As we work with leadership across a myriad of industries invariably we get the same question, “What is SEO?” My goal is to provide you with a brief overview of what SEO is, and how it can help your business.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site more easily found by increasing your ranking in search engines. More simply put; if you own a car company and I enter “car dealerships in Chico, CA” into a search engine like Google does your car company pop up as the first listing?
The main purpose of Google, or any search engine, is to provide us (their customers) the most relevant WebPages possible based on what we ask for when we type in a “search term”. If we aren’t consistently happy with what we find we will go to another search engine to find the answer. This is what happened when so many people left Yahoo and went to Google over 10 years ago. To accomplish the amazing feat of trying to read our minds from a few words typed into a WebPage Google came up with a special scoring system. They give the best scores to the WebPages that follow their rules and reward them by giving them the best place on the front page.
There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank websites in the Google search results. Statistical research tells us that when a potential customer puts in a search term on Google they will click the first link 42% of the time, the second link 12% of the time, and the third link about 9% of the time. That means if you are in the fourth position you are missing 63% of the potential traffic.
“90% of people never go past the first page of a Google search.”
So how does an organization optimize their site to increase their position in the rankings? It begins with proper planning. When building and maintaining a Website it is imperative that you plan and prepare to attract visitors. Without proper planning, preparation, and maintenance of your websites you may build the perfect site that never gets noticed. Ten years ago your website might be competing against 50,000-100,000, but today it’s competing against millions and millions of websites.
Understand that it takes time, diligence and patience, and you won’t see results overnight. A solid SEO strategy, in this day and age is one of your greatest assets to building an online presence. It will deliver more visitors to your site increasing sales of your product or service.
Wondering where to start? Give us a call to find out how we can help!
