What exactly is SEO?
A primer for small-business owners
When performed competently and ethically, SEO is a virtuous cycle that benefits every party involved, and it differs from other forms of marketing in that you don’t have to pay to play.
Clients often refer to SEO or Local SEO as something they’ve heard of/about, know is important, but don’t know why — and they definitely don’t have a clue what it is or what it stands for.
To me, that’s exciting, because it’s an opportunity to explain — from the ground up — exactly what SEO is and means, without any of the superstitions or misinformations many others seemed to have picked up. As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’
So, for my clients and anyone else, here’s a small-business’ perspective on SEO and digital marketing, starting with the acronym, itself: SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’
Search engines (like Google or Bing — even platforms like YouTube act as search engines) try to answer questions or solve problems for their users, by serving results (answers) to user queries. Since they algorithmically order their results in descending order of authority/relevance, the lion’s share of the clicks and traffic go to the ‘top’ results, especially those on the first page.
Naturally, most websites (business, personal or otherwise) want more traffic, and therefore would prefer to appear closer to the top of those results.
Search engine optimization, then, is the conscious and deliberate attempt to ‘rank higher,’ in one sense. But more broadly, SEO is anticipating potential customers’ needs (queries), and crafting content that caters to those needs. If successful, Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. recognize a site as beneficial to its users, thereby ranking it higher, which drives more traffic, and so on.
When performed competently and ethically, SEO is a virtuous cycle that benefits every party involved, and it differs from other forms of marketing in that you don’t have to pay to play.
SEO isn’t ‘free’ (in the sense that someone must spend time doing it well, and their time presumably isn’t free), but it is foundational, and offers the best ROI possible in the realm of small-business digital marketing. Improvements to SEO through keyword research (what are potential customers’ problems, and what keywords/queries are they using to search for solutions?) and digital optimization flow outward and augment all other marketing efforts, with all roads leading back to a business’ website.
An added benefit is that the value of every dollar a business-owner puts into paid-ads (on any platform) will benefit from a foundation of strong, consistent SEO, especially if the goal of those ads is to drive traffic back to a website or a physical storefront.
And if you refer to the article I posted earlier from Search Engine Journal, you’ll see that Google is overwhelmingly the most valuable, impactful search engine, and therefore, Google is the place to start.
Sign up for Google My Business, completely fill out the information it requests, and request to be ‘verified,’ which usually requires a postcard to be sent to your physical address. This helps ensure that you are who you say you are, and can be reached where you said you could be reached. Therefore, Google is more comfortable — having verified your information — serving you as a search result to users’ queries.
Once, you’re verified, you can start using free resources like Posts, Photos, Q&A, Messages and other components of the GMB platform that are vital for SMBs looking to increase traffic and appear more prominently in search results.
