• In the first step, the search engine uses spiders or crawlers (programs) to capture and link all the available information. 
• The second step is indexing the information; It is analyzed, organized, and stored, creating a catalog or directory.  
• The third step is ranking the results based on the specific words or query.

To rephrase: when a user enters a query like “how to cook pasta” the search engine references all of its index/directory for content relevant to “how to cook pasta”. Then, the search engine generates results based on its algorithm and the users’ language, region, etc. 

Now that we understand a bit more about how The Search Engine works, we can talk about SEO strategies that can help to improve the positioning of your website or brand on the Google Search Engine.