If you have been involved in business marketing, you may have heard the term “SEO”. As a business owner, you most likely have been told by your marketer that it is extremely important to have, as it helps your organic visibility. Sure, you understand that concept, but outside of that, you have no idea what SEO entails. SEO is such a buzzword in the marketing arena these days, that the term itself has been searched between 10,000 to 100,000 times per month.
If you have a business website, you should have some knowledge on SEO. In this blog, we will go over the basic principles on SEO and what you should know about this service.
Let’s start with the definition. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving your website in order to increase your visibility and organic rankings when people search for your service/product in search engines such as Google, Bing and other search engines. Before we get into the fundamentals, let’s look at a local Google search query for “dentists near me” below.
You can see that the companies paying for keywords “dentists near me” are on the top. These are their search engine marketing efforts, which is essentially paid ads. Under the paid ads, there’s a map of local dentists. The section on the right are the organic rankings on the first search page, which is what SEO if designated to do. By increasing your SEO efforts, your business can show up on the first page of search engines.
Now that we understand where you are competing for SEO, how can you get there? Here are a few basic principles.
Backlinks:
What are backlinks? In a nutshell, backlinks are links from other websites that direct traffic to your website. Links can be referred to your site for reasons such as citing information from your site or referring your website to their audience. The more reputable the website referring your links, the better it is for your website’s reputation. Google’s algorithm is set to rate pages based on their expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The higher quality of rating, the better you will rank.
This is one of the most important tactics in SEO. According to a pie chart by Firstsagepage.com, backlinks account for 16% of Google Algorithm Ranking Factors.
Relevant Content:
Relevant content is by far the most important piece of search engine optimization. Why you may ask? Google’s algorithm is set to send a search query to the most relevant website to their search. With so much competition on your area of expertise, the more quality content and information you have on the subject, the more it will keep that reader engaged. Other factors that Google will measure is the actions and time spent on your site by the reader. If you post engaging content and keep the reader on your page and interested, the better your website will rank.
One great way of increasing content is starting a bi-weekly or monthly blog on your industry. Not only will this establish you as a leader of knowledge in your field, it will increase quality of content on your website and provide more keywords to help your business rank organically.
Meta Descriptions:
You’ve heard of meta descriptions, but the term seems well beyond your marketing knowledge. Not really! You come across these on a daily basis as you conduct your own searches online and you have most likely clicked on a website link because of them. Simply put, a meta description is the small blurb that appears underneath your website in the search results page. It includes information about your page and is designed to provide users with a brief summary on the content of your page.
See an example below highlighted in red:
The more valuable information on your meta description, the more opportunity to increase interest and clicks to your website. Use this to your advantage to increase your organic website visits.
User Experience:
When a user finally lands on your page, what’s next? The user experience is an extremely important part of SEO, as Google will measure their time on site, bounce rate, landing page views, etc. Often called “technical SEO” the user experience and website functionality are factors you don’t want to ignore. Other factors to keep in mind is your website’s load time and design. Unfortunately, marketers often focus on the keyword aspect of SEO before user experience.
Now what?
Now that you know about the basic parts of SEO, let’s talk about time. Unlike Google Ads, SEO takes time. We like to say that SEO is a marathon, while SEM is a sprint. Depending on the work needed to optimize your website, it can take 2 to 4 months to see those results. In the end, you will be glad you did, as SEO will decrease your Google Ad cost and bring in more quality customers.
These are the most important parts of SEO that you, as a business owner, should understand. Knowing the general idea of SEO will help you make better decisions on hiring someone to do it well. Just because you know some of this, doesn’t mean you have to know all of it. You should have a dedicated marketing partner like KJ Marketing Group that focuses on optimizing your website to be SEO friendly. KJ Marketing Group is a marketing agency that will partner with your business and make sure you are receiving quality work to increase your Google ranking. Schedule your digital audit today and let us help you create a winning marketing strategy. www.kjmarketinggroup.com