If you are a business owner, web designer, digital marketer, and SEO is new to you, stick around. I’m gonna explain to you exactly what SEO is and how it works.
What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization, and it is a process of optimizing your website for search engines like google. So your website shows up when people search for keywords or phrases that pertain to your product service business. You go on google and you search for anything like web design, halifax or restaurant near you, or some sort of home improvement company.
Google is going to show you what it thinks are the most relevant answers. So first you’re going to get a few ads. Then you’re going to get a map pack, and then you’re going to get some organic search results. So when we’re talking about SEO, we’re talking about those search results, and if applicable, the map spots as well. Each search engine like google has an algorithm.
And this algorithm is a bunch of variables that play into what website it considers to be the most relevant.
Break it down in three main components:
Keyword Research
You have to figure out what the keywords are, what the search volumes are, as well as the difficulty so you know if you have a chance at ranking for specific keywords. And if you want to know more about keyword research, I’ve made another video that goes deeper into keyword research.
On Page SEO
So this is a set of tasks and strategies that you can implement on your website. So you take those keywords and you implement them throughout the website. This includes page titles, page descriptions, headers writing, really good high quality content that is optimized for those keywords. There’s a whole number of things on on page SEO. And if you want to know more about that, I’ve also made a video on on page SEO.
Off page SEO
And this mainly refers to backlinks other websites that are linking back to your website. So let me give you an example. If you have a news website like New York times, which has been around forever, and they do an article on your business, and they link your business website in their article, this is going to bring up the authority of your website, because you have a website of much higher authority linking to it. And then the more of these higher authority websites that link to your website, the better.
Business directories, news websites, industry websites, magazines, any high authority website that is going to link to yours, the better. So now that you understand what SEO is, how it works and what the main components of it are.
Why SEO?
What makes SEO different from other tactics? Like Google Ads, social media like Facebook, Instagram.
First of all, it’s not pay per click ads. When you’re looking at Google Ads, you’re literally paying per click. Every time somebody clicks on your ad, you pay for it. And as long as you’re paying, your ad is there. When you’re not paying, your ad is not there.
With SEO, you don’t pay per click. The clicks are free. It’s just a matter of doing the work and doing the work correctly. So the algorithm of the search engine picks your website over the other websites.
I want to address SEO versus Facebook ads or any other social media ads. The difference there is the intent. When somebody’s on Google searching for a product or a service, they intend to do business more than somebody that’s scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram and gets interrupted by your ad.
The best way to think of SEO is like the gym.
If you start the gym today and you go to the gym for 2 hours, you’re not going to see any results after that 2 hours except that you put in a bunch of work and you’re tired now. Same thing tomorrow, and even after a week. But after three months, after six months after a year, you’re going to look physically different than you did on the first day you started. SEO is just like that.
So when you first start doing SEO, you’re not going to really see results.
But after three months, six months, you’re going to start hitting the first page for a few keywords and you’re going to start getting traffic. You’re going to start getting leads or sales. And then you can gradually lay your foot off of certain keywords where you’ve reached the first page, the top of the first page. Now you can focus on other keywords. And then if you stop doing SEO, you’re going to still see results for a while. But then if you stop doing SEO forever, eventually you’ll drop off the first page.
So by now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what SEO is, how it works, what the main components of it are, and why it’s different from other digital marketing strategies.