It boils down to one word – one word that everyone likes to hear: profit. But how does SEO help your profits? Ahh, now that is the big question!
In the very simplest form, with SEO, your site ranks higher in Google (or other search engines) so more people click the link to your site. The higher you are in the search rankings, the more clicks you’ll get. Pretty basic stuff, right?
SEO is all about sending traffic to your site, but not just any traffic; relevant TARGETED traffic for your desired keywords.
Search Engine Optimization involves many different methods of making the search engines “like” your site more. This can include on-page stuff like adding a sitemap, tweaking title tags, adding more keyword-rich content, etc. Or it can be off-site stuff like adding backlinks to your site. I don’t want your head to spin with some of these terms we haven’t used yet, but I want you to know there’s a ton of things that can be done that the average website owner might not know about.
An SEO expert has all sorts of tools like this in his or her bag of tricks. It’s not arcane magic, it’s not hacking, it’s not even bad. It’s just a proven method that works, and search engines like Google actually encourage you to do some of these things (assuming you’re using white-hat SEO methods – more on that in future posts).
A great SEO will teach you how to create optimized content for your site. Sure, you can totally hand it off to someone and just let them do everything for your site. But as I’ve said before, this works best when the business owner is involved with creating the content for their site. So even just a few months of working with an SEO expert will pay dividends for years down the road.
That’s not just for what you’ll learn from them either, although that alone makes it worthwhile. The SEO work that gets done over the course of months (or years) will typically last quite a while. Just how long it lasts depends on how competitive your market is for the keywords you want to target. If there’s not a whole lot of competition for your keywords, that SEO can sometimes last YEARS. So paying a couple hundred bucks a month for a year is CHEAP compared to what you might spend for other forms of advertising or lead generation.
SEO is the single biggest factor in the success of your website. It drives organic traffic to your site – “FREE” traffic. (You may think it’s not free if you pay for SEO, but it is free in the sense that you’re not paying for clicks.)
If you’ve got a website that is a large part of your business, you absolutely should be doing some form of SEO, whether it’s yourself, with the help of an SEO expert, or completely handing it off to an SEO expert. The benefits are immense compared to the cost of it – you almost cannot afford to not do it!
