What is SEO and why is it important to know

Google is now full of opportunities to get your business visible on related search queries with SEO (search engine optimization). However, these opportunities are slowly decreasing over time, and the future will be limited to a few businesses that own almost all the keywords within their industry. As an SEO-specialist will in this article tell you why. But to do so we need to go in a little in depth to understand how SEO works.

Some quick basics about SEO

95% of search traffic does not go to page 2, and 70,4% of clicks goes to the first 5 results. This means being on the second page of Google is almost useless.

Google only allows for a maximum of 10 search results on the first page, and sometimes less when people pay for the top and bottom ad-listings.

Owning a keyword on Google is related to 3 main factors:

1. Authority (Based on Google’s algorithm to rate your site as an industry leader)
2. Keyword optimized content (Content written to rank well with certain keywords)
3. User signals (User signals show Google if your content is good or not for the searched term)

Now that you get the superficial factors, we can go into more detail about why the search field of Google will be limited to only a few select businesses within most industries. But first we are going to dig a little deeper on website authority.

Authority is based on mainly 2 factors.

1. The popularity of the website. This is measured by how many other websites link to it, and how many times the brand has been mentioned online.
2. The amount of industry related content. This shows Google that the website does produce content and is a source of information. If the quality of the content is high, Google will in turn reward the site with authority within the industry.

The thing about authority is that it’s obvious that the older more established websites are way ahead of new competitors in this game. Also the bigger companies will always have more resources to generate both content and links online. This will in the long run end with a few industry leaders owning the top-ranking for most keywords within an industry. As of the statistics you can see on the top means that less than 5% of all traffic on Google will actually go to small businesses.

Is it worth starting with SEO or is it too late?

SEO today is just like bitcoin in 2014, it’s already worth a lot but it will be even more valuable in the near future. The reason for this is because of Google’s increasing popularity by millennials searching for their needs instead of relying on contacts as the older generation does.

If your website starts doing an SEO-strategy now you may be well prepared for the future and even beat the giants in the long run. This has been done several times already, hungry entrepreneurs being more furious in SEO than a fortune 500 company. This is done by them producing an insane amount of content and heavy backlinking strategies.

Can’t you just pay for ranking in Google?

Not for long.

Google advertising is subject to CPC-inflation (the increasing cost of advertising on Google). The CPC inflation within an industry can easily be increased by 100% year on year. Which in turns means that only the well-established businesses with good control of their CAC (customer acquisition cost) and CLV (customer lifetime value) will be able to make a profit from Google advertising. Small businesses are rarely good with numbers, hence why they're small.

Conclusion

If you’re in an industry where the trend for franchising and business-chains are moving upwards? Well, you should prepare your business for battle right now. SEO is luckily still a part of marketing which is undervalued because people don't understand that Google searches are always tied to a need. This makes Google one of the most valuable marketing channels out there.

About the author

Henrik Park is an SEO-specialist from Norway that has founded the SEO-agency Marketin.no - which delivers supreme rankings for both small and large businesses in Scandinavia. Henrik has made several businesses the most visible on Google within their industry.