Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ranking a website on the search engines to increase its visibility when users search for relevant keywords and queries.

Yes, your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimization offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click. When you run PPC ads, you'll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, it takes investment into skills and resources to rank a website on the SERPs.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work? Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and these allow the search engine's algorithms to rank websites based upon the relevancy and authority of their pages. Google is striving to recommend the most relevant answer from the most trustworthy source in the most appropriate format for its user. To succeed at SEO, you need to ensure that your content is the most relevant result for a specific search query and that your website is seen as a trustworthy source. You can read our guide on SEO basics to learn more about how to optimize your site if you're a beginner.

You might have heard that Google hands out penalties to websites that violate their webmaster guidelines? There are two types of penalties; at least as far as webmasters go: Manual action penalties Algorithmic penalties (adjustments) However, officially, algorithmic penalties (or adjustments) aren't penalties. They're the result of a site's rankings changing because of the algorithm (for example, the Panda and Penguin algorithms) filtering a site due to the identification of manipulation.

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends. Long gone are the days of launching a website, optimizing your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can't launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority. You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there. A good answer is somewhere between six months and one year, but this is very much based on the level of resources you allocate to your strategy, the level of competition, and what others who compete for the same queries are doing.