What is search engine optimization and why should I do it?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. The term describes a range of methods aimed at making websites and their content appear at the top of the organic search engine rankings. The aim is to increase the reach of web content and direct more visitors to your website. To put it simply:

Everyone who creates a website wants to be found and SEO helps them to be found!

The importance of search engine optimization can hardly be overestimated. People searching for content on the Internet google it. Users looking for products visit Amazon or eBay and if you want to watch videos, YouTube is a popular place to go. Google, Amazon, eBay and other search engines naturally want to present their users with the most relevant content at the top of the list. For this reason, they examine the content offered and create a ranking. Those that rank well are displayed in the top positions. The ranking can be influenced using search engine optimization methods. Google SEO The most popular search engine is Google. There are more than 3 billion search queries on Google every day. For this reason, when we talk about search engine optimization, we usually mean Google optimization. This does not mean that a website that has been optimized for Google is not also optimized for other search engines. On the contrary: Google has the highest standards for websites and web content and is therefore particularly strict when it comes to ranking. The Google algorithm Penguin, which is responsible for the ranking, is changed around 500 times a year and is therefore always up to date in order to find the most relevant content for Google users. So if you optimize your web content for Google, you are also optimizing it for other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo or Ecosia. The algorithms here work according to very similar principles.

Why is search engine optimization worthwhile?

1. At the forefront of the Google marketplace

You can think of Google as a huge marketplace for the same product. There are market stalls and vendors everywhere trying to convince you of their content. But this marketplace is infinitely long. So long that you would have to walk for days to reach the market stalls at the end of the marketplace. But luckily you don’t have to worry, because Google, the marketplace operator, sorts the market stalls for you according to their quality. The best market stalls are right at the front of the marketplace and you don’t have to go to the back to get what you want.

For the market stall operators, this means the following:

You would do well to be the best market stall and get one of the front spots because hardly any visitors arrive at the back.

With SEO, you can make your virtual market stall relevant and get a place at the hotly contested entrance to the market. Or to return to Google: You will be displayed at the top and probably clicked on. If you are displayed at the bottom, you have a much lower chance of being clicked on. The first 3 search results on Google tend to be clicked on most frequently. After that, the clicks continue to decrease. If you end up on page 2 of the Google search, you hardly have a chance of being found.

2. Different keywords for different pages

To be found, optimize the various pages of your website for specific keywords. Watch out! Google does not view your website as a coherent entity, but each page individually. For this reason, it makes sense to optimize the various subpages of your website for different keywords. For example, if you offer shoes, it makes sense to optimize one page for the keyword “men’s shoes”, one page for “children’s shoes” and one page for “women’s shoes”. You can find out which keywords could be of interest to you and how to determine them in our blog post “The right keywords for your website!”.

3. The advantages and disadvantages of SEO compared to SEA

The advantage of search engine optimization is clear: you invest manpower and time in optimization, but no capital, and still get better organic rankings. However, we don’t want to hide the disadvantages of SEO from you.

SEO takes time: Search engine optimization is a long-term undertaking that does not immediately ensure that you are displayed at the top of the search list. You constantly improve your ranking and thus achieve a better ranking in the long term. If you want to get a lot of visitors to your site quickly and in the short term, you will inevitably have to think about advertising. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) are advertisements that you can place on Google. Although you have to pay for these, you will achieve better results in the short term and attract more people to your site. However, your organic ranking is not affected by the ads. We explain in more detail when SEA could be worthwhile for you in our blog post “SEO vs. SEA – What is worthwhile and when?”
Some keywords are highly competitive: you are not the only applicant for the top rankings on Google and you are also not the only one who is aware of the relevance of search engine optimization. Many other website operators are trying to optimize their websites for certain keywords and some keywords are particularly competitive. To come back to the example from earlier: Shoes are a very competitive keyword on Google. For this reason, it will be difficult for you to rank well for the term “shoes” as there are so many competitors for this term. I’ll just throw Zalando into the room here. Instead, you should perhaps focus on long-tail keywords here. In other words, long keywords that are perhaps not as competitive, such as “buy leather shoes in Aachen”. However, it makes sense to focus on advertising in addition to search engine optimization, especially for such highly competitive keywords.
SEO is a never-ending project: the factors that are particularly relevant for search engine optimization are constantly changing, just like Google’s algorithm. While backlinks used to be the most relevant factor for ranking, today it is content. If you want to rank well in Google, you therefore need to provide well-structured, original and relevant content. What Google pays particular attention to here requires experience, as Google does not release its algorithm. For this reason, you should always keep an eye on key performance indicators on Google and make changes if necessary if a page is not performing well at all.

In our blog post “Measuring success on Google”, we explain how you can measure the success of your SEO optimization and which key figures you should know to keep an eye on your search engine optimization: Is your search engine optimization achieving the desired success?” As you can see, there is a lot to consider when it comes to search engine optimization. Nevertheless, we would like to encourage you to tackle them, because a good organic ranking does not only speak for the quality of your website. It will also ensure more visitors to your site in the long term and help you to generate more sales.

How to do SEO?

We’ve been talking about the benefits of SEO for a long time now. How exactly SEO works has been neglected and would be too complex a topic for a blog post – after all, SEO is not just about optimizing your texts and images on your website. Search engine optimization encompasses many different aspects:

Technical SEO: Site speed, crawling and indexing
Onpage optimization: content structure and metadata
Offpage optimization: Links
Keywords
Mobile SEO: Optimization for mobile devices
SEO KPIs: Measuring success

We want to inform you about all these aspects and would therefore like to draw your attention to our blog series “Search Engine Optimization”. In our next blog post “How to do SEO? Onpage and offpage optimization” you will learn more about the various optimization options for your website. Read our series and find out more about: