What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of doing certain tactics, steps and changes involving your website to increase your visibility for what people are searching. The more you improve the visibility, the greater chance for visitors to find you. Note, this is all NON-PAID search engine results, meaning Google PPC for example is not SEO.
So, is SEO important for your business?
YES…
Read no more, because asking if SEO important, you have your answer. But if you wanted details, read on…
Google and Bing are very popular search engines. I prefer Google, well, incase you cared. The search engines have bots that that go website to website, searching all the pages of each of the websites. The sites go into an index, where algorithms then use ranking factors to determine the order of pages in the search results. So if you have a bad result from the ranking factor, you are going to the bottom of the list.. like page 4….7… or 100.
Search ranking factors include a secure and accessible site, keywords and mobile speed. There are a few major components of SEO. Technical SEO, On-page SEO and off-page SEO are the 3 categories. Each category has their own rank factors, and work for you… tactics to improve your quality for each.
Is SEO Important? I mean really?
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN ASK THAT?!
SEO is what let’s you reduce or eliminate Paid Ads. It’s bringing in traffic for you! If you are trending high with key words on google and are on the top 3 results, there really is no need to keep paying ads for those words. Theoretically. But some argue that keeping PPC while you rank on is still a smart move. SEO is important if you want to lower or eliminate specific ad spend.
Implementing Search Engine Optimization is a great long term strategy and it is cost-effective.
When you execute SEO, you are working in tactics to try and get your site on the top search results in google. By doing this, people will see your page.
How Easy is SEO?
I personally don’t think it is easy. Sure, certain aspects of SEO are, but many of the tactics require time, patience, and a lot of research and thinking as you look to execute them. Taking a step back, there are so many strategies that can be put in place. When you look at the types of SEO- on-page, technical, off-page, local – some you can start very quickly.
On-page deals with your content, the keywords the quality. It’s everything on your website page or post. Content is King. Technical covers your site speed, use of proper meta tags and descriptions and images optimized. Off-page is the most time consuming and difficult, with other sites referencing yours and linking back to you. Lastly, local SEO is tactics to get your business found locally, or nationally, on directories and places like Google My Business.
How to Get Started?
Do you know how well your site is performing today? Do you have an idea of how you are ranking? The first step is to get a SEO audit. This will tell you much about your site, and can be hood baseline to check back against as your work to improve your Search Engine Optimization by doing the tactics to support it.