If they don't know you, you don't exist. In the digital age, this phrase perfectly defines the behaviour of potential customers in the selection of their future supplier. According to a study by Hubspot, 77% of potential buyers research a brand before contacting a new company. And therefore, service providers seek greater visibility with a natural positioning on Google and other search engines.
When you go into a browser and perform a search, the first results are usually well-known brands. SEM paid positioning aside, getting to the top is not easy, but it is very decisive. It is not only the fact that your company is seen ahead of the competition, it is that rarely does a potential customer search beyond the first page of the search engine.
The rules of search engine positioning are dictated by the search engines, and they are not easy to decipher. Moreover, the situation is clearly dominated by Google, with a market share of 92%. In such a predominant position, adapting to the "Google way" is the only way to survive digitally.
When it comes to positioning your website, the situation depends on everything but chance. Google leaves everything to its crawler spider. The famous robot of the most widely used search engine is nothing more than an algorithm that indexes the pages and organises them in an index so that they can be located. Once you make your website available to the public, the spider's visit ranks it and positions it in the virtual world.
To achieve an appropriate ranking for the effort made, Google and other search engines reward actions that benefit usability and user experience, innovative content and well-organised structures. Website loading times and user feedback also count positively when it comes to being ranked. On the other hand, pages that are poorly organised, have problems reproducing content or copy other domains end up penalised and placed in lower positions, as do those that use cheating positioning methods.
The positioning rules are very broad and not entirely known. The algorithms of the search engine spider robots are not public, to avoid manipulation, but the basic precepts are vox populi. The correct use of keywords or referral traffic from other websites are other SEO techniques used to naturally position your domain.
The need to get higher positions when a search is performed makes website creators use techniques or tools to position themselves on the first pages of search engines. In the end it all comes down to the two more or less standardised methods, SEO and SEM.
The advantages of positioning through SEO techniques are durability and lower investment. By developing a structure for your website in which the crawlers recognise a good organisation and functionality of the domain, you get a return on investment (in this case the investment is the time and effort made) that is easier to maintain. SEM techniques depend on a constant investment for positioning improvements, while the effects of SEO are more lasting. To achieve good results in search engines without investment you can perform some techniques that are effective:
Regarding the way to achieve a natural positioning in Google, we must always distinguish between two forms of action:
Getting a good result with SEO techniques is neither easy nor quick. A proper care and knowledge of the online environment is necessary to be able to correctly position your domain and obtain improvements in visits, branding or sales. Inbound marketing techniques carried out by agencies such as Occam will achieve results that will have a palpable return on investment.
Investing in an agency to carry out natural positioning techniques on Google can be contradictory. The fact of hiring a service seems more associated with SEM than SEO, but the reality is that the advantages of natural positioning on Google and the lower investment that is usually required make it more than profitable to leave the care of your company's brand in the hands of professionals, who end up being the visible face in dealing with potential customers.