What is SEO? How to use it to sell more?

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which translates as Search Engine Optimization. The vast majority of e-commerce, website and blog managers find this subject too complex and don't pay enough attention to what can be the biggest generator of visits and sales for an online business.

To explain better, let's say you have a shoe e-commerce business. In general, you can attract visitors through social networks, email lists, referrals from other sites or being found on Google. Of these ways, the most guaranteed in the medium and long term is through Google.

In a Google search, the basic thing is to be found by the name of your store. But you should also be found when someone searches for "online shoe store", "men's shoe stores", or "buy sneakers on sale". This will bring visitors who don't yet know about your business to your e-commerce site.

With more visitors, you get more sales, right? So, you optimize your site for Google, it brings more visitors to your site, those visitors convert into more customers, with more customers you make more profit. Simple, isn't it? More or less.

It's easy to understand how SEO works and its results. However, search engine optimization only generates results in the medium and long term. Unfortunately, this causes many professionals who are only focused on the short term to give up on this important factor for sustainable growth!

For the good manager of a website, blog or e-commerce, this subject is fundamental. So, to help you understand how it all works, I've divided this article into 4 parts:

How does Google work? - The library and Google;
What is SEO? What are the main criteria?
Google's interface and first results;
The relationship between SEO and profit.

Happy reading!

How does Google work? - The library and Google

I once watched a video by Search Engine Land, a reference in SEO, which brilliantly explained how Google works. I'll bring the idea back here:

Imagine you're a librarian, but not in an ordinary library, one that has all the books in the world! And all the time, someone asks you about the best book to explain how to solve a problem, how to prepare a recipe or what a concept means.

Imagine, then, how difficult it would be to recommend the best books to these people. To pick out books on the subject in seconds and then tell them which ones you believe best meet their needs. Sounds impossible, doesn't it?

This is exactly what Google does. It uses factors such as the title, topics, description, region, external and internal references, among many others, to offer the best recommendations to those who search on it.

What is SEO? What are the main criteria?

It was simple to understand how Google works, wasn't it?

How about taking advantage of this knowledge to appear more in Google searches? That's exactly the answer to "What is SEO?"

Optimizing your site for search engines is nothing more than increasing your reputation(PageRank) with search engines by optimizing it for the criteria they use. So, if you "prove" to Google, Bing or Yahoo that your site is an authority on a subject, the chances of the search engine making you appear as an answer in searches is increasing.

To do this, I've simplified the main criteria that Google uses to rank websites in general. I've divided these factors into the two main SEO categories: "On Page" and "Off Page":

On Page SEO Factors

These are the factors that make up the site. They may or may not be visible to the visitor and depend exclusively on optimization and content generation.

Content. Your PageRank is strongly influenced by the generation of quality content with: keywords that have a relevant volume on Google, topics that are widely discussed and current, the use of videos and images and, finally, that clearly answers what you set out to do at the beginning.
Architecture. It is totally influenced by the way the site has been built. The factors are the ease with which search engines can identify keywords and content on the site, solutions for duplicate content, affinity for mobile devices, loading speed and the use of https.
HTML. Although it has to be worked on for each page, it is one of the easiest to maintain at optimum. It is influenced by titles, descriptions, structured content and headlines and subheads with identified keywords.

Off page" SEO factors

These are the factors that influence your rankings, but remain outside your site. They help Google understand your authority based on elements that depend on visitors, readers and other sites.

Trust. It is influenced by the interaction that Internet users have with you. It will depend on shares and links, engagement with your publications and how consistently your site works over time.
External links. As with books, when several books reference a source, it must be reliable or an authority on the subject. Therefore, influencing factors are: having links to your site from others with a good reputation and influence in your niche, and also the text of these links with relevant keywords .
People. Another very influential way of prioritizing is if your site is located close to the searcher. o Google will also give priority if the searcher, or a friend of theirs, has already visited your site regularly or liked it on some social network.
Social. Although less influential, sharing on social networks can influence your PageRank, especially if done by authorities in your niche.

Google's interface and first results

To talk about interface and first results, I'll start with the question: When you do a search on Google, how much do you believe that the first result already solves your problem?

"35% of clicks are made on the first Google result."

Incredible, isn't it? Despite the high number of clicks on the first position, being in the top 4 is acceptable, because that's where more than 70% of the clicks are concentrated.

Finally, users who don't find what they're looking for on the first page generally don't visit a second page; they prefer to change their search term because they believe that this is the only way to get more relevant results.

But what is the relationship between SEO and more profit?

So far you've seen how Google works, what its ranking criteria are and how users behave. But what does all this have to do with more sales?

Let's go back to the shoe store example from earlier? Imagine the number of potential customers who search for the terms "online shoe store", "men's shoe store" or "buy sneakers on sale" every day. Many of them intend to buy and, if they found your site, they might become interested and make a purchase.

This is the goal of SEO work: to work on generating content, optimizing pages, gaining relevant links, defining keywords, among many other optimizations that can earn your site excellent positions when people search for that term.

Finally, to recap what I said at the beginning, with more visitors, you get more sales, right? So doing SEO work will bring more visitors in the medium and long term, guaranteeing more sales and sustainable growth for your business.

Start your SEO today

You can start very simply: if your website, blog or e-commerce platform is based on WordPress, all you need to do is download and install the Yoast SEO plugin . It's extremely easy to use and can help you optimize each of your pages.