Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

According to the report released by The Association of Marketing Agency in Asia, 98% consumers do online research before trying out new products or brands. As they hope to obtain some useful information before making decision, resulting in a trend of delivering more well organised message as the Key to attract consumers’ attention.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), though, is not the most direct way to reach out for clients, it is the most effective tools to obtain new clients. The intensifying website rank competition and rising cost of advertising on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, has made budgeting on online advertising heavy. To offset such cost, more and more companies have started shifting to invest more on SEO, and to capture a better rank by producing more quality contents to their customers.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

There are thousands of algorithms on Search Engines like Google, Yahoo or Baidu to calculate the score of your content and determine their rank. In that sense, the more your website content favours their algorithms, the higher the rank you can get.

Imagine Google as a library, and how people search books on the search engine. When people enter a keyword, a list of books which titles contain such keyword will be generated. That means, if your website is highly related to some keywords, you will rank first on the result page.

Playing with Keywords is some sort of manipulation, but Google is thousand times more complicated as content relativity is not the only rule to make you rank higher. In fact, SEO comes with 2 parts: the Onsite SEO and the Offsite SEO.

Onsite SEO is the process that is done on your website. It is a series of adjustments on a certain of components of the website so that your content can be clearly understood by the search engines. It requires professional website engineering skills.

Offsite SEO is the continuous marketing actions that are done outside your website. By following the algorithms of Google your website can be referenced and ranked higher. Factors like backlinks, links rank, marketing strategy, etc. all would need to be taken into account.

And most importantly, companies will have to look constantly into their competitor’s actions as search rank is highly related to how good your competitors behave, and this is also the key factor to determine your search engine optimisation strategy. As your competitors will continue to write good contents and get better SEO results than you do, both onsite and offsite SEO should be seen as a mix that requires a detailed research on your competitors, keywords, website codes as well as the specific market conditions.

SEO is a long-lasting task that you can’t simply ignore and slow down. As it is a sustainable way of advertising and saving you millions cost while generating direct income for you, it is worth investing on either in terms of expanding your business or getting rid of your competitors.