Great SEO = Quality Leads

On the slim chance that you aren’t familiar with SEO, we’ll begin at the beginning and keep this blog as super simple as possible. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s how you improve your website’s visibility for organic searches. And, after all, every website’s main goal is to attract attention for your products or business from absolute strangers.

How do these engines search your website?

They use bots that crawl through the pages in your website, following the links on your pages, and from other websites to your site. These bots are sent to sites from Google, Bing, Yahoo to collect information and index that information. For example, you may be looking for business startup information, so you Google “business startup info” and a 278,000,000 results appear. Those results appear because the bots have indexed the information on those sites pertinent to “business startup info”.

How do the bots know what to index in the sites they visit?

Good question. That’s where SEO comes into play. The copy on the pages of the website contains keywords, phrases, images, video and other content specifically tailored to attract the crawling bots. If you thought that highly successful websites just happened on their own, you’re wrong. The content and copy within that content have been thought out and planned. And if the planning is successful, that page or site will rank high enough in the search results to attract quality traffic. Think of it this way. When you are searching for information, you will pay the most attention to the first few results on the page. So as a site owner, you want your site to be within the first few listed, or die on the second page. SEO planning will help accomplish that.

Search results have matured over the years. In the early days of SEO, just using a relevant keyword did the trick. For example, if you were promoting your lawn service business, merely using the words “lawn service” anywhere throughout your website copy was sufficient. Search engines today are more sophisticated and intelligent, and they don’t just look for a word or two – they look at the neighboring text to determine if they are cohesive and make sense and aren’t just inserted randomly. The days of fooling the bots by keyword stuffing have long been over!

Today it’s important to create content that includes those keywords that are relevant to the subject of that page. This is why it’s crucial to have a copywriter closeby to help draft relevant content (like Nancy who is writing this blog).

An unfathomable number of searches are conducted every year making search an important, if not primary, source of finding information. This is critically important for marketing success as a higher visibility will elevate your business over your competitors, resulting in a direct impact to your bottom line. Proper SEO planning is an ever-changing art requiring someone staying on top of the latest algorithms and trends.

Nuts and Bolts of SEO

At the end of the day, SEO is the cheapest form of marketing you can do, however it is also the marathon of tactics. SEO brings the highest quality leads to a website, since it’s based on user intent. This is why, for emerging brands, it’s recommended to pair PPC with SEO, and then tailor off PPC as your SEO starts to yield sufficient, regular results.

Want more information about SEO? Give us a call. We’d be happy to go into more details about it.