Knowing The SEO Basics
If you’re running your own business, you probably have a few goals. You’re always looking for ways to drive traffic onto your website and get more customers to purchase your products or services.
There are a lot of marketing strategies that can help you do this. You can do a social media campaign, tv commercials, paper fliers, or emails to get more people interested in your business.
You can also practice something called, SEO. There are thousands of people learning this method of marketing and even more professionals like Oklahoma City SEO who are making it easier for businesses to have SEO content.
If you’ve never heard of this term, you’re in the right place. While it might seem complicated at first, here is SEO for the complete beginner.
What Is SEO And What Does It Stand For?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps you bring quality traffic to your website. It also helps you get your business name out there and expose your brand to a wide range of customers. It’s a practice that helps your customer find your company based on their unique needs and desires.
In order to practice SEO, you have to know what your customers are thinking and what they want. You need to know how they would search for something online so you can tailor your content to match. That way you can organically expose your brand.
What Does “Organic Search Results” Mean?
When I use the word organic, I mean not paid for. Organic search results are earned, not bought through paid advertisement. You know those links you see sometimes in blog posts or websites that bring you to another company to purchase something. That’s not SEO.
SEO is geared towards customers rather than sales. It allows the customer to freely gather information without feeling pressured by dozens of advertisements.
Why Is It Important
While paid advertising is still an effective way to market your company and bring in traffic, most of it’s brought in by customers using search engines to find the things they need.
Organic search results, like what’s practiced in SEO, receive more clicks than paid advertisements because they feel more credible to customers. Customers don’t like the idea that a company bought their views online, so organic search results make them feel like the products are worth a second look.
It also gives your company the opportunity to continuously generate traffic. Media campaigns and commercials have a limited shelf life before people get bored and it becomes irrelevant. SEO allows you to provide quality content that can last far longer than these forms of marketing.
For example, blog posts are a great example of SEO. If your company sells luggage and you make a travel blog for vacation destinations, customers can keep coming back to your post and find your website. It doesn’t age because different people go on vacation all the time throughout the year.
Let’s say Janice and her family goes on vacation during her kid’s winter break but Mark takes his wife on a trip for their anniversary in June. Everyone has different reasons to travel so by creating this kind of organic content, you’ll have customers finding it all year long.
SEO can work for any business in the same way. By producing organic content that is long-lasting and relevant to your target demographic, your company has an opportunity to see increased traffic all year round.
How Do I Do This Myself?
The best way to do this yourself is to learn as much as you can about SEO. Read good SEO-driven content online to see what works. Read a book about SEO to increase your knowledge or take a course online. Do your research before you attempt to start writing SEO.
For more information on do-it-yourself SEO, click here. Hopefully, you’ll be able to find out more about SEO and determine whether it’s something that you want to do yourself.
What To Look For When Hiring A Professional
If you’re someone who doesn’t want to learn everything that goes into SEO, I understand. To someone who’s never experienced it before it can be daunting.
There’s a lot to learn before you’re able to produce the content you need to produce to bring traffic to your site and you’re a busy person. You may not have the time and energy to commit to learning something like this and that’s okay too!
If you do decide to hire someone to do your SEO marketing for you, there are tons of agencies who can help you do just that. The most important thing to look for when hiring a service like this is the quality of their work.
Ask for examples of their content and get some references. Make sure the other companies they’re working for are happy with their service.
If you choose an SEO servicer who isn’t actually good at their job, then you’re wasting your time and money. You can also lose the trust of your customers and harm your business more than it helps it. I can’t stress this enough for you to do your research.
The cost of hiring a professional can vary based on a number of factors such as how much content you want, what kind of content, the techniques the SEO company uses, and the amount of time they’ll have to spend on it.
When you’re hiring an SEO company to help you, make sure you ask for an estimate so you can compare pricing with other agencies. You might be able to find one for a better price and quality by comparing.
There’s still a lot more that goes into SEO but we won’t get into that here. Too much information can be overwhelming and it can make it harder for you to understand what it is you’re learning.
If you want more information, I suggest you look online and read more about SEO and its importance once you’ve fully digested this article. That way you’ll have even more understanding when it comes time to practice SEO or hire someone else to do it for you.
