Getting Started with SEO: A High-Level Guide
For any business owner, growing a customer base is always a top priority.
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, adding an online presence can be a great way to increase revenue and expand your brand quickly.
The most challenging part of doing so is getting new customers to find your company’s site among the vast sea of competitors. In the last decade, the most effective and widely used method for marketing online has been search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is useful for many reasons, but most companies like that it casts a wider net online, is more affordable than other forms of marketing, and when done correctly, is a gift that keeps on giving.
By utilizing the power of search engines and social media, SEO strengthens the possibility of getting immediate results. That is why anyone who is starting a new business or looking to expand an established company must consider adding an SEO campaign to their marketing budget.
How SEO Works
Similar to how technology is always changing, so have many of the rules of effective SEO.
Companies that operate search engines are continually working to ensure that people using a search function get quality results. As technology has gotten better at deciphering what makes content relevant and reliable, SEO content that was acceptable a few years ago wouldn’t work today.
SEO, once based firmly on keywords and content, didn’t care about the quality of the material, as long as it had the keywords for which people were searching.
So, if you had a car dealership in Chicago, an SEO company would likely generate several pieces of content that had the keywords “car dealership in Chicago.” Usually, one or two well-written, well-researched articles containing those keywords would appear on your company website. Then, several fluff articles packed with the same keywords and other related terms would end up on anchor websites, which would have links directing traffic back to your main site.
That was how SEO worked.
Search engine algorithms determined a site’s relevancy based on backlinks to a page and related search terms in the content. Quite often, someone searching for something got directed to an article or page that offered nothing useful, just a generalized piece full of commonly searched terms.
Now, it’s a lot more difficult to trick search engines, and SEO is not as easy to achieve. In other words, search-engine algorithms can pick up on specifics that determine if the content has substance.
The standards for effective SEO content are straightforward...