What is SEO and why is it so important for a business to understand? WrightB, September 8, 2023 What does SEO do? Have you ever wondered how companies become the first website you see when searching for something related to their product? Well, this is done via Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is optimizing your website so that search engines like Google can easily search your website for what the searcher is searching for. Many people somewhat know how Google organizes their websites, which is basically by the popularity of said website. So how does one optimize a website so that it’s easily searchable? Well, that’s something that is a very specific niche of marketing which is why multiple companies specialize in exactly that. The basic way is to have a better grasp of what people who could use your services are searching for. Let me explain with an example. Imagine you are a roofing company that is trying to optimize your website so that when someone searches anything related to “roofing company near me” yours pops up first. Well, when someone types in that search guess what Google does? Google grabs that person’s location (or where they think your location is) and will look for a website that contains the words “roofing” (or synonyms for roofing) along with the city/zip code they believe that person is located. Now if you don’t have the locations you service on your website then Google is going to simply “skip over” your website as it doesn’t see that your service is anywhere near where this person is looking. Sassy Brother Method This is a very simple example, but it gives a good grasp of what SEO is. When I’m trying to get in the framework of SEO optimization I always like to imagine a person who is extremely specific about what you say. Imagine the phrase “Actually what you said was…”. I like to call this the sassy brother (as I have a very sassy brother). The idea of this thought process, explained in more technical terms, is Google is simply a program that looks at things extremely literally it can only read exactly what you put there. If it isn’t on your website Google won’t try and extrapolate what you might do because it’s all about being as fast as possible while also providing good search results. Key Word Phrases A final example of SEO that I will provide in this post is keyphrase searching. It’s something that is yet again hard to grasp but if you can master it, it’s an extremely powerful tool. Going back to the roofing company example try and think of the scenarios in which someone would need a roofing company. For me it’s “roof leaking how to fix”, “Do I need to clean my roof”, or “how to know if my roof is up to snuff”. These are what could be called keyword phrases which are things that people search when they have problems or questions about their roof. The most optimized websites will have these little phrases snuck into as many places as possible, and the super smart companies have blogs and articles explaining these questions in detail. Go try it for yourself just look up “roof leaking around vent” and I guarantee you’ll see an article from some roofing company that relates to that problem (this is one of the reasons I chose to start writing a blog). The reason Google is showing you that website is that it has the phrase “leaky roof around vent” in that blog post multiple times and it’s been visited by multiple people. So, to recap everything SEO is all about understanding how search engines rank websites and what a possible customer will search that could use/need your services. To understand how Google searches through a website imagine the phrase “well actually what you said was…”, which is saying you need to clearly state exactly what service you do in multiple different places and ways. Another form of SEO is the idea of the keyphrase searching. To understand this, you need to get in the mindset of the consumer of your product. What would someone be searching for that could use your product? As a little trick think of the most literal way to explain your product/ service. Some examples are “roof leaking around thing” “phone not turning on” or “burger near me”. Hope this post made sense it was quite long but it’s a good intro to SEO marketing. Also if you want someone to do all this thinking and optimizing for you schedule a meeting on the “Work with me” page and I’ll tell you about how our experts can make your website top 3 recommended on Google. Marketing Posts MarketingSEO