What is SEO?

In your marketing research or in your Linkedin news feed, you have probably already heard the term SEO. But what does SEO actually mean? Our marketing agency gives you some answers.

SEO comes from the acronym search engine optimization. This term refers to all actions and strategies aimed at improving the ranking of a website in the organic results (also called "natural") of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Important: SEO excludes paid advertising results (SEA).

How to differentiate SEO from SEA?

When you do a search on Google, the search engine will offer you two kinds of results:

• SEA results, they appear in the first position.

• Then the SEO results called "natural" then.

In our example, we wanted to find our next hotel in Lausanne with the query "hotel Lausanne". You will notice the mention "Ad" next to the first two results which indicates that the advertiser, in this case www.booking.com, pays to be listed. This pay per click (PPC) system works according to a bidding principle. The amount depends mainly on the competition on the keyword in the region in question. It happens sometimes (rarely) that no sponsored keywords appear.

In the second part of the page, you will see the organic/natural results. This word is quite subjective since these results are never the result of chance. The main objective of SEO is to appear on the first page, and search engines are constantly scrutinizing sites in order to propose the most relevant results. To achieve this, you need to understand both the expectations and intentions of your visitors and those of the algorithms.

SEO is a vast subject where techniques and algorithms are constantly evolving. It deserves to be addressed as soon as possible if you want to see long term results.

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