What is SEO? Definition, relevance in online marketing and function

Why is SEO so important in online marketing?

In fact, search engines are often the starting point for Internet use. As a rule, only the first three results are clicked on. Such searches are also often linked to purchase intentions or can be directed in a commercial direction by companies with clever strategies.

Search engines are therefore very important sources for a large flow of website visitors (traffic). If you do not work towards a good positioning, a huge amount of potential is lost. The online marketing of the website (which is still the most important channel for digital customer acquisition and retention in most industries) is perceived much less without SEO than with it.

In summary, SEO is the foundation for a holistic, effective marketing ecosystem.

How does SEO work?

Search engines, such as Google and Bing, use bots to analyze pages on the Internet. They go from website to website, collect information about the individual pages and add them to an index.

Think of the index as a huge library in which a librarian (the search engine) can select a book - or a website - to help you find exactly what you are looking for.

This search is largely based on specific literature characteristics - or, in the case of the search engine, via ranking factors. In the search engine context, algorithms analyze the pages in the index for search queries and evaluate the factors in the process.

The pages whose ranking factors best match the respective input are displayed at the top of the search results. In the library analogy, the librarian has stored each individual work in the library in an index with special properties and can therefore give you the books that are most likely to answer your questions first.

SEO now works by transferring the ranking factors (ideally in detail and holistically) to your website. This relates to keywords, links, content and technology, among other things.