If you have done any amount of online marketing, you have probably heard about “SEO.” Does it sounds like complicated jargon? If so, this Marketing Tip of the Week is for you! Today, I want to give you a simple explanation of SEO that can help you understand how it relates to your marketing and what you can do to play into it.
First, it helps to know that SEO is an acronym. It stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Imagine you are trying to find something online. Maybe you need a mechanic, but you don’t have any idea who to go to. You open up Google, Bing, or some other search engine. You type something in – probably a short phrase that gets to the root of what you are hoping to get information about. Magically, you get the results of your search. It could be just a few pages of results or thousands.
How many pages of results do you look through before you feel like you have enough information? I personally might pour through dozens of pages if it is a really important topic and I want to comparison shop for answers. More often, people only sift through a page or two of results before they are satisfied enough to abandon their efforts.
If you have a business, and you want new people to find out about it online, you want your website to come up on those first pages. If the very first record that comes up on the first page is #1 in the ranking, you want a page of your website to rank as close as possible to that first spot for any keywords you think might have to do with your business.
If you understand this, you understand the point of SEO. You want your website to rank well in search results so new leads can learn about your business.
You want your website to rank well in search results so new leads can learn about your #business. Share on XNow, there are different approaches you can take to get there. The first thing to know is that the back-end coding of your website should be designed to speak to search engines. If you are trying to design your own website, you may want to consult with a professional web developer on getting yourself set up properly for SEO. It will have a big impact for you down the road, especially if you have product pages or blogs on your site.
The factors that go into search engines recognizing your website are many, if a little murky. But there are certain things that hold true:
- Search engines look for sites with fresh content. If a site hasn’t been updated in 10 years, why would anyone think it is relevant? This is a great advantage of having blogs on your website, because it shows you are continually adding new material.
- Search engines look for what keyword phrases are relevant for your pages. What should your page rank for? Rather than expecting Google or Bing just to know what you wrote, you can specify the keyword phrase that your page is about. You would do this in the back end of the site, often with an SEO plug-in of some sort that makes it easy for you to label photos and create keywords and descriptions. By doing this, you tell search engines exactly what your fresh content is about and what you want it to rank you for.
- Search engines look to see how much traffic visits that page. If you have specified a keyword phrase and suddenly a lot of people start visiting your page, a search engine can only assume that you had something valid and worthwhile to say for that topic. Your page will rank better as a result.
- Search Engines look for links. Okay, this is a complicated, jargon-filled topic. Not all links are created equal in the eyes of a search engine. However, to keep it basic, if other legitimate sites are linking to your page, it makes your page more credible. If you link to other people’s pages, you are being an overall good community partner and doing a favor to those you link.
It is smart to be wise about the set-up of all pages on your website and to promote the right pages to the right audiences. One thing that may help you along is to identify cornerstone blog content (read here for more information), key products, or key landing pages you want to attract your audience to. If you pick the key pages and promote those specific ones really heavily, you have an opportunity to rank well for those pages, attract more people, and then convert them to the next page or offer you want them to see.
This “heavy promotion” I talk about can include paying for ads, but SEO does not have to mean paid advertising. Your search ranking can improve organically without paying for ads, too. It takes a lot of time and a lot of hustle to get there organically by sharing the link to your cornerstone content or key pages as widely as you can. If you do a good job of getting a lot of people to that one page – and the page is designed well enough that people want to continue on and visit more of your site – you will find that the ranking of many pages of your site improves. This is why you always want to design it so you know where you are sending people from each page of your site.
Your search ranking can improve organically without paying for ads. #SEO #marketing #smb #smallbiz Share on XIf you are paying a ton of money for advertising online on search engines, it is worth taking a look at that plan and making sure it is aligned with these principles. I know a lot of people who are wasting money on paid advertising for web pages that are dead ends, for websites that are already ranking well organically, or for businesses that should be shifting towards customer retention and referral building. If you are not sure if that’s you, look into it! Or contact me. It’s worth it.
SEO may seem like a complicated topic, but it is important to understand the basics of it if you are doing online marketing. A well-designed online marketing plan pays dividends for you. If you get yourself set up correctly, you create the opportunity for a lot of happy moments where people find out about you, read your content, prospect themselves, and start the sales process all on their own. But this only happens if you are smart in designing your content, structuring your site, and promoting key pages to bring the leads in.
There is a whole world of complex lingo to explore on this topic, but this simple explanation of SEO is a practical way to get started. You may just need to make some minor adjustments in your online marketing to make a massive difference in your lead generation and customer pipeline.