SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of making your site rank as high as it can in a search engine — like Google or DuckDuckGo. SEO is the continuous battle to get organic visitors to your website and to convince Google that your site has the information that potential future visitors will want.
It refers to the process of improving a website or web page to increase its visibility when a relevant topic is searched. Better visibility means that you can get more people to visit your site, which in turn means that your business is more likely to garner attention and attract new and existing customers.
With just a little SEO knowledge, you can begin to make changes that lead to long-term success. A beginner to SEO might get a bit overwhelmed by the tons of sites, books, and guides they might see. We’ll introduce you to these changes and answer a few of your questions about Search Engine Optimization.
A major reason why SEO frustrates so many aspiring business owners or web developers is that it changes continuously. Whenever the “marketers” hear about a new trend or technique to generate leads, they run it dry. Also, there’s the fact that Google keeps fiddling with its algorithm.
If you want to succeed at Search Engine Optimization, you have to be extremely adaptable. Marketers don’t change their strategies because they’re fickle idiots; they know that sometimes, the difference between a front-page Google ranking and absolute obscurity might be a single decision.
How Does SEO Work?
When you understand the magic behind SEO, you can take advantage of several methods to increase your page ranking and visibility. Most people divide SEO tactics into two broad categories:
- On-page SEO: These are the SEO strategies you put into place on your site.
- Off-page SEO: These are the SEO strategies that happen outside your site.
Both categories’ primary aim is to make your site seem more trustworthy to both users and the crawlers that the search engines use. The more friendly your site looks to a crawler, the more likely it is for your site to rank well for relevant searches. For example, say you have two websites: Website X and Website Y.
Website X isn’t responsive. A significant chunk of their users — those on smartphones and tablets — will not be able to conveniently navigate or use the site. Website Y, on the other hand, is responsive. This means a better experience across the board — tablet, smartphone, and desktop users alike.
For search engines, it’s an easy decision which website is more friendly: Website Y. It’s not that easy in practice, though. An average search engine crawler can go through more than 200 different factors to rank a website, which means several elements can influence your visibility.
How Is SEO Beneficial For Business?
Search Engine Optimization can help business owners create speedy, user-friendly websites which rank higher in search engines. That helps to bring more visitors, i.e. potential customers, to their sites, which improves conversion rates down the line. Users hardly, if ever, navigate past the first page of search results on Google.
As a business owner — especially if you own a Small or Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) — you should utilize SEO to build a strong web presence and undercut the competition. If you can get your business to the front page of relevant search terms, you could also build brand awareness.
Taking SEO techniques seriously could be the source of a new sort of prosperity for you and your brand. In our interconnected modern world where everyone is glued to their screen, search engines and SEO are more powerful than ever. If your competitors show up on a search result page before you, they have been busy with SEO marketing. Why have you not invested in it yet?
How Can SEO Help Various Businesses?
Each business has its target market. By regularly creating and publishing content related to your target market, you’ll have a chance to reach your potential customers directly through search engines. If your content is of a high enough quality, then the search engines will rank you higher.
That gets you targeted traffic at no extra cost. Once you get your targeted audience to your site, you need to know how to keep them there by giving them what they searched for. Your content marketing should work with the goals you set for your business so that you can build real trust and rapport with the audience.
The best SEO doesn’t just get people to click through the site by blogging and marketing; it also gets the user to take the right actions when they do visit. When you use SEO to get traffic to your website, you have to know why you want people to come to your site. You have to keep in mind the actions you’d like the visitors to take.
You are probably searching for SEO help because you want to get more business from your website. The only way you can do that is to have a laser focus on how you’ll convert the traffic you will surely generate. Visitors to your business are only valuable when they do what you want with your content.
Even if you can’t coerce visitors into a sale, you at least want to give them your contact info for a follow-up call or email. You don’t want people to visit your site through a search engine, only to leave and never visit again.
How Can SEO Get Me Leads?
Good SEO is hidden in plain sight. It sits on the website, hidden but starting your visitors in the face. It shows itself to Google, Bing, and other search engines but doesn’t sacrifice your content or context. The easiest way to generate more leads is to optimize your site for search engines.
Having a website hosted won’t be enough — to drive leads, you have to use an SEO strategy. You can lure your target audience by using keywords, building trust, and more. SEO generates leads by ensuring that you’re visible on search engines and that you appear first when users search terms related to your target keywords.
You need to know the type of leads you would want. The more specific you are, the better for your audience. If you want to sell fast food to New Yorkers, “New Yorkers” is way too vague. Are you interested in men or women? People living alone? People in Queens? And so on and so forth.
The more time you spend tailoring content for your audience, the easier it is to tailor keywords they might be interested in to lure them in. A Gen-Zer looking for a snack might decide to search for a number of long-tail keywords, such as “order vegetarian pepperoni pizza online faux meat.”
Can SEO Provide Long-Term Quality Leads?
Unlike ads, SEO doesn’t just stop one day. It builds a foundation for lead generation which only grows in value over time. This means that your average cost per lead is always reducing.
As you and your team build more content tailored to your SEO needs, your page will keep getting fed to your prospective audience at every stage of their decision-making. As they discover your brand through the engines, they’ll start to subconsciously recognize you as an authority in your field.
Inherently, SEO is slow and deliberate. It doesn’t promise to pay off right away. When it does pay off, though, it is worth all the time spent waiting. When search engines begin to recognize that you’re the one with the answers to their users’ questions, you’ll get progressively more visitors, and by extension, sales.
How Can My Business Benefit From SEO?
Your website isn’t the same as the next person’s. Take time out to find out your site’s specific goals for doing business. This won’t just help you know where to put the most energy into concerning your SEO work and focus, but it will also help you to communicate that with your team and/or bosses or clients.
You’ll need to set down KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track the return on your SEO investment. These are measurements to show how successful your efforts to push your page up the rankings have been. For example: “For my Doritos Site, my main Performance Indicator is _________.” Need some inspiration? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with some common KPIs:
- Sales
- Downloads
- Email signups
- Contact form submissions
- Phone calls
If you run a local business, you will want KPIs for your Google My Business listings, too. These might include:
- Clicks-to-call
- Clicks-to-website
- Clicks-for-driving-directions
You might have noticed that things such as “ranking” or “traffic” weren’t on our sample KPI lists, and that is not a mistake. You might be wondering why those aren’t listed as common goals. SEO done right will help your website get better visibility and thus drive leads to it, but those shouldn’t be your ultimate goals.