SEO — Back to the Basics

What is SEO?

Today, we’re going to be discussing another topic in a category that falls under Marketing 101: Search Engine Optimization. If you say it out loud, it sounds really cool, and it’s actually an interesting topic as well.

SEO was essentially born from the need to organize websites properly on ever-growing search engine platforms like Google or Bing. Have you ever wondered why when you typed in a certain query into the search bar that a website relative to that search query popped up? This is due to SEO. Search engine platforms have special algorithms, like Panda, that help searchers get the best and most relevant data in the fastest way possible.

Also, it’s important to know that SEO has nothing to do with Paid Ads which appear at the very top of the search engine result page when you type in a query. SEO focuses on what we call the ‘organic search results’ of a search engine’s results page.

Before you read on! If you’re more of a visual learner, check out this awesome video about SEO from Search Engine Land.

How does SEO help your business?

If you’re a business owner, or work pretty much anywhere, you’ve probably been told at least a hundred times that a web presence is necessary. It’s true! We’re in the digital age where every business is expected to have a webpage. This is so so so important, especially if your target audience is younger and more tech savvy, like the Millennials and Generation Zs.

If you decide that paid ads aren’t the way to go for your business, then SEO will be a huge help for getting your website exposure for relevant search terms. Web pages that are only displayed on the second results page or further receive virtually no traffic. To prevent this from happening, practicing strong SEO for your web pages is paramount.

Something new: Rich Snippets

Something that is relatively new by Google is the use of Rich Snippets in their top organic results. Here’s an example of a rich snippet for one of our favourite coffee shops in downtown Kamloops:

The rich snippet that was added to this search result is what’s inside the orange box. A rich snippet adds information that might be of instant value to a searcher. For this example, the star rating is given for the restaurant, along with the number of reviews from Yelp, and it also gives the average price range of their products.

Rich snippets attract user’s eyes towards your link, which may in turn lead them to clicking on it to visit your site.⁵

What can we do to help you with SEO?

Part of a healthy, well-rounded digital marketing strategy contains SEO. SEO starts with building your website, and is an ongoing process. You must incorporate the strategies that we discussed above, and constantly be updating your website in order to stay relevant to your audience attain higher conversions. ROI Media Works can handle SEO for your company and maintain it with best practices so that it’s recognized as an effective, authoritative, and trustworthy site on Google.

Search: Moz.com^1 & 2, Search Engine Land³, PracticalEcommerce⁴