Why SEO Is Important
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), in short, is the process of observing a set of best practices aimed at improving your visibility in search results. The goal is simple. When a potential customer types “best (insert your business type) in (insert your city)” into Google (or any search engine for that matter), your business’ listing or website will be the first thing they see.
SEO, if done correctly, has the potential to produce the highest ROI of any other form of online marketing today. SEO has the capability of driving tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of traffic to your site, if best practices are followed and the necessary time and energy is put in to making your site rise above the competition.
The Keys to Great SEO (It’s Really Not That Complicated!)
What are the Keys to great SEO? Simply put, SEO requires:
- A fast, error free, device optimized website
- Good, fresh, abundant, customer focused content
- Backend code that translates the content in a way that search engines can understand
- Links from other reputable websites linking back to your website
1) A Fast, Error Free, Device Optimized Website:
Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible experience when sending them to a website. User experience is key.
Think about it. Imagine you are searching for “NFL Power Rankings” on Google. In all of the top results, when you visit the sites that are recommended by Google, they take “forever” to load, or there are errors on the pages and the content is unreadable, or maybe there are popups covering up the content. If this would begin to happen regularly, wouldn’t you become frustrated and try to find some other way of obtaining the information that you are looking for?
Search engines make money through advertising. If a user becomes frustrated with the results that a search engine gives them, eventually they will find other ways of obtaining the information they need. It is bad business for search engines to recommend sites that users don’t enjoy. This is why search engines are continuously trying to optimize the results that they provide to their users.
This also means that if your site is slow, full of errors, or is not optimized for the devices they are using, Search Engines will prefer to show users other sites that are more user friendly ahead of your site.
2) Good, Fresh, Abundant & Customer Focused Content:
Search Engines also want to provide their users with the answers to their questions in the best way possible.
In today’s SEO landscape, it’s almost impossible to “cheat” the system. You either have the goods, or you don’t. If your website contains good, up to date information that can answer users questions, search engines will recommend your site to the user.
This is where “Customer Focused” comes into play. It’s extremely important for you to understand WHO your customer is and WHAT they are searching for. You can have the greatest, fastest website in the world, but if you don’t offer content with keywords that match what your customer is searching for, they aren’t going to find your site. It’s extremely important to research what your target customer is searching for, and then create content that answers the questions that they have.
There is one issue with this though. You have competitors. Unfortunately you are not the only one who is targeting your customers. That’s why it’s important to have abundant content as well. It’s not enough to write up an article and fill it up with all of the keywords that you want to target. It’s important to become “THE” authority in your area of business or expertise. When search engines realize that you are the real deal, and you have good, Fresh, Abundant content that the customer is looking for, they will want to point your target customers to your site.
When you put all of these together, you have found one of the main keys to success in SEO and Organic Search.
3) Backend code that translates the content in a way that search engines can understand:
An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t see and understand a web page the same way a human can. Adding backend code can help the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.
This code includes unique Page Titles, unique Page Descriptions, Schema Structured Data Markup, Sitemaps, Instructions for Robots that are indexing the site, image and link descriptions (alt text and titles), social media tags and instructions, etc.
4) Links from other reputable websites linking back to your website:
How do search engines know how important your website is? The short answer is “backlinks”.
Backlinks are links from other sites around the web that point to your website. If you have good content, or if you are a business that is making a difference, people are going to want to share and link to your site. When search engines find that many people are talking about your site, and that other “important” sites around the web are linking back to your site, they realize that you are a credible source of information. Building backlinks is a must for any company that wants to improve their rankings in Organic Search.
It’s also important to ensure that the sites linking back to your site are Highly Regarded sites. In years past, people would “buy” backlinks. These vendors would spam links all over the web trying to build your backlinks. They would also create “Link Farms” with hundreds and even thousands of links to different websites.
Today, Search engines have smartened up, and now base backlinks on the quality of the site that is linking to you. When High ranking sites link to your site, it builds your credibility greatly. When sites that are known for spam links are linking to your site, it can actually hurt your ranking.
We Can Help!
There’s a very good chance that you found this site because of SEO. We excel at it, and we can do the same for your business. Our goal is to connect your clients to you in order to grow your business. We do this through all of the above points mentioned… beautiful and user friendly web design, content creation, technical SEO and backlink building. Contact us today for an assessment of your current digital strategy, and let’s see how we can work together to help you reach the goals that you have for your business.