What is SEO? That’s a question many business owners ask themselves…
Running a business takes focus and energy, and doesn’t leave you a lot of time to be concerned about the intricate things that make up SEO.
If you own a business, you probably know that SEO is important, but otherwise don’t know much about how SEO works, other than it can help your website rank higher in Google for certain words and phrases.
It may seem as if SEO experts are mythical creatures who can work their magic with the Great Google:
But the fact is, SEO is not magical at all.
SEO is much more mathematical than mystical!
SEO 101
Moz’s definition of SEO is:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
It’s a good definition, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about what SEO practices entail. In other words, it tells us what, not how SEO works.
Boromir is right! One paragraph from Moz doesn’t really tell us enough about SEO to get the job done. Here is a better explanation:
What is SEO?
SEO can be explained with the analogy of a wheel. Let’s think about the spokes of the wheel. All of the spokes work together to make a wheel, which can support a wagon. Each of the spokes represents a tactic used in SEO. These tactics fit together to make up your entire SEO campaign. The wagon represents your business. And all of the wheels made up of the spokes, support the wagon.
Each wagon (business) will have different spokes. Some spokes will do more of the work. Some will be stronger than others. All of this depends on your business, industry, and where your target audience spends time online. However, every SEO wheel has the same basic structure and tactics.
Google’s unique algorithm determines how well each website ranked in the search engines. These are called “ranking factors”. SEO involves using tactics that make these factors work better for your website, and get Google to favor your website when ranking search results.
Some of those ranking factors are:
- The relevance of your content to the search terms used
- How many websites (especially high-quality websites) link to yours
- The layout and organization of your website
- The loading speed of your website
- How well the headlines and title tags integrate keywords and support the remainder of the content on your website
- How often your website is updated
- How mobile-friendly your website is
- The quality of your site’s content
- The ratings of your business (if it’s local)
- The consistency of your business listings across the web (address, number, etc.)
- The amount of shares your site has on social media
What is SEO?
As a trusted SEO agency, we take into account all of these “ranking factors” into account, and use what we know about improving each of these factors. SEO campaigns take time to develop and implement. But once they are in effect, the improvement in your website traffic will be extremely worth it in the long run.
At Fireside, we work small-to-medium-sized businesses to set them on the right path forward towards higher search engine rankings. A recent client we worked with began ranking on page 1 of Google after only 4 months, in a competitive market, and is now swimming in leads!
Fireside Creative Services can also provide a free, no-obligation SEO audit for your website – this is a great tool to understand where your website currently struggles with on-site SEO, as well as diving into various other aspects of your website’s performance.
Click here for a free website audit
Are your wagon wheels missing spokes? Let’s chat more about our SEO services.
Hopefully this article helped to answer the question – “What is SEO?”
