SEO in the Philippines: How Can it Help Your Business

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the Philippines is gaining more popularity in the recent years. This is even in the midst of major updates on Google’s algorithm, such as the latest Panda update which intends to improve search engine users’ experience. But though the Panda update will benefit the Googlers who now can see more quality and relevant pages on Google’s top search pages, some search engine optimizers, especially those who use black hat SEO strategies, will definitely feel its drawbacks and punishments. Good thing for the white hat SEO’ers, Panda will provide them more benefits and edges than other optimizers.

Introducing SEO on your business
Now if you’re a business owner, you may want to understand how SEO techniques can help your business. Let us say you’re into hotel business. Your hotel provides great services, you have a nice restaurant on it, and you think it’s the nicest place in town where tourists, travelers and other customers can check in. But despite of this, you still found out that your competitors are getting more people to their hotels than yours. What’s the problem? Isn’t the good word-of-mouth about your company enough to pull more customers? Yes it maybe not enough. Your competitors might be working something more powerful than the word-of-mouth marketing… it must be the word-of-link marketing.

How SEO helps your business
Search engine optimization aims to make the search engines more effective and efficient in providing more relevant, accurate and useful search results to its users – the searchers. Thus, search engine optimizers help businesses, through their website pages, bring their online presence on the top of the search engines, which includes Google, Yahoo and Bing. Through keyword targeting and other SEO strategies, companies can pull more potential customers from the search engines. Google alone has about 300 million users a day and logs several hundreds of million search queries everyday. It is still the number one most visited website in the world, ahead of Facebook according to Alexa. That is why we cannot ignore the power of SEO and how it will help our business succeed.

Going back to our example of the hotel business owner, if he wants to attract more people to become his customers, he can start by putting his business online. He can start building his company’s online presence by creating a website, blog or a simple web page with the help of a website developer or a designer. His website will serve as the people’s gateway to his business through the Internet which is accessible anywhere and anytime. That website must contain quality design, interesting contents and friendly usability. Once it’s done, it’s now time to promote it to the search engines. It’s time to optimize it, bring it to the top of the search engines, and bring it closer to potential customers.

Google search engine results when I type the search term/keyword “search”.

How search engine users become your customers
With hundred of millions of people using Google, it’s exciting to imagine how you can pull a piece of it to your website and to your business. But it’s not as easy as that. Besides, you still need to choose only the people who will really need your business. Thus, targeting relevant traffic and visitors to your site is a must. Of course, if your hotel business is located in Manila Philippines, you won’t promote your business to people who don’t want to travel in the Philippines. That is why search engine optimizers target the best keyword that will bring the most relevant people to your website and business. So if you own a hotel in Manila, you should attract people in the search engines who search for the keywords, such as “hotel in Manila”, best hotels in Manila Philippines”, and other search terms that would fit to your specific services. By targeting the best keywords that will rank your website, you will also be targeting the most qualified visitors to your website and potential customers to your business.

How SEO helps you win the business competition
Search Engine Optimization helps a business win in the market competition by outranking its competitors in the search engines. Let us say if your company web page (assuming you’re in a hotel business in Manila) will be on the top of the search engine results for the search term “hotels in Manila Philippines”, and your competitors pages are only found below your rank, your business will receive the highest exposure than those of your competitors. This will even become more advantageous if your competitors don’t have presence yet online, that is, they don’t have any website or online profiles. However, when your competitors are also ranked competitively on the search engines, being on the top should not be an absolute reason to celebrate. Remember that SEO is only a way to promote our businesses in the search engines and to the searchers. Promotion alone doesn’t make a great marketing strategy. We also need to ensure that we will not disappoint the visitors that Google and other search engines bring us. We need to assure that we can provide them what they are looking for – quality and satisfaction.

Final thoughts:
SEO will still continue to grow in the Philippines and will continue to help more and more businesses not only in the Philippines, but also in the other parts of the world. And though the social media sites, like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are also becoming more popular places to promote an enterprise, search engines will still continue to progress through evolution and integration. Google has now its own social media network called Google Plus. This is a great move to integrate social media with search engine. In the future, SEO people will evolve to a fusion of search engine optimizer and social media marketer. But one thing is for sure, SEO will continue bringing more traffic and more profit to your business. And to ensure that you will be receiving lasting traffic and stable profit, choose white hat SEO. Choose a more customer-oriented marketing campaign. Finally, choose to satisfy and make your customers happy.