What is SEO?
As a business owner, you may have heard this term being mentioned among other business owners, but you may not have understood exactly what it is.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In basic terms, it means a process of improving your website so that it increases its visibility when people search for your products or services. When your website has better visibility, there is a greater chance of having your link clicked, resulting in more website visitors.
When SEO is done correctly, it not only attracts more people to your site, but it helps to convert those visitors into customers or clients.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Google use bots (or spiders, as they’re sometimes called) to crawl all the pages on the Internet, collecting information for an index. The index is more like a big library that can be searched to pull up information.
Algorithms analyze each page, checking it against many factors or signals that determine where a page should rank. Some of those factors or signals include:
Location-specific information
Properly used keywords
Page readability
Social media activity
Linking internally or externally and the quality of those links
Search engines take these and other factors into account and then they assign the page a rank in search engine results for various keywords.
Take a look at the image below.
Ahrefs is a tool that a lot of SEO experts use to analyze what’s already on the Internet as far as topics and keywords go. This information is extremely valuable because it tells the content writer how new articles need to be written in order to rank higher.
This picture might not make much sense to you, but because the page this image is referring to has a rank of 1,021, it doesn’t have much visibility at all.
These and other tools can also be used to check existing pages and determine what needs to be added or taken away from them to improve their rank.
SEO is Always Changing
It’s hard to believe, but the way Google and other search engines “read” website content and rank it is always changing. When Google first started, pages ranked just for having the keywords on the page, and they didn’t even have to be woven into articles. Writers would just list them at the bottom.
That’s not even close to how it is today.
In order to rank well in search engines today, the content has to be well-written, feature the proper use of keywords (and enough of certain keywords). Articles also need to have pictures, links and be written in ways that are easy for the average person to understand.
What’s Your Google Rank?
Take a moment and Google your products and services using your location as a part of the keywords. So for example, you might Google, auto mechanics in New York, or hair salons in Pittsburgh.
Once you do that, search for your business. Where do you rank?
If you’re not on the first page, we need to talk.
At Colwell Creative Content, SEO is our specialty. We know how to get your website to rank higher because we stay up to date with the latest changes in search engine optimization.
If your website isn’t performing well, it’s probably hitting your bottom line pretty hard. Contact us today and let’s change that.