DIGITAL MARKETING 101 : SEO
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
While performing SEO on your website can help you expand your reach, solicit response and acquire new customers the results can take 3-6 months to be fully realized but only last 1 to 2 years depending on how competitive your industry is.
Remember that by 2020 40% of all purchases will be online and more than 90% will be searching the web for product info or a better price even while at the store purchasing from. Since more than 50% of web users never click on PAID ads, it is important that you optimize your website for search engines. Take into account that more than 60% of web searching and 40% of all digital advertising is performed on Google so your product or service needs to be on display there first and foremost. You will work on Bing, Yahoo and the others later.
So, how does SEO help you? It answers the questions for each and every possible consumer type you want to target so that when they type a SEARCH QUERY looking for something that you have, provide or sell YOUR INFORMATION shows up before YOUR COMPETITORS info catches their attention. This area is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page and studies have shown that consumers usually click on the top 3 links and have an attention span of about 10 seconds once your LANDING PAGE is displayed before they decide to continue deeper with you or go back to a competitor link. It should take you less than a week to optimize your website but depending on how many pages you have it might take longer to update and re-submit your sitemaps.xml, robots.txt files for spiders, webcrawlers and robots to re-index.
But how do you figure out this new content to include? It's called "self analysis" or keyword search for your on-page content and and off-page popularity on the web. By finding out what keywords and keyphrases are beign used by your customers to talk about you or look for your products. Researching your competition in the same manner can help you understand what separates you from the competition.
Once you find these short and longtail combinations you can decide which have a higher probability of getting your company to the top of the search results page and insert them into your file names and HTML code to ensure proper densities and proximity. Use them in your metatags, heading tags (H1-H5), cascading style sheets inside external files or internal code. Update internal and external anchor links, file names, titles, descriptions and alt tags for all of your audio, video and image assetts as well as the internal html code on your web pages. Basically your entire website should be written strategically to reflect how customers look for you and not how you see yourself.
Sounds easy enough right? Don't fret it... in the "Tools of the Trade" we will see many applications that can facilitate this process and remember that whenever your business process changes you will need to consider re-optimizing again. :-) SEO is not a ONE TIME fix but a constant choice.
