What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Without spelling it out in too many words, SEO is simply marketing for your website. Unlike with a physical store, where people might walk past your shop front, potential online customers cannot stumble across your website without it being around in the search engines. SEO helps your website become visible to people searching for phrases related to your industry. Therefore, unless you want to pay a fortune for paid advertising on the main search engines, it is time to take SEO seriously. If you are small business, or a medium one, it is very likely that you do not have the resources to advertise on TV, radio and print on consistent basis. What SEO allows you to do, is reach your target market, without spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising, effectiveness of which you can’t even track.
How does SEO work?
Just think how often you Google something up. The word Google in itself, is often used as a verb, and you probably did not even think why we used “Google” instead of any other word such as “search” or “look”. It is because word Google is now synonymous with “web search”. When you Google something up, you see a page with different websites listed that might fit your search criteria. Lets just say you are searching for tennis lessons in New York. Google will pull up sites that it thinks fit your search, and it is very likely that you will click on the ones near the top. SEO is brining your website to the top results on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, when someone searches for your line of business.
How can SEO help your business?
Lets say you own a fitness business in New York. It is quite possible that when someone searches for your business by typing “NY fitness” or “New York Fitness” in Google, your website doesn’t even show up. Yet, “NY Fitness” is searched an average of 33,100 times every month, and “New York Fitness” is searched an average of 271,000 times every month. This means that in total there are 60,000 people looking for fitness space or a trainer in New York. Imagine if you could tap into just 1% of those search results. It would mean 600 new people every month coming to your website. Not too shabby, right? Any business that is not ranked well on Google, Yahoo and MSN is losing a lot of business just by not being up there. Woody Allen once said: “95% of life is just showing up”. It is certainly the case with SEO. After all, this is probably how you have found us!
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