SEO: Explained! A BEGINNERS GUIDE & INTRO INTO THE BASICS OF SEO
SEO EXPLAINED:
Plain and Simple
The HOW's WHAT's & WHY's of SEO
More often than not, the typical response received when asked what it is I do for work typically consists of "what in the H*ll is
that?!" or "no idea what that is".. something along those lines.
Unfortunately, many people
don't know what SEO is even though it's highly important to have especially if you
have a website for your business, your blog, your cause, or selling products. However, you do not need a website in order to provide SEO services and boost your rank in the search engines.
Statistics have previously shown that many business
owners don't think it's necessary to have a marketing team on their payroll so
they do their own marketing. Now in 2019/2020 over half (60% if I remember correctly) of the business-owning population is putting more of their money into SEO companies and making it a higher priority. As they should. And you are about to find out why.
From this article, you will leave with the following:
- a shared understanding of SEO
- comprehension of its importance
- insights on whether or not you need to hire a professional
- gained appreciation for SEO
WHAT IS SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization
Yes, SEO is an acronym for Search
Engine Optimization. Back when I was told of this, I was still not even
remotely sure what it meant. I also learned the hard way that it is not an easy job one can just pick up and do immediately.
The quick definition:
- SEO is a form of internet marketing comprised of many different strategies to help your website or business rank higher on Google without paying for advertisements.
The in-depth explanation:
- SEO is an effective form of internet marketing generating a high ROI using multiple methods and different approaches to increase your online presence, site visibility, and ranking on SERPs as it hones in on your target audience. SEO generates more organic traffic (user visits) which holds a higher value among search engines and means that it is accomplished without the use of paid advertisements
My conclusion- SEO is essentially just all of us in the industry trying to figure out Google's search result algorithm and beat them at their own game while adjusting to their daily algorithm updates.
***Side note- Google uses over 200 different factors in their algorithm when deciding how to best rank a user's results.
It is important that when a specific
user searches for a product you carry, a service you provide, or high-quality informative content that you write about, your business website comes up
on the first page of their search results, especially in the top 5 results. So let's find out why.
What does SEO consist of?
The many jobs & tasks of SEO
SEO consists of many things that you may not think would be too important. Some of it is common sense. These are the things that make an impact on how Google ranks your website on the results for online users.
For instance, you will need to focus on pumping out new and updated high-quality content on a consistent basis. Also, you need to optimize your website for keywords that your target audience would use and include both internal and external links on your website. These would be on-page SEO examples. On-page SEO is anything that is done directly within the website itself (See the infographic below)
So take both those types of SEO, and add the importance of remaining current in many areas in order to continue to rise upwards in the ranking. It becomes a whole nother business in itself. Heck, it's a whole nother industry. Hence why we do it for a job. Unless you have the right knowledge AND time on your hands, it's probably not the best idea to do it on your own while you already run daily operations for your business.
Having your own team of marketing experts or freelance SEOs on your payroll would be more beneficial to you. You would receive custom graphics for your website, social media content, and updates & new content for your site without having to keep writing new stuff and updating it. We recommend leaving it up to the experts instead of doing it yourself because...
Why You Should Hire an SEO/ Consultant:
- SEO is not learned over-night and takes a lot of time which most business owners do not have while running their business concurrently
- Can you run your business and take on another 5 jobs? Keep in mind that Google does algorithmic updates every day.
- SEO must be maintained on a regular basis, you can get a one-time optimization for the most part, however, SEO takes a few months to see optimal results and that's with monthly services
- Updating your website consistently with fresh content, new market trends and staying on top of your UI and UX to make your site more user-friendly especially where navigation is concerned is key,
- Continuous research is needed to remain relevant to your target audience like keyword research, market research, analytic pattern research so that you can adjust to these changes
- All these points boil down to two things: TIME & KNOWLEDGE. You must be able to have both of those in order to do it yourself.
How to Find Out What You Need
If you aren't sure about what your website needs or what you need to do to increase your traffic, have a consultant run an audit on your site.
An audit is essentially a health check-up of your website that will diagnose all of your website's strengths and weaknesses, show how much traffic you are getting, go over your links and content, any potential risks you may not be aware of plus other things that may be harming or helping your SEO.
Yes, there are websites that will do audits for you but having a consultant's assistance will help you as far as combing over your site in detail & help you understand the results that it generates. More importantly, once you have looked at and understand your results, a consultant can begin creating a strong marketing plan and help you with your campaign.
Discuss this in detail with an SEO, ask as many questions as you need to so you can develop a shared understanding of what is being done for you and why it's being done . From there, you start at the first step of your business plan for improving your online presence. Now, back to our main goal in doing all of these things for your website.
Why do we do all of this?
As we stated before, our job is to increase your brand's online presence by helping your site rank higher on the Google search result pages.
Finding your target audience is key. Think about your customers or the new customers you want to attract and use the gender, age range, income amount, school level graduated as a generic basis for applying your target audience.
For example, let's use a corporate business that we all would know- Let's go with Hollister Clothing. (my first job so yeah it popped in my head) So their target audience would most likely be both genders, ages 16-25, income: $0 - $30k, education level: > or less than high school grad/college grad. Sound about right?
Figure yours out and try and go through outlets where those types of people will be located and market the SHNIT out of your services/goods. With proven white hat methods, we can essentially bring business to you by increasing your monthly user visits (your organic traffic)
When we say organic traffic, organic means generating traffic to your site without using paid advertisements. It is strictly based on how relevant your search was. If you have a kayak boat rental service, for instance, when a user in the area types something like "kayak rentals near me" into their query, no exact name search or paid ads. Organic traffic is the kind you want, wait for our blog coming up about organic traffic.
Statistics show that the majority of people, about 4/5, do not click on the paid advertisements that come up on the search result pages (aka SERP - Search Engine Result Page). They are the few search results that come up first and are marked as paid ads. I am one of those 4 people who don't click on the paid ads. I wanna see what comes up just from my search query.
Statistically speaking, you are probably one of the other three of the four people who do not click on the ads either. So, you are searching for the use of organic traffic. This is what we are trying to increase as SEOs. And more traffic equals more awareness & attention, more customers who begin spreading word about your business, more readers, and essentially more revenue if that is what you are after.
Why is SEO important?
The statistics alone explain it all
If you don't, however,
you are like most of us. Chances are that you do not make it past the first
page and you are most likely going to click on one of the top choices within the first 5 results. So,
being on the first page is good, and being within the top 5 search results is gold, and a sure
shot way to increase your organic traffic to your website.
If you are at the
number 1 spot, you have basically hit the Google lottery and winning at life so
give yourself a high five, grab your retirement plan, buy a yacht and sail
across the globe! Oh and don't forget to thank and tip your marketing team!
Okay, that
may have been a little overboard (pun intended) and a bit dramatic, but you get
the point.
In case you still aren't convinced, check out these other statistics:
- 91% of people pick a site on the first page alone (blue corona)
- The first SERP entry gets more than 20% of clicks while the top three get almost 50% of all clicks on the first page (Ignite Visibility)
- 75% of clicks go to the top 5 positions on Google (Search Engine Joural)
- 70-80% of users ignore paid ads and organic links get 70% of all clicks (Imforza)
- Search engines are the #1 driver of site visits, 300% more than social media (Search Engine Land)
- There are 6,586,013,574 searches made a day worldwide. (SmartInsights, 2018)
- Organic SEO is about 5.66 times better than paid search ads (markinblog)
SEO & Search Engines
You may notice how
Google is used repeatedly when it comes to SEO and if you are asking yourself
if we only do SEO under Google regulations and algorithms, the answer is no. But according to that market share, check at the infographic below to see the market share as of late 2019, Google seems to be the best one for now.
SEO goes across the board with all
search engines so yes, Yahoo, Bing, Yankdex, DuckDuckGo etc. are all included.
All in all, the world we live in keeps evolving and changing every day. Google does about 500 updates to its's algorithm each year. (blue corona) With this very fast-paced, visual, and constantly growing world where technology remains at the forefront, it is important to stay up-to-date and keep adjusting to the market as it changes so you can evolve along with it.
Using pictures/vides to communicate is more important than ever. So make sure you have a good graphics team on your side, using stock photos can possibly hurt your SEO.
By having a strong market plan and honest,
hard-working, white hat-wearing SEO's plus content marketing experts & market researchers, you will take
those dreams and bring them to life!
It is possible to achieve anything as long
as you are willing to make that first step by contacting us, put in the hard work by focusing on your business, and let us focus on your business' online and digital presence.
Drop a line if you have a relevant story you want to share for use on our blogs, site and as research, share your story in the comment section or if you want to remain anonymous you can email it to us at insiteandonline@gmail.com
Let's come together and keep on fighting the good fight!
One.
Content is written by
Amanda Hankey
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