I love my planet. I love everything about it. Green Websites, the greenery of the Amazon, the snow of the Himalayas, the water of the oceans, the clear blue skies and the starry ones. Every single aspect of our planet needs to be loved and cherished. Many of us do just that, but not all.
The last century has deteriorated our mother earth. Its beauty is slowly diminishing. The forests are depleting by the minute, the snows are melting, the waters are being polluted and so is the air.
The stage our planet is at isn’t one we should or can be proud of. The deleterious effects are caused by no one else, but us. The greenhouse effect and our carbon footprints are the culprits.
Do we want to leave our planet for our next generation like we received from our previous generation? If the answer is yes, we have to start initiating change. And this change has to be holistic. You can’t just stop using plastic and think your part is done. No, plastic is just one aspect of human activities that is slowly killing our planet. There are so many others and we have to start addressing them as well.
And that is what I am here to do. I am going to be talking about the internet, search engines and our websites and how they are also contributing their bit into the damage that is ongoing to our planet. The trend towards green websites is reshaping how SEO strategies are developed. With a growing emphasis on sustainability, integrating green practices into SEO is becoming crucial. For a deeper dive into how these emerging trends, including green websites, are shaping the future of SEO, visit our detailed analysis on The Future of SEO.
Internet and The Carbon Footprint
Using the internet seems like a trivial activity we perform a thousand times a day. Up until recently, I didn’t even know that using the internet is actually affecting the planet. And there are so many like me who think the same way. However, that is wrong and I was wrong.
The use of the internet contributes to as much as 2% of the global carbon emissions. Now, you might think that it is such a low number, but think again.
I’ll give you a comparison that would shock you.
The carbon emissions from the internet are equal in proportion to the carbon emissions that the entire aviation industry produces.
With the hundreds of planes and thousands of flights, we can imagine the kind of carbon footprint the aviation industry is capable of. And that is 2%, which the internet is equally contributing.
Talking about search engines, the Google searches specifically, each search on Google accounts to 0.4g of carbon being released.
Do you know how many searches there are on Google each day?
That is close to 4 billion a day, which becomes 28 billion in a week and 112 billion a month. And probably calculate just how many in a year.
This is why the green initiative has moved onto the internet and this is why green websites need to be prioritised. Now, let’s see how.
How Does SEO Promote Carbon Neutrality?
People all over the world are becoming increasingly aware of the harm being done to the environment. The consequence of the same awareness lies in their needs. Consumers look for products and services that aren’t harmful to the environment. And the same is being witnessed in the virtual businesses.
A green websites would be largely appreciated by its audience and even search engines, as we have already discussed.
So how does SEO come into the equation?
Well, there are a lot of factors that come into play when adopting and implementing a sound SEO strategy. And when that happens you would end up with a greener web experience. Let’s see how.
The right click on the first attempt
One of the primary goals of an SEO strategy is to ensure that your audience finds exactly what they typed into the search engine’s bar. That’s researching and adding the appropriate keywords into your content. When an SEO strategy does that, your users will get what they need on the very first click to your site.
They’ll peruse it, find what they are looking for, become satisfied and leave your site and the search engine being happy and satiated.
What does this mean?
Your users won’t be searching for more results. Their internet activity would reduce and the 0.4g emitted from unnecessary Google searches would no longer be a problem.
The right site map for easy access
The goal of an eco-friendly carbon neutral website is to reduce the number of redirects and clicks that only add to the user’s carbon footprint. These clicks serve no real purpose, and therefore they should be eliminated.
And SEO helps in this too.
An important part of an SEO strategy is the creation of a site map, that too an XML map. This helps in the navigational aspects of the website by improving them.
Getting from one page to the next becomes very easy. Through an XML map, the user can conveniently move across the site and only surf the pages that he thinks may serve him a purpose.
Another SEO hack that helps in easy access and navigation is the removal of the shoddy redirects. The perfect SEO strategy would never have unwanted redirects or pages showing the 404 error. With that, you will again be saving on a ton of unnecessary clicks and navigation
The right answers to the user’s environment dilemma
Your website may be a commercial one, but along with that it is also going to be an informative one. You can’t expect every consumer to come to your site and buy something, but you can expect him to leave with something every time. And that something is knowledge.
Google searches for topics related to our environment’s health are too many.
- Climate change
- Global warming
- Carbon footprints
- Greenhouse effect
These are regarded as environment centric searches and SEO helps you become the answer for them all. This is done through adding content on your website that pertains to the environment related searches.
This one doesn’t really have a direct impact on the environment like the other two searches. However, it does impart knowledge to your consumers about an important issue. And I like to believe that that knowledge would show a result in one way or another.
Conclusion
Now the only question left to answer is how do you become SEO-friendly and environment-friendly. The answer lies in a digital marketing company in Delhi or anywhere in India.
These companies are professional, like you are thinking about going green websites, there would be other online businesses as well. And being professionals in digital marketing services, they would have thought of ways to implement the green websites strategies to help you.
Speaking from personal experience, it is wise to leave something to the professionals. I did that, and I literally saw tangible changes in my website’s carbon footprints from the day I hired them. There are actually tools to measure the progress towards carbon neutrality. So, when are you taking up the challenge of being carbon neutral?
