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What is SEO and How it Works?

If you’re new in the digital world, you’ve probably heard of SEO and have no idea of how it works. SEO is critical for you to know as it can give you tons of organic traffic to your website if you know how to do it correctly.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the technique and process of getting a website rank higher in search engines such as Google. The main idea of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website by getting the closer to first result on the search engine’s ranking. As you had learnt in the previous lesson, algorithm is the last process of how the search engine works. With algorithms, the search engine can decide what goes where and which website should rank higher in the SERP. In SEO, we focus more on how to win the algorithm and rank higher in the SERP. googlebot Specifically, Google has over 200 algorithms that they use to consider how a website rank on their search engine. If you can satisfy what the search engine’s algorithms need, the search engine will not hesitate to give you the 1st ranking in their SERP!

What Happens If You Don’t Use SEO?

A website without SEO is just like a car without fuel. You can create a great design website and put some nice products or content there, but nobody know that your website existed. There is no point of creating a well design store if it is placed in the middle of the desert, right? Search Engine Mentor - What is SEO and How it Works Of course you could choose to use paid traffic to generate visitors to your website. But why do you need to spend a dollar cost per click on social media ads if you can get the targeted niche free for free?

SEO is All About Competition

What happens if you don't use SEO If you notice, whenever you search for anything on Google, you will only find 18 pages or 180 search results that came out on the search engine result. Meaning, if there are million of websites that created the same topic, Google will only choose and show the best 180 out of all the million contents out there. So, if your content doesn’t seem to fit Google’s criteria, you’ll be out of search result and nobody will find your site organically. If you want to get an organic traffic, try to get at least on page 1 Google / Top 5’s Google search result. Ask yourself this question, will you go to the second page of Google when you’re looking for some info? Most of the people tend to just go for the first result and only 1% of them even desperately go to the second page of Google. On September 2021, I did a research, with total 50 keywords on my sites. Here are what I found: google search result click ratio Around 45% clicked the first result, meanwhile the ratio drop drastically when it comes to second rank and lower. A similar research also done by Moz back in 2014, and they found 71% of the search traffic clicked the first result. Meanwhile, the second rank and lower results are average at 6%. So, what can we find here?
Rule number 1: Never be number 2!
Less people care about the second page, and nobody care to look on the second page. So, if you want to get tons of organic traffic to your site, always aim for number 1 search result.

Next Lesson

Why SEO is important for your website?

Proceed to Chapter 6

Written by Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at Search Engine Mentor is a team of SEO experts led by Gian Stavin. Trusted by over millions of readers worldwide.