Five Minute Marketing: What is SEO?
There are a lot of buzzwords that get thrown around in the world of online marketing, and one of the most popular is “SEO.” Web hosting services claim to have the best SEO out there, companies sell their SEO services, and small businesses obsess over whether their SEO is optimized. But at the end of the day, what is it really? And how can you achieve the best SEO possible?
In its simplest terms, SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It is a ranking given to a website that will push it higher or lower in search results. The ‘gold standard’ of SEO is to be on the very first page of results for a particular search, because the amount of people who visit your website will increase dramatically when yours is the easiest to find. According to Mr-SEO.com, the first page of Google results gets 91.5% of all clicks! If you think about even your own search habits, you’ll realize how common it is to stick to first-page results only.
So…how exactly can you improve your SEO? The bad news is that there is no one silver bullet that will automatically give you a page one ranking. Search engine optimization takes a lot of time and hard work. I could write a book about this topic (and there are a lot already out there!), but here are a few of the top factors that Google (currently) uses to determine your search engine ranking:
Page speed - does your website load quickly? Is it mobile friendly? Or are there a lot of huge images that slow down the user experience? Faster page speeds improve your overall SEO.
Domain authority - having good domain authority means that you are the go-to source for one or a few topics. If a lot of websites link to your content because it’s useful, or you have a ton of traffic to your website, those factors will improve your SEO.
Keywords - how and what you write when you create content for your website is incredibly important. Create content that people are searching for, and you will begin to strike Google gold. Think through what keywords to use and how people will search for the content before you begin to write as a best practice.
Meta tags/descriptions - there are a lot of things you can do on the back end of your website to improve SEO rankings, and this is just one of them. Google uses meta tags and descriptions to understand exactly what your website, and each page on it, is all about, which it then uses for search indexing.
CONTENT - this, by far, is the most important piece of SEO. If you have a ton of content that nobody wants to read, or read for very long, no search engine will view your website favorably. But if your content is readable, searchable, and grabs the attention of your website visitors, you will begin to see huge results.
It’s hard to talk about SEO in just five minutes, so I’m sure I’ll expand more on this topic in the future! If you have any specific questions on how to improve your SEO, shoot me an email or leave a comment below and I’ll answer as soon as I can!
