What is search engine optimization?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization-What does that even mean?
Around here, we like to say it stands for Seize Every Opportunity. That’s what you’re really doing with SEO-grabbing every chance you can to get your website to show up in the search results. A more formal definition is the process of making your website more visible to the search engines so your website will rank higher in the organic (or natural) search results.
We think you’ll agree our definition is easier to remember and understand. If your website includes SEO, you will Seize Every Opportunity to show up in the search results each time someone does a search for products or services you sell.
SEO is complex and can’t be explained in 30-seconds. To make things more complicated, it’s changing all the time so SEO methods that worked 2 years ago, aren’t going to work today. You don’t need to know everything about SEO though, as a business owner, you should want to know WHY it’s important.
Why you need SEO
If doesn’t matter if you sell on a local or national level since over 85% of all people (and it’s growing all the time) looking for products and services start their search online. If your company doesn’t have a visible online presence, you are missing the boat (and it’s a HUGE boat).
You are missing a gigantic pool of potential customers if you can’t be found online. Would you like to guess as to how many lost sales that translates into? That's probably not a good idea-it’ll only depress you when you realized how much money you're losing every day by not getting found by qualified buyers.
What’s most important in SEO?
Content. Content. Content.
Content is crucial when it comes to SEO. If you remember nothing else about SEO, remember that it’s all about the content. Focus on filling your website with great, original content that's helpful to visitors and you WILL be rewarded with visitors.
Think about it. When people do a search, they’re looking for answers to a question or a solution to a problem. In short, they want information and the search engines want to give them the best answer so the websites with the most current and outstanding information are presented in the search results. Makes sense, right?
How search engines rank results is complicated and involves hundreds of factors, including:
- Domain name registration length
- Website code
- How often content is updated
- Quality of the content
- Length of time it takes for web pages to load
- Errors in the code (of website)
- We could list more though you’d get bored and stop reading (and frankly, we wouldn’t blame you).
The search engines are always fine-tuning their algorithms for a better user experience and the last few years they have been concentrating on getting rid of spammy sites with duplicate content and questionable links. (Yes-spammy is a technical term used in the industry). We applaud this effort by Google and the other search engines as most of the companies negatively affected by these changes were engaging in questionable SEO methods frowned upon by the search engines.
We do the hard work
None of our clients have ever been negatively affected by any algorithm changes and that's because we only follow SEO best practices. While other companies take short cuts and do things which are in a 'gray' area, we focus on the fundamentals (creating high quality content for the user) and you can't go wrong when you follow the rules. So, when other companies are penalized by Google for buying links or having duplicate content, we can sit back and relax knowing our clients' websites will only benefit from the results.
Yes, SEO is time consuming but here at Sleepy Dog, we aren't afraid of a little hard work. Plus, our clients trust us with their business and we take that very seriously. We aren't about to jeopardize their rankings or risk their online reputation as we care about their business as much as they do.
SEO services aren't all the same
Most SEO companies out there offer programs to improve the SEO of your website yet they make no mention of creating and adding content to your website. Hmmm? Since content is the foundation for effective search engine optimization and imperative to its success, we are puzzled as to how these companies can offer SEO services without content creation. We would argue there is a very limited amount of improvement that can be made without adding new content.
We do it all
In addition, many SEO companies simply offer consulting services so if you use them, you still have to hire another company to make the changes they recommend. Seems like that just makes more work for you-having to hire another company so that's why we DO IT ALL. We want to make your life easier so our web maintenance packages cover everything needed to get your business found online, from SEO to inbound marketing to managing social media and email campaigns.
When you hire Sleepy Dog to work for you, you'll never have to hire another company to manage your website or online presence ever again.
