SEO Explained Simply for Business Owners
Imagine that your potential client goes to Google and types in a search related to the product or service you offer. Next, imagine that most if not all of what they see are two things:
- The first thing they see on the search engine results page are only or mostly results that directly point to your competitors’ products, services, and website.
- The second thing they might see, are domain authority sites related to your product, service, or market that again are only linking to and referencing your competitor’s products, services, and website.
Now picture being in your potential customers’ shoes.
Who do you think they’re going to go with? Better yet, who would you go with in that scenario?
Uhh duh, naturally they’re going to go with your competition.
The reason being is that there is more perceived value, expertise, knowledge, and information popping up in Google about your competition then there is about you.
This all leads your potential customer to think that your competition is, in fact, the leading authority or “go to” experts they need to spend their money on in order solve their particular pain point.
That my friend, in an eye-opening nutshell, is a crash course on SEO.
Break Down
In the simplest of terms people generally speak of SEO as being two-sides of the same organic traffic strategy, which are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
Taking it a step further, I typically break SEO into 3 different tiers, which further help simplify how it works with clients.
FRONT-END
Front-end speaks to On-Page SEO. In particular, Front-End refers to the content on your page and aims to craft your content around “keyword” factors.
EXAMPLE:
Let’s use Fitness as our category and Cross Fit as our specific Fitness topic. To implement great SEO on your Front-end you want to ensure that your content focuses not just on fitness but more so that it is tailored around Cross Fit specific terms and phrases such as:
- WOD, meaning “Workout of the Day”,
- AMRAP, meaning “As Many Reps/Rounds as Possible
- “Hero WOD” which are simply WODs that are named after military servicemen, such as the “Murph”, which is one of the toughest Cross Fit workouts.
Those are just a few examples. I’m sure you get the point. Which is to say your page’s content should use the same language and semantics as the audience that you’re trying to attract through the topic you’ve chosen to write about. Note that this does not mean you use “keyword stuffing” techniques, which simply means you literally throw a bunch of keywords and phrases into your post or article.
Note that this does not mean you use “keyword stuffing” techniques, which simply means you literally throw a bunch of keywords and phrases into your post or article. Your content needs to be that of hight quality information and uses language that is both natural and reads more like a conversation than a medical journal. Unless of course, you’re writing for a medical journal, in which case it would be appropriate but I digress.
Front-end also refers to the way in which your article is structured, meaning that you need to use the appropriate title and heading tags to ensure that your content hierarchy is clearly understood by both your readers and search engines.
BACKEND OR TECHNICAL
Again, Backend or Technical still refers to On-Page SEO. This aspect of SEO speaks more to the underlying technical aspects and capabilities of your website.
These technical aspects are related to your sites Code, Server efficiencies, and page load speed to name a few.
Other equally important aspects include your website’s overall site structure or whether you’re serving your web pages over secure HTTPS protocols to encrypt user data that you may be aggregating through things like online forms or general contact pages.
If you have a website, take a second and go to it. Now look up in the URL bar and see if your domain name is preceded with “http://” or “https://”. If you only see “http://” then your site is not secure and will appear less favorable to a search engine like Google then another website that is using “https://” correctly.
One of the most important aspects of SEO, especially with the rising number of mobile devices is to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices.
Simply put, if your website is not optimized to render content that tailors the look, feel, and design and page load speeds to mobile devices you can expect that Google and other search engines are going to penalize you by pushing your site further down the search results page.
This dates all the way back to 2015 (read here).
With that in mind, when you consider the exponential increase in mobile engagement and the rapid decline of desktop engagement it becomes evidently clear why optimizing your website and content for mobile devices is not only crucial but required if you want to win in the game search.
Interested in finding out if your website is optimized for mobile? Use this free Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
EPHEMERAL OR REFERRAL
Last but certainly not least, lets move on to the Off-Page SEO strategy that we’re calling Ephemeral or Referral.
This is where tactics like “backlinking” are employed. Backlinks are used to help boost the perceived domain authority of your website and the page authority of the specific page or blog article you’re trying to rank higher.
Think of backlinks like this — imagine your Google and your friend comes up to you and asks, “where is the best place to go eat around here?”. Next, you pause for a second to think… You recall 5 of your friends saying that “Burger Joint A” was great and then you recall 20 of your friends saying that “Burger Joint B” was amazing.
Instantly you point them in the direction of “Burger Joint A”. Why is that?
You pointed your friend to “Burger Joint B” because there was more perceived authority with “Burger Joint B” — a.ka. more people said it was awesome.
Backlinks and social signals work the same way. The more quality links — note I emphasized “quality” — you get to reference your website and blog articles the more perceived authority Google and other search engines will attribute to you. The result is that you will land you much further up the results page then competitors who have less perceived authority.
Just as a precaution, let me again emphasize that these links need to be high-quality links. In the past and even nowadays some blackhat SEOs use tactics where they get hundreds or even thousands of cheap, low-quality backlinks using link exchange networks, buying them, or various other quick, yet harmful methods of acquiring backlinks.
Be aware that many of Google’s most recent (2016–2017) search algorithm updates will not only catch these tactics but more importantly they will severely penalize your site for them. In other words, make sure you keep things on the up-and-up, this will take more time but will prove much more valuable to you and your business than trying to get a few cheap wins.
Wrapping Up
I can’t say this enough but know that SEO is not a silver bullet for the here and now problem.
As a business owner, I know you want to see immediate results, especially when you’re investing your valuable time, precious resources, and hard earned money into it.
Despite wanting immediate results, you need to be aware that SEO is more of a marathon and not a sprint. Inevitably this means you need to view it as a long-term strategy for your business growth.
Deploying great SEO today, will generally start yielding results anywhere from 4–6 months down the road depending on what you do and how you implement it.
Realize that as with any growth strategy, SEO is just another set of tactics and strategies you can (and should) deploy to help you build your business and achieve the success you want.
Cheers!
Corey
P.s Want more? Read the entire article by going to http://bit.ly/2sWIB1J
If you’re a business owner and have questions, please feel free to reach out :)
