Search engine optimization (SEO) is “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines,” according to Rand Fishkin.

A few examples of what search engines look for:

Content: the information on the site has to be relevant. This includes text, title, images, and descriptions that are given.

Performance: the site has to meet standard performance benchmarks, including page load time, time to first byte, page size and total image content. The site also has to function properly. Any error codes or a break in the site will also affect ranking.

Authority: Your site should have relevant content to link to, or have other related sites refer to your website as a reference.

User Experience: How your site appears to end users is vital. Navigation, endorsements, and testimonials can help users gain trust in your site.

Now that you know what it is, you may be asking, “Why is it important for my business?”

Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they’ve determined are the most relevant. When a user performs a search using a keyword or keyword phrase, Google searches through their index and displays links to pages that it considers relevant and authoritative. Authority is primarily measured by algorithms and the quality of links from other web pages. These results are displayed in order of ranking. It is optimal for a company to be displayed near the top of the first resulting page of a search, as users will traditionally take action on those links.

More traffic = more visitors. More visitors = more revenue.