But after a while (maybe 1-2 years), we realized that some of our articles were much more consulted than others. By analyzing the situation a little, we realized that all these people who were reading these specific articles were actually coming from the same place: the Google search engine ! This realization was a real turning point for us and that’s when we started to take a more serious interest in the wonderful world of SEO and natural referencing.
Why SEO is important
Having quality traffic is the fundamental basis of any online business. It’s quite simple actually, no matter if you sell a product/service online, have a blog, a showcase website… the more qualified traffic you have on your site, the better your business will be!
There are obviously several ways to get traffic to your site:
Social networks: When we started blogging, social media represented a fairly significant portion of our traffic. We simply shared our articles on our Facebook page (or on different groups, in comments, etc.) and the people who followed us saw our content in their feed and clicked if it interested them. Unfortunately, over the past few years, the rules of the game have changed andYou now have to pay to be visible on Facebook or Instagram.. If you put a link to your site in a Facebook post, only a tiny fraction of the people who follow you will see it (Facebook is trying to keep you on their site). Pinterest can still be an interesting source of traffic, but without paying in 2019, you won’t get very far on social media.
social media traffic
Paid advertising: For some businesses, paid advertising (on Google, but also Facebook and other websites) can be a profitable source of traffic. If you can measure how much a click costs you and how much money it earns you, you can implement a profitable strategy. But that said, it’s important to remember that on Google, for example, only 4% of people who search end up clicking on an ad. This means that the biggest traffic opportunities are elsewhere, especially since they’re free.
If you manage to position yourself at the top of the 1st page of Google for a relevant query, you will be rewarded with a lot of quality traffic.
Google is here to stayGoogle’s evolution has been much more stable than that of social media in 10 years, and Google will certainly be the main search engine for a long time to come. The skills you develop by learning SEO will allow you to get free traffic for years to come.
Distribution of traffic on the first page of Google
Even though I just told you that Google’s evolution has been quite stable over 10 years (compared to social media), we are still far from the simple list of results that was at the beginning on the first page of Google (you may remember some sponsored results at the top of the page and then the list of search results). Today, the first page of Google is much richer and looks more like this depending on the query:
Google search rich content
The first page no longer looks like a simple list of search results; there is also a lot of enriched content with images, ratings, questions/answers, etc. (rich snippets). We will come back to this point later.If we now consider these 45-46% that generate organic traffic, it is also interesting to know the distribution of clicks according to your position in Google. Obviously, the first positions will bring you more clicks, but to what extent?
Google’s algorithm and its multiple parameters
Google has one main goal:Give the best possible answer to people who ask him questions(making a little money along the way 😉). To do this, it will try to put the best content available on the internet at the very top of its first page of search results to answer the questions that Internet users ask it. To judge which content is the most relevant for a given query, Google uses complex algorithms based on hundreds of more or less important parameters.
Equation du SEO
Different parameters that together define how Google ranks your content
Overview of our method for properly referencing your website
Okay… enough theory, let’s get down to business. In the following sections, we’ll share with you the method that helped us rank our blog well in Google.
About the Author
