“What is SEO, and why do I need to do it”?
SEO is Search engine optimization- managing your website both on page and on the internet broadly for the search engines like Google and Bing so that you show up when people are searching for your services online.
It involves doing some coding of your pages, and some work on the internet with directories, maps and listings. Its not rocket science, but it needs to be worked at over a period of months, and then refreshed regularly, which for most businesses means checking monthly, and doing a days work quarterly.
Why is SEO Important:
Businesses that don’t pay attention to SEO are in far worse situation than companies who invest in search engine marketing.
SEO offers a number of advantages to small business owners.
1. Create a better and more user friendly website:
SEO will help you create a better, faster and friendlier website for users. Despite the name, SEO search engine optimization puts the focus on the user in addition to Google and Bing. When your users are happy, search engines are happy as well. Following good on-page SEO techniques (in the coding and text) improves the user experience and this creates a number of short term and long term benefits.
2. SEO will help you gain better rankings in search engine result pages and this translates to more targeted visits and essentially to more customers:
SEO is a very viable marketing outlet that can, in concert with effective landing pages and content, bring your business qualified leads and customers. Moreover, studies have shown that SEO can have a better ROI than traditional forms of marketing. It isn’t magic, and SEO alone is not going to transform your business. But neither is any form of advertising. What it can do is provide a business visibility, branding, traffic, a high ROI, credibility, and insight into customer behavior, at a relatively low long term cost.
3. SEO is Good for Business Visibility and Branding
When people search for your products and services, you want to appear as high in the search engine rankings as possible, but the reasons for this are more than just because you want them to click through to your website. In fact, there is a certain amount of value in simply appearing in search results for terms directly related to your business. For instance, most searchers don’t just simply search once, click on some websites, and be done with it. Instead, they search, click on some websites, edit their search terms, search again, click on some websites, further hone their search terms, search again, and so on. SEO will help you be there for the correct terms, and allow you to help you solve their problems.
