“There is no better place to hide a body today than on page 3 of search results.” Arne Kirchem makes it clear what he means: brands or offers that don’t appear high up in the search results won’t be found. No matter how great the product is. But achieving good rankings is becoming increasingly difficult. If only because there are more search results every day. So what do you have to do to be found on search engines like Google? Search Engine Optimization (hereafter SEO) is the answer.

SEO is used to improve the visibility and ranking of a website in search results. It forms thereby with Search Engine Advertising the large range of search machine marketing. SEO is divided into onpage and offpage SEO. Onpage-SEO are measures that are carried out on the website itself. These include optimizations in the content, through e.g. images and meta information, and technical optimizations, such as mobile optimization or improving the loading speed. Offpage SEO refers to areas outside the website, so among other things link building and increasing visibility through content marketing or social media.

So far, so good. But what exactly do you have to do? First of all, if you think of SEO as a miracle cure that will instantly catapult your website to #1 in search results, you’re wrong. It is often a matter of individual small measures, but – combined with other optimizations – they achieve great things. For every search query, search engines determine how relevant website URLs are for the query in question. Google alone uses several hundred factors for this. Although these are not published for the most part, some of these “ranking factors” are considered known. These include:

– Page title
– Keywords
– Search intent
– Linking
– Loading speed
– Content
– Mobile optimization
– User signals
– Brand factor

To optimize all factors means work. Depending on the factor, however, not that much: page titles and keywords aligned with the target audience’s search queries provide immediate improvement. Internal linking can achieve significant improvements without investing a lot of money and work in backlinks. Web optimization of images reduces loading time. Proper content design reduces bounce rate, which is an essential part of the “user signals” factor. And so on…

As you can see, the work is worth it. SEO has long been an integral part of our everyday work. To create a non SEO optimized website for a client would be negligent. The same applies to content creation. At B+D, we know this.