SEO and Data Analysis

What is SEO?

Have you recently come across the term SEO and aren’t quite sure what it is?

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is pronounced ‘S-E-O’, saying each letter separately. In other words, it’s basically a bunch of settings and little things that make search engines show your website first in the results.

Google result for a search for cruises to brasil

For example: if you want to book a trip, you go to Google and type ‘buy cruise to Brazil’. When you scroll passed the paid results, you should get something similar to the image.

Why does Google show Celebrity Cruises, Cruise Critic, and Planet Cruise first? Why doesn’t Aunt Eleonor’s travel agency website appear first?

Several factors determine this, and SEO is a set of techniques to try to get your website among the first results.

Why SEO?

Is there a more efficient way to bring quality traffic to your site than appearing first in search results?

An optimized website and well-done SEO bring free and passive traffic to your digital business every day! The more traffic, the more opportunities to achieve your goal, whether it’s sales, growth, or anything else you want. 

How much do you believe it would be beneficial to appear as the first result in a search by someone looking for exactly what you offer? At least ‘incredibly sensational I’m going to swim in money’, right?

Google?

In most places, Google leads the market and holds, astonishingly, more than 97% of all searches made in the country (StatCounter). Not only that, but Google is also the most accessed website in many countries according to Alexa. That means people not only use Google when they want to search for something but also search a LOT!

This makes it TODAY (this can always change) the main goal of every SEO professional who wants to gain market in Brazil.

(This article will focus on Google, but it’s important to know that it’s different in other countries. In China, for example, Baidu is used, and in Russia, Yandex. Where to focus depends on where your market is.)

How does Google work?

To understand how to position a website well, it’s important to know how Google works:

  1. You create and publish your website.
    For example, a Digital Marketing blog. (It’s online but not on Google yet)
  2. A Google robot (Crawler) tracks your site.
    It ‘reads’ your site and recognizes what you have to offer
  3. Google indexes your site
    Your site is indexed so Google can access the information when needed
  4. Someone searches on Google
    For example: What is SEO?
  5. Related searches
    Google accesses the collection of topics related to the search. In this case, what can satisfy your search
  6. Result
    Google presents the results in the order it considered most relevant, which best satisfies the user.

One thing a lot of people don’t know: publishing a website doesn’t necessarily mean it will be on Google. As present as Google is in our lives, it is not THE internet!

There are indeed a series of things you can do to make life easier for Google bots. Knowing what to do, that’s SEO.

Imagine that Google is a grumpy person because they have a lot of work to do: anything you can do to make this person’s life easier will be welcome!

Let’s see now what can be done basically:

Navigation Experience

Google values technically well-made sites, with fast navigation and loading, and that are 100% adapted to mobile. Since July 2019, Google uses the ‘Mobile-First’ system, which means that your page’s performance on mobile determines the navigation experience.

Quality Content

It’s not enough to repeat your keyword 10 times in an article. For a long time, Google has used qualitative parameters to define the ranking. Basically, you need to offer quality content that adds value to the user.

Optimization

There are a series of things you can do to make your site more easily read by Google. One of them, for example, is to use structured data to categorize your content. Robots.txt files and index.xml are also very important, as well as a well-designed architecture.

Authority

The more quality links leading to your site, the better. Please pay attention to the emphasis on ‘quality’. Google has been doing a more qualitative authority analysis for a while, and having many links from unrelated sites can hurt you. It’s simple: if you have an online clothing store, it would be better to have 1 link from a fashion blogger than a hundred from a site that sells refrigerators.

Security

Google really likes secure sites! The minimum you need to do is install an SSL certificate on your site, which turns http:// into https://.

Google Search Console

Google has various tools to help you monitor and improve your site. My favorites are:

  • Google Search Console
  • Google Analytics

Conclusion

I hope I have answered your questions about what SEO is. There’s much more! If you’re interested in the topic and would like to learn more, I would like to invite you to take a look at the rest of the blog.

And, if I have left any question unanswered, please do not hesitate to leave a comment! I will be happy to respond.

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