SEO is currently one of the most important marketing practices that a company with any ambitions of having a presence on the internet must undertake, and there are very few companies that would not benefit from having an enhanced online presence.

What is SEO and Why is it Important?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and those three words explain the practice quite well.  The idea behind SEO is to improve a websites ranking on a search engine.  So UK firms would use content writing services to achieve the ‘optimum’ possible position on Google UK for a selected set of keywords.

While it is possible to feature prominently on search engines using pay per click advertising to have your website among the search engine’s sponsored results, statistics indicate that more than 70% of the links clicked on in search results are organically produced results, rather than the paid for adverts.

The link above also highlights another crucial statistic, 75% of users on search engines don’t bother to view the second page of results, which shows how important ranking highly is.

75% of users on search engines don’t bother to view the second page of results, which shows how important ranking highly is

 The Value of Search Engines

In case anyone was in any doubt as to the value of search engine presence as a marketing tool, there is one stunning statistic to set them at ease.  Google, the search engine market leader, records 100 billion queries every month.   That’s an average of nearly 20 searches per person on the planet per month, and Google isn’t even the market leader in large territories such as Russia and China. What’s even more amazing is that on a daily basis since it began there are approximately 500 Million searches that it hasn’t ever even seen before and so has to go out to over 20 Billion sites per day searching for new data it can turn into results.

Of all website experiences, 93% of them are located using a search engine. Social media is an important driver of web content, however these are just random links for social media users to follow.  Most web users when they want to find something online, will inevitably use a search engine.  Furthermore, as these are searches motivated by their own thought process rather than a random click, these are more likely to result in sales.

Content Writing Services

Google and the other competing search engines in the market use algorithms to determine the rankings of websites on their searches.  The skill of SEO specialists is knowing how these algorithms work, and how to design a website to be judged favourably by the algorithms.

Google will rank sites by popularity first, and then it takes into account the number of times the keywords a user searches for relate to websites.  Content writing services for SEO are essentially article writing with SEO in mind.  Articles are written with 5-10% of the content being the keywords, however this does not mean that you can simply spam the internet with articles consisting of nothing but the keywords.

Skilled Writing

Article writing is much more skilled than that.  Google and other major search engines will reject content of poor quality.  They will also not accept anything that is not original.  Furthermore, the content needs to be displayed on a website.  Even if a user is brought to a website by the high search ranking, they would be immediately put off the website by poor quality content, rendering the whole SEO process pointless if a website’s users do not stay engaged with the content and become a customer.