[SEO Basics] What It Delivers, and Its Benefits and Drawbacks

SEO is one of the activities you cannot do without in digital marketing.
Many people wonder what SEO actually involves,
and how to get results from it.

This article sets out the basics of SEO, along with its advantages and disadvantages.

1. What is SEO?

SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”, and
it is called SEO after the initial letters of each word.
In Japanese it means “search engine optimisation”.

When someone searches a keyword in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo,
SEO can put your own site or blog near the top of the results and bring in more traffic.
For that, it matters that you read the user’s search intent correctly.
Think about what the user is looking for,
and do the SEO work that builds a site genuinely useful to them. That way
you can grow your business.

2. What determines how search engines rank pages?

So how is a search engine’s ranking decided?
First, a brief explanation of how search engines work.

Behind the rankings is a robot called Google’s “crawler”,
which goes around gathering information from web pages via links, URLs it has crawled before and more.
Being registered in Google’s database through that crawl is called “indexing”.

Indexed pages are assessed against hundreds of factors,
and those criteria are known as the “search algorithm”.
The algorithm decides the rankings.

■How search results are generated
Here is how a search engine serves up the right content, in concrete terms.
Say a user searches for “cat”.
“Cat” alone does not say whether they want the biology of the animal, how to keep one,
or information about pet shops.
If results came back at random with nothing given priority,
the user would struggle to reach what they wanted to know.

So, for the information the searcher wants to find,
the search engine uses the “search algorithm” described above to order it by relevance,
then factors in other signals and presents it as a ranking.
That appears as the search results, and the user gets the information they were after.

■The search algorithm and rankings
The search algorithm is the mechanism that scores the web pages shown in the results
according to how relevant they are to the search keyword.
The more accurate the algorithm, the more easily users reach the most useful and relevant information.
If users are satisfied with the results and find them easy to use, they will come back to Google day after day.
To that end, Google makes small adjustments to the algorithm every day to improve quality.
Separately from those daily updates, core algorithm updates are rolled out several times a year.

4. The advantages of doing SEO

SEO has three main advantages.

• A good return on cost
• Greater brand awareness
• A steady flow of visitors

We will take them one at a time.

・A good return on cost
The first advantage is that it costs nothing to run.
With search advertising, every click costs you a set amount.
Keeping the effect going means keeping up a certain level of spend.
With SEO, once you rank near the top,
you stay in the results with no advertising spend at all.
The longer you hold that position, the better the return on cost of the traffic you attract.

・Greater brand awareness
Ranking high in search is how people first come across a site.
And if they then visit and find information that is genuinely useful,
the site earns their trust.
Ranking well through SEO therefore leads to greater brand awareness.

・A steady flow of visitors
A steady, stable flow of visitors over the medium and long term is another big advantage of SEO.
Stop running search ads and the traffic stops with them,
whereas a site that has been optimised keeps attracting visitors
for as long as it holds its position.
Results from SEO are not immediate.
Once they start to come, though, the flow of visitors is steady.

4. The disadvantages of doing SEO

SEO has three main advantages.

• It takes time to see results
• You are at the mercy of the algorithm
• Traffic is hard to forecast

We will take them one at a time.

・It takes time to see results
One disadvantage of SEO is that it takes longer to show results than other activities.
Sometimes you rank quickly; sometimes it takes six months, or a year or more.
So if you need traffic in the short term, SEO is the wrong tool.

・You are at the mercy of the algorithm
Google updates the algorithm that decides rankings at irregular intervals.
So a page that ranked near the top until yesterday can be off the first page the next day.
That is a real possibility.
Being affected by a major algorithm update
is a disadvantage of SEO.

・Traffic is hard to forecast
The third disadvantage is that you cannot forecast or control traffic.
If traffic jumps all at once,
the surge in enquiries may push down the quality of your response to customers.
With advertising you can prepare, by adding staff in advance,
but with SEO traffic there is no such control.
And, as noted above, an algorithm update
can cut traffic in a single day, so the difficulty of forecasting it is a disadvantage too.

5. Keyword selection, which matters most in SEO

Keyword selection matters a great deal in SEO.
There are four main points to it.

• The quality of the traffic
• The volume of the traffic
• The breadth of keywords
• How competitive they are

Each in detail.

・The quality of the traffic
Can you expect conversions from the users a search keyword brings in?
To find out which keywords the users who actually converted had searched,
data from search advertising and from analytics is your best source.
Also check the keywords your competitors are targeting.
As well as visiting competitor sites and looking at “meta name=”keywords””,
you can use an SEO tool such as SEO Cheki to check how often keywords appear.

・The volume of the traffic
Find out how much that keyword is actually searched for in search engines,
and look into the volume of traffic it could bring.
Tools like the following show the search volume for a keyword,
and let you see the actual volume of traffic.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Google Trends
aramakijake.jp

・The breadth of keywords
Look for related keywords and multi-word combinations you could use,
and widen the range of keywords you cover.
The following tool will show you.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner
rishirikonbu.jp

Use autocomplete and search suggestions as well.
Pull out synonyms, related terms, alternative phrasings and other keywords,
and work them into the content of the page to build a page that is strong on SEO.

・How competitive they are
Check whether ranking at the top for the keyword you are aiming at is realistic.
Use that view of competitiveness to prioritise the keywords you have gathered so far.
You want to avoid going head to head with the big sites where you can,
but making good use of high-converting keywords, such as multi-word phrases,
will lift the results of your SEO.

6. In closing

This article has set out the basics of SEO and its advantages and disadvantages.
Doing SEO properly calls for a broad knowledge of the web.
It is a field with a great deal of information about it, so you have to sift that information carefully.
We hope this article is useful to you.

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