What is SEO?
In a nutshell, SEO is a tool used to help maximize your visibility on a search engine. For example, if someone is searching for a type of product or service that you provide, would you want your website to appear on page three or page one of Google? Optimizing your website can boost your viewership and placement on a search engine site such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing since the internet has become saturated with new websites, being seen as essential in garnering traffic to your website. Having high Google rankings gives your website more visibility, as well as more targeted visibility.
What are the ranking factors?
Ranking factors are tools that will boost your visibility online. Ranking factors include:
Domain authority: Domain authority is a measure of the power of a domain name. The three main factors of a domain authority are Age, popularity, and size.
Backlinks: A backlink is a link that one website gets from another site. For example, a shirt company has a website, and a fashion blogger wears a shirt. The fashion blogger links the shirt site on her page.
Evergreen content: It’s content that is interesting to the reader, but it is not something that will be dated. Its information is just as relevant today as it will be in five years.
Other forms of ranking factors include an updated website, social media, maps, correct name, address, and phone number across all sites for businesses, fast site speed, and mobile-friendly. Keep in mind, most people do their internet-ing on their phones, so mobile-friendly is a must.
What is the advantage?
Applying proper SEO techniques gives you and your website a big advantage over your competitors. Keep in mind there are over 2 billion people online. There are 3.5 billion searches being made daily on a search engine. How can your products and services be filtered in all that online noise? Using SEO helps sift through the online noise and gets you to your potential clients, and vice versa. Your potential clients are most likely starting to look for you on a search engine before they even know it.
SEO is more targeted: Traditional marketing, such as television and radio ads, was put out to everyone, hoping something would stick. Now, with online marketing, SEO brings traffic to you. The people who are irrelevant to what you are selling are not seeing what you are advertising. It’s a narrower filter. Since people are already looking for you, SEO makes you stand out so that they can find you a bit easier in the online crowd. It eliminates the other unrelated online noise.
It’s very low cost: One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it costs you nothing if you know how to apply it to your website or a little something should you decide to hire a company to do it for you. SEO helps you garner organic traffic to your website and contributes to gradually increasing your ranking on a search engine. Remember, when building your online tribe, it takes a little time to find your regular, repeat, and loyal customers. It does not happen overnight, but the quality of your customer ship goes up.