What is SEO and why does businesses need it?

Perhaps someone doesn’t know:

To quickly and clearly understand why a business needs SEO, watch this video:

What search engine optimization consists of

1. Comprehensive SEO audit is an important step on the path to successful website promotion. Enhanced work by specialists is aimed at increasing traffic, as well as raising the number of clients and improving conversion rates. During an SEO audit, the following results can be achieved:
   • detect and correct technical errors in the website’s operation;
   • adjust the content for better conversion and text perception;
   • implement effective solutions;
   • adjust the strategy for obtaining backlinks.
2. Building a semantic core allows for the identification of key words and concepts for a specific topic. These are then considered in the page’s content semantics; proper use of them in texts affects search result rankings. We are convinced that the semantic and conceptual core are identical, and we adhere to this principle in our work. An SEO specialist will select low-frequency and high-frequency keywords that will allow your site to reach the positions you need. Of course, everyone strives to get their site on the first or at least the first three pages of the search engine. And all this is achievable with a professional approach (without amateurism).
3. Technical website optimization allows for continuous monitoring of the website’s status and promptly making necessary technical changes, including referring to search engine algorithms. The main goal is to improve interaction with search engines. With a competent and comprehensive approach, it is possible to achieve maximum full indexing of the website’s pages. A comprehensive approach includes eliminating site errors, configuring URL types, redirects, working with the site map, and the robots.txt file.
4. Building up a link mass ensures high results in search engine rankings. Crowd marketing increases traffic and allows for the creation of a positive information field around the client’s site. As a result, positive reputation growth, increased conversions, and sales popularity. Your brand becomes recognizable, and more and more customers visit the site, ready to place an order. When choosing platforms to post articles with links to your resource, the specialist considers many factors. The better the quality of the site, and the more trust it has gained from search engines, the better the result of placing links on it.

Today, there are many ways to promote on the internet:

• social networks;
• blogs;
• contextual advertising;
• chatbots;
• CPA networks;
• e-mail newsletters;
• SEO optimization

Read more about each type of online advertising in the articles:

1. Online Advertising: Its Types and How It Works
2. Website Promotion and Boosting

SEO promotion and contextual advertising are some of the oldest types of online advertising, which appeared back in the 90s (as soon as search engines themselves appeared) and became very popular in the CIS by the end of the 2000s (especially after the 2008 crisis) and the early 2010s.

But since 2014-15, with the rise of social networks and chats, entrepreneurs began to underestimate search promotion and search advertising, preferring targeting in social networks and SPAM in Viber, WhatsApp, and Telegram. What’s wrong with that? Targeting an audience that didn’t request your offer is a big risk and most often—money wasted. If a potential client enters a search query themselves, then in messengers and social networks, it’s more like a lottery, where the prize is unknown, but the money needs to be invested immediately and in significant amounts.

In the next chapter, I will provide detailed arguments for my assertion.

Website ranking factors – how to get to the TOP?

Google has over 200 main or about 1500 additional factors. In this article, we will consider only the most important ones:

1. Content quality. One of the key ranking factors has always been and remains the quality of the content. In 2024, this concept includes not only the uniqueness and usefulness of the text but also its relevance to user queries, structure, the presence of multimedia elements, and the authority of sources. To improve positions in search results, it is necessary to create content that answers specific user questions and provides deep expert information.
   The E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) concept was introduced by Google to assess content quality.

   In 2024, its significance will only increase. Sites that can confirm the experience of their authors, their expertise, and authority in their niche, will receive higher positions in search. Trust from users and search engines in your content is the key to success.



2. Technical optimization. Technical aspects such as proper data structure, the use of microdata, and ensuring site security (e.g., having an SSL certificate for the HTTPS protocol) remain fundamental ranking factors. Without proper technical optimization, a site may lose rankings even with high-quality content.



3. High loading speed is a critical ranking factor that directly affects user experience and SEO. Fast page loading reduces bounce rates, increases time on site, and enhances user satisfaction. In 2024, Google will evaluate loading speed even more carefully, using Core Web Vitals metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Image optimization, minimizing the use of JavaScript and CSS, and utilizing modern caching technologies will help improve these metrics. Read: “How to Speed Up Site Loading? Relevance and Main Ways”



4. Mobile adaptation is a crucial ranking factor that considers the usability of a website on mobile devices. In the 2020s, Google will continue to prioritize sites with a mobile version, ensuring fast loading, easy navigation, and correct content display on screens of various sizes. Sites that are not adapted for mobile devices risk losing a significant portion of mobile traffic and lowering their rankings in search results.



5. Regular content updates Continuous content updates are another important trend. Search engines prefer sites that regularly update information, ensuring its relevance. This is especially important for topics that quickly become outdated, such as technology or medicine.

SEO Trends in 2024

Above, we discussed key ranking factors, but since the internet is the fastest-growing industry, new factors are added every year that need to be addressed to keep your site in the TOP positions and bring new clients to your business.

• Video content is becoming increasingly popular, and this is reflected in SEO. Video optimization for search engines includes the proper use of keywords in titles and descriptions, as well as creating high-quality and attractive thumbnails. Video helps to increase the time users spend on the site, which positively affects rankings.



• Website optimization for voice search With the increase in voice queries, it is important to adapt content to natural language patterns. The use of structured data helps improve site visibility in voice search results, which is becoming an increasingly important factor in 2024.



• User experience (UX) User experience plays a crucial role in SEO. This includes ease of navigation, page loading speed, responsive design for mobile devices, and overall visitor satisfaction with the site. In 2024, Google will continue to focus on Core Web Vitals—a set of metrics that measure aspects such as loading of the main content, interactivity, and visual stability of pages.

Only flexibility and the ability to quickly respond to changes will help maintain and improve a site’s position in search results.

The marketing advantage of search promotion and advertising

As we found out at the beginning of the article: search promotion is a type of online advertising. If you open any marketing textbook, the effectiveness of any advertising can be predicted by its properties:

• Coverage is a property of advertising that shows how much of the audience we can reach with a message, how many people will be able to interact with it. For example: if it is an ad in an apartment building elevator, the message’s coverage will be a few hundred people who use that elevator, but if the ad is aired on a central TV channel during prime time, its coverage can reach several million people. Search promotion allows you to narrow the audience, for example—only a city, or expand it—a country, multiple countries.

• Affinity is a qualitative measure of the concentration of the target audience within the overall audience that the ad reaches. For example, if you place an ad about a sale for Lawyer’s Day in a courthouse, the concentration of the target audience will be very high, as 90% of courthouse employees (except for janitors and guards) have a law degree, and the main visitors are lawyers, attorneys, prosecutors, and police officers. Accordingly, if the same ad is placed in a kindergarten building, the likelihood of “hitting the target audience” is also possible, as some of the parents picking up their children may have a law degree, but the concentration of such an audience will be very low, thus low affinity.
• Relevance is the extent to which the ad message meets audience expectations. What is meant: If we show an audience with low or medium income a luxury product advertisement, the effectiveness of this ad is likely to be low. Because, despite all the product’s advantages, it will not meet the expectations of this target group due to its high cost.

I think that’s enough theory!

Let’s analyze the effectiveness of search engine advertising and promotion.

1. Search engine coverage. Various search engines are regularly used by more than 93% of all internet users on the planet, meaning billions of people! For example, the audience registered on various social networks accounts for 50.64% of the entire internet audience.
2. Search engine ad affinity – search engines are designed to deliver content based on user queries. The user, through their query, which they enter into the search bar, identifies their need, and the search site adjusts its content to this query.
   Thus, the affinity of ads in search engines approaches 100%.
3. Relevance in search. It would be unfair to say that search engines always deliver results that 100% meet the expectations of their users; naturally, this is not the case.

However, the relevance of search ads is significantly higher than that of social network ads or messengers (chats).

I’ll explain with an example:

As a rule, to spend their leisure time: chatting with friends, watching some entertainment content, right? And here they see an ad, how relevant is it, i.e., does it meet their expectations?

Social media ads are often perceived as unnecessary and annoying. They are more likely to cause irritation rather than motivate users to visit the site and take advantage of the company’s offer (retargeting is a different story, but cold audience ads have a high percentage of missed targets).

Another situation: a person in the 21st century needs something, what do they do? Correct, they start searching for it in search engines, for example: “Buy a sports bag“. And the search engine gives them 8 ads and 10 organic links with offers from online sports goods stores. What is the level of relevance here? Significantly higher than in the first case!

To back up my words with numbers:

CTR is the ratio of clicks on an ad to the number of times the ad was shown, measured in %. For example, 1000 people saw the ad, 10 clicked on the banner, so 10/1000 = 1%, CTR = 1%.

Users are much more likely to click on search ads than on social network ads because in a search engine, they themselves made the request for a service or product, rather than encountering this offer seemingly by chance, without any need for what was offered.

Thus, in terms of the main metrics—coverage, relevance, and affinity—search engine promotion and search advertising (ppc) excel.

It’s fair to ask here:

We’ll delve into this below.

The financial benefits of SEO promotion over search advertising

At first glance, investing in contextual advertising seems more attractive than investing in search engine optimization (SEO).

Investment in contextual advertising (ppc). The entry threshold is $50-$100, payment is made according to the rate (bid) per click, i.e., the tool is manageable and predictable. The ad appears instantly, in some cases within 3-4 working days after launch.

Investment in SEO promotion. The entry threshold is from $300 – $800 per month (read the article “How much does SEO promotion cost?”), payment in the form of a fixed or variable rate for the agency’s services to promote a pool of keywords. The first results are seen no earlier than 3-4 months, sometimes 6-8 months. The tool is unpredictable, as it depends on search engine algorithms, which often change.

Given all of the above, investments in contextual advertising, for example, Google Ads, are significantly more profitable and reliable than in search engine optimization.

I won’t go far; I’ll show you with an example:

Our site, the one you’re reading this article on, attracts 120-220 unique visitors from different search engines daily, or about 6,000 per month.

Of course, our SEO promotion budget is significantly lower. We also have client cases with budgets of $600-$800. Our team manages to attract up to 65,000 unique visitors per month!

In addition to cost, contextual advertising has other disadvantages.

1. Since payment is made for clicks, often unscrupulous competitors may deliberately click on your ads to incur additional costs, and sometimes even use bots for this purpose. Google, in particular, tries to combat this through its algorithms, but as practice shows, 10-20% of the advertising budget is still “clicked away”.
2. Short-term effect. As soon as your ad account runs out of funds, the ads stop, and so do visits to your site. In the case of SEO optimization, if a site is brought to the TOP for keywords and all optimization activities are stopped, the effect will last for several more months before gradually fading.

Thus, the financial advantage of SEO over search advertising is clear.

The image advantage of SEO website promotion

As is known, contextual advertising is characterized by quick launch.

You can make a site using a builder or template, place $50 in Google Ads?

In other words, literally in 1 day, you can go from nothing to being a full market player, offering your goods and services on par with competitors.

And this is starting to be understood by consumers! If we take the B2B sector, where the clients are entrepreneurs who themselves use contextual advertising—this component plays an important role. For example, for our web studio Business Site, occupying TOP positions in search engines is crucial in terms of image and customer perception.

There’s also the issue of search quality: If I want to advertise the Business Site web studio website through contextual advertising for the word “car wash”, Google, for my money, will show my site for that word too, depending on the price. And the user, in turn, will land on a page that’s irrelevant to them (they were looking for a car wash—offered a website service).

Many search engine users have also noticed this, and now there’s a whole audience of people who completely ignore ad links, not wanting to waste time viewing sites that don’t meet their expectations.

Which business doesn’t fit SEO?

Reading up to this part of the article, you probably think I’m a devotee of the SEO sect.
This is not the case. I highly value this tool but try to be objective about it. Therefore, I must say that there are businesses where SEO won’t work.

Which business doesn’t work with SEO?

The main drawback of SEO is the delay in results, the postponement over time. SEO is definitely not suitable for a startup, meaning a business that is just starting its activity. Since the main task of a startup is to test demand as much as possible, fine-tune business processes, and attract the first orders, so the business has something to live on in the future. In a startup, it makes sense to choose contextual advertising, which, with proper setup, can bring in the first clients in a matter of days. This option is also good if the startup’s primary task is to find partners.

The second category of business that definitely doesn’t fit SEO is trending products, all sorts of fancy Chinese gadgets like spinners, credit card knives, solar-powered power banks, and so on. This can also include seasonal products. For example: New Year’s or Christmas gifts that are relevant right now and definitely won’t attract interest in the spring or summer.

• Super-specific and innovative business, which the market doesn’t yet know about and therefore doesn’t search for, also won’t be effectively promoted through SEO. In this case, an indirect query strategy will be appropriate.
• Local business. For example, a coffee shop in a business center or a small retail outlet is unlikely to justify the investment in SEO promotion. Here, organic traffic often works: employees of the business center or just passers-by and residents of the area.

If your business has the following characteristics:

• Has been operating for a year or more and plans to exist for at least another 3-5 years;
• You are working in an established, formed market;
• Your business coverage is at least a city or region.

SEO is definitely suitable for you, and investments in this internet marketing tool will pay off many times over!

How to start SEO promotion of a website

To make SEO promotion effective, it is necessary to turn to professionals, as self-study of the strategy and its implementation are not always effective and threaten the loss of valuable time. The key stages don’t change depending on which country the client is in, whether they focus on Yandex or Google.

By contacting our web studio, you will receive detailed consultation about your future project, and our managers will guide you through the main stages and their intricacies.

1. Website and competitor analysis It’s important to understand what exactly your competitors are offering and what you can offer users. This stage is indispensable if you have a business card website, online store, catalog site, corporate web resource, blog, or news feed. Analysis allows you to determine the main promotion strategy and develop a concrete plan.
2. Forming a semantic core.
   

   It contains the key concepts and words that directly influence promotion and conversion rates. A specialist collects the words, clusters them, and checks the semantic core’s frequency. With their help, you can accurately write titles, descriptions, create internal linking, and saturate the content with keywords.

3. Creating a broad website structure

   This stage is relevant for almost all types of sites used for E-commerce. At this stage, an optimized landing page is created for a specific group of queries.

4. Compiling tasks for internal optimization

   At this point, internal optimization errors are corrected, landing pages are improved, and “popped up” duplicate pages are removed. To ensure tasks are as relevant as possible, a technical SEO audit is conducted beforehand. Now is the time to address multilingual settings, configure review microdata, and create an XML sitemap.

5. Forming internal linking

   At this stage, a plan for articles to which links should redirect is drawn up, and a check is performed—are there any “broken” internal links? This approach will allow pages to be regularly indexed by search engines.

6. Working with content

   The informational part of the site needs optimization, whether it’s a forum or a large marketplace. Here, it’s important to manually create unique meta tags, considering the collected semantic core, check the texts for saturation with these elements, and if the frequency is low, increase it.

7. Improving website usability
   It’s important for the user not only to get answers to questions on your site but also to get aesthetic pleasure from surfing it. Specialists must take important usability rules into account for this. At this stage, all elements, their placement, buttons, color scheme should work so that the user doesn’t leave for search results, increases the time spent on the site, and reduces the bounce rate to zero. The design of a business card website or one-page site is no less important than what is offered on it. Very often, it is inconvenient usability and unattractive design that cause a potential client to quickly leave the site without delving deeper into the product information.
8. Attention to external optimization

   At this stage, link exchanges are used, and work with thematic forums is conducted.

9. Working on increasing clients from conversion

   It’s not enough to motivate a user to visit and stay on your site; you need to do everything to get them to place an order. For this, order forms are improved, work with reviews is done, and buttons to contact the manager are added.

10. Phased page optimization

    As mentioned earlier, SEO is a long process, with regular changes made, and work done on the structure. SEO website promotion is not a quick result, but it is “long-playing” and worth it if you want to be in the top search results, for example, several months in a row.

Everything in the complex works to ensure that the site gets to the TOP of the search results, is customer-oriented, and the financial costs of promotion were not in vain, and the business generates revenue.

SEO payback

SEO is a long-term investment that requires time to achieve noticeable results. It’s important to understand the payback period and potential return on investment (ROI) to properly evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts in this area.


1. SEO payback period can vary depending on many factors, including the level of competition in your niche, the current state of your website, and the scale of SEO work being done. On average, it takes 6 to 12 months to achieve stable results from an SEO campaign. During this period, your site will gradually rise in search results, attracting more organic traffic. However, the first results may be noticeable after 3-4 months, especially if the site was in good condition before optimization began.
   It’s important to remember that SEO is not a one-time action but a continuous process. Ongoing attention to optimization, regular content updates, and strategy adaptation to changing search engine algorithms help maintain and improve the achieved positions, ultimately reducing the payback period.
2. ROI (Return on Investment).Return on investment in SEO is measured through the ROI metric, which shows the ratio of profit received to the money invested. A high ROI indicates that your SEO strategy is working effectively. Unlike other digital marketing channels, such as contextual advertising, SEO offers more sustainable results that continue to generate traffic and revenue even after the main work is completed.
   To determine SEO ROI, compare the growth in organic traffic and increased conversions with the costs of SEO services and resources. It’s important to consider that SEO ROI increases over time, as investments in content and optimization start working for you long-term, providing a steady stream of clients without additional acquisition costs.


Thus, while SEO requires significant initial investment and time for payback, a well-constructed strategy focusing on content quality and technical optimization can provide high ROI and sustainable business growth.