What Is SEO & Why Is It Important To Your Business?
You’ve probably heard that SEO is important and it’s something that your business should have a strategy for, but what does that mean?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing your website and content to organically rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. Organic search is a top method for discoverability and attracting people to your website, but without a strong SEO strategy, there is a good chance that your business will be lost in the pack.
Imagine This: Your business sells running shoes in Vancouver and you have about 100 direct competitors in the area. If you have not optimized your website for search, your website may show up somewhere between the 50th and 100th search results when a consumer searches for ‘running shoes Vancouver’ on Google. Let’s be real, that consumer is probably not scrolling down to the 50th search result to find you.
How Do Search Engines Work? (In Basic Terms)
Search engines make life easier for all of us, but how do they do it? Believe it or not, they use ‘spiders’ and ‘bots’, otherwise known as ‘crawlers’ to gather digital information to populate the search engine’s index (database). These crawlers follow links across the internet to gather all of this information.
As the crawlers follow links from page to page, they ‘learn’ about the page based on its content and the context in which they ended up there from other links. This allows the search engine to understand what the page is about and categorize it within its index.
There are a variety of factors within the categories of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO that determine how your web pages are understood and ranked by search engines, but we’ll get to that!
What Are The Goals Of SEO?
Why would a brand want to prioritize SEO? Here are a few SEO goals that might give you some insight.
- Ranking Higher On SERPS | Since many search engine users will choose a web page from the first page of search results, and 75% click on the first or second result, it’s important to rank as high as possible for a variety of search terms so that your website is the chosen result.
- To Attract More Quality Website Traffic | If you’ve nailed your SEO, the quality of traffic to your website should improve. If you’re ranking well for relevant search terms, the people who click through to your website are more likely to see and get what they need from their search, which will improve your conversion rate.
- It Can Lead To A Better User Experience | Search engines reward content that is actually useful to its audience. With this in mind, investing in SEO means investing in the overall user experience of your website and offering further value to your end user.
How Can You Apply SEO In Your Business?
There are a variety of ways that you can improve your SEO and they fall into the categories of On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO focuses on the content on your website. Makes sense right? Some of the things to optimize for search on your website include:
- Meta Description Tags
- Image Optimization
- Alt Tags
- Page Titles
- Internal Links
- Alt Text
- Headers
- Videos
- Navigation
- On-Page Body Text
Off-Page SEO
You can probably guess this one, but Off-Page SEO includes the optimization tasks that take place off of your website, yet still impact the searchability of your website. These tasks can include:
- Social Media Marketing
- Guest Blogs or Podcasts
- Earning Backlinks and Backlink Outreach (When reputable websites link to your website from their own.)
- Traditional PR
Technical SEO
Last, but not least, Technical SEO is the action of optimizing your website to ensure that it can be properly crawled and indexed. These actions can include:
- Mobile-Friendly Website Design
- Image Compression
- Analytics Setup
- Page Load Speed Optimization
- Robots.txt Status
- Indexing Status
- Site Crawling
- & much more.
While you may consider hiring an SEO expert for many of these tasks, there are a number of things that you can do on your own to improve the search discoverability of your website, such as crafting strategic copy with long tail keywords for product listings, services pages, and blog posts for your website.
If that sounds a little too daunting to you, Sammy Hill Creative has a knack for implementing SEO strategies through the creation of strategic copywriting, social media marketing campaigns, and traditional PR. Schedule a discovery call with us and we can help you identify the best route for an SEO strategy.
