By: Johnathon Kidd
Everyone who’s been a business owner for longer than five seconds has heard of it: SEO. I’m pretty sure the only place it hasn’t been advertised is at the IRS. And I should know, I spent an hour with them on the phone this morning – before I even started talking to an actual person! SEO or Search Engine Marketing is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “The process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine”.

1. In short, SEO is utilizing various methods to dominate the front page of a SERP. But what is a SERP? Fortunately for you, dear reader, this answer is much easier than the definition of what SEO is. A SERP is essentially a fancy word for a search engine.

2. You’ve most likely used one in particular thousands of times: Google. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and several other smaller SERPs like Duck Duck Go serve as the Internet’s encyclopedia. As of October 2019, Google services over 77,000 queries per second. This translates out to around 2.4 trillion searches each year, which needless to say is a lot of data, and a lot of potential business

3. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, not all of these searches on Google are for business. Some, are for cat videos. Others are for the Golden Globes and Ricky Gervais’ speech.

For those of you who are business owners, however, this means one thing: you need to dominate the front page of Google. The good news is, there are many ways to do that. From adding high-value content, to videos, to optimizing your website for mobile phones, you have a lot of methods available to market your website. The bad news is, it takes a while to take root. After
beginning an SEO campaign, it will take around three to six months for you to see significant traffic from it.

Overall, you’ll want to focus on three main topics for your SEO efforts:

1. High-value, rich content. As you continue finding out more about SEO, you’ll likely hear the phrase ‘Content is King’. That’s very true, as Google prioritizes websites that give their visitors useful, helpful, information. It’s important to mention, however, not just any content is good enough for Google. It has to be extremely high-value, keyword-sparse, information that reads well to both a user and computer. And with how well Google A.I. is with people nowadays, the user and computer are essentially the same.

2. Mobile-first presentation. Much of the content available today on the Internet is viewed through the screen of a smartphone, and Google has responded accordingly. Websites that are looking to attract traffic should guarantee their websites will load on Android and Apple devices, as well as have them load in a presentable and easily understood design.

3. Videos! Videos! Videos! As you can guess from the title, videos are important. Quickly imparting both human and metadata to a visitor, videos can help your audience grow. Google recognizes videos as rich content for potential visitors and sees this as an increase in the amount of content on your website – which loops back into that phrase ‘Content is King’.

In order to see a strong return on your SEO efforts, you’ll want to request an audit from a proven,
experienced, firm like the Seopologist.

Bonus – sign up with LA Biz Guy and get 20% off your custom quote.