Getting a page to rank higher in search engines such as Google is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines play a crucial role in people discovering content online, so gaining a higher ranking in search engines can boost a website’s traffic.
On Google and other search engines, paid ads usually appear at the top of the results page, followed by organic results. SEO traffic is often referred to as “organic search traffic” to distinguish it from paid search traffic. Pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM) are terms commonly used to describe paid search.
Google, for example, uses an algorithm or set of criteria to choose which sites to display for every given query. To establish the rankings of their SERPs, these algorithms have developed to be incredibly complicated, taking into consideration hundreds or even thousands of various ranking indicators.
A site’s ranking and quality are determined by three core metrics that search engines evaluate:
To rank higher in search engine results page, the search engine optimization process optimizes each component of the search engine algorithm.
When done correctly, search engine optimization has the ability to significantly improve the quantity of traffic that a website receives; but, all of that search traffic will not help a business expand unless it turns into paying customers.