What is SEO?
Imagine you have an amazing bottle of red wine, but there is no label, no information, no reviews. Amongst all the red wines in the world, how would customers know about this wine, where to find and how to experience it?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the relevant details so search engines such as Google, Baidu and Yahoo can index your website correctly and improve your visibility.
If your bottle of red wine has the correct labels and relevant details, wine distributors would likely promote it over a poorly designed bottle regardless of the quality inside. This is the same concept as search engines
Search engines favor a well designed and organized SEO strategy, rewarding them with higher ranks in search results. Therefore with a proper SEO strategy, your website is likely to garner additional attention and receive more organic (free) traffic
Why is SEO important?
The Macao Government Statistics and Census service researched that in 2019, 68% of Macau residents use the internet to search for information and a Backlinko analysis of over 5 million google search results showed that only 0.78% of searches clicked on something on the 2nd page of results!
How much potential business can you gain from a conclusive SEO strategy?
How much business are you losing to your competitors who has a well established SEO strategy?
Think of the last time you needed a service. If your friends and colleagues do not know, it is likely you will search on Google for the answer – “phone repair in Macau”, “baby shops near me”, “Best Portugese restaurant in Coloane”. How often would you click on the first few results AND do business with them?
Competitors outranking you?
Competitors outranking you?
68% of Macau residents use the internet to search for information 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites
How does SEO work?
Search engines use bots that continually crawl pages on the web, collect information about them and put them in an index. Next, they apply algorithms to rank the results given a search query.
What factors are important to the index and how do the algorithms look for? These are tightly held secrets by the search engines and their algorithms are ever evolving, however, we know the ultimate goal for search engines is
“to deliver highly relevant information to an inquiry from a trustworthy source which has authority over a given topic”
Although the search factors and algorithms change over time, based on history, proven important SEO factors include
Technical SEO: ensuring your website is configured correctly and optimized. Website loading speed, SSL certificate, structurally sound
How fast is your website? Test with GTMetrix and Google Speed Test
Mobile friendly: as the world becomes more mobile, more searches are conducted on mobile devices. As well as content, search engines look to deliver high user experience, websites not mobile friendly do not rank high
Is your web page mobile friendly? Google Mobile Friendly Test
Backlinks: when your site links to other sites or other sites links back to yours. Having links makes your site more trustworthy, however, spamming links and linking to bad domains may have a negative impact on your SEO
Ahrefs.com Backlink Checker
Keywords: having the right keywords indexed and using those keywords throughout the content gives the search engine the topic of the page
Bounce Rate & Time on Page: Bounce rate generally refers to visitors who visit your site and leave without taking any action. Time on page as the name suggests is the average time visitors spend on that page. A high bounce rate and low time on page indicates to the search engine this page does not have relevant information.
See the Behaviour section in Google Analytics