We’ve been devouring a great deal of SEO content lately in order to explain what the heck SEO is and why it’s vital in marketing your business. The more paragraphs of information we read the better we are at shortening our explanation of the hundreds of things that make for good SEO.
So here, we’ll do our best to explain simply why your business needs it.
What’s the big deal?
Wait. I’ve said SEO three times, and someone out there has no idea what that is. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing your website so people using Google or Bing can find your business on that all-important first page of search results.
Why do you want to be on the top of page one of a Google search? That’s a no-brainer. The answer is more web traffic that can lead to sales. When people type “chainsaw jugglers near me,” you want your chainsaw juggling website to be at the top of the list. Customers click on the link, which takes them to your site. They take in your content, deciding you’re the best chainsaw juggler for them and they contact you for a booking.
The harder question is “how” do we get on page one of a web search?
We keep mentioning there are a lot of steps to achieving sales through an SEO campaign. And now would be a good time to get in a plug that Marketing Tech is an expert in all this SEO stuff, and we’ll be happy to take care of all the little details. But basically, how it works is, we get all your business information correct on Yelp and the 100 other Yelp-like services. Then we find the best keywords that are being typed into those search engines and make sure your website is chock-full of them, not just in the content people read, but in the back-end code that search engines look for. Then we keep adding keyword-rich content in the form of blogs and landing pages every month, so we keep the search engines showing potential customers you exist.
Blogs
If you did all the above for your website, month after month, year after year Google will take notice. That’s called Organic SEO. But if you want a managed and more effective impact on your SEO results, you’ll want to budget for an SEO campaign, with fresh content created and added with the best performing keywords. This is called Paid SEO or Search Engine Marketing. If you are sitting there thinking, should my business pay for SEO, ask yourself if you know how to regularly optimize your website with quality links and keywords, and if you have time to write two or more blog posts every month.
It’s been our experience that when we mention blogging to clients, they tend to get a less-than-thrilled look on their face. After all, they have a business to run, who’s got time to be a writer? And find out what keywords Google wants to find, and get those into your writing?
ROI (Return on Investment)
Let’s talk return on investment (ROI) for a second. If you happened to catch Mad Men, there’s an episode where Don Draper has just sold Kodak a beautiful commercial and the client says, “I hope that commercial works” and to that Don replies, “We’ll never know.” Yikes. Those guessing days are gone. We live in a very technical and “trackable” age, where the money you spend on SEO and Pay Per Click advertising can be measured for success. While there’s no chart that shows dollars spent vs sales achieved, we can track what people search, who comes to your site, what content they consume, what pages they spend the most time on, did they do what you wanted them to, and on what page of your site do they exit. Goals can be set up like “who comes and opens up my coupon” or “who filled out my contact form” after an SEO campaign is set up – and all that data can be measured and tracked over months.
“Tracked over months” is an important thing to mention regarding SEO. SEO improvements are measured in months, not days or weeks. If you want your business at the top of a search result in hours or days, that is called Pay Per Click, and that’s for another article.
If all or any of the above intrigues you, we’d love to chat about it. Give us a call and we’ll do our best not to overwhelm you with all this nerdy stuff we know. We’d rather you do what you do best, and have us handle marketing your brand how we know best.
We hope this post gives you some insight into why SEO is crucial to your business! If you’re interested in getting in touch with us, leave us a message below!
