What Is SEO and why does it matter?
By: Maddy Fitzgerald, 17 Jan 2020
By: Maddy Fitzgerald, 17 Jan 2020
Whether you’re a sales and marketing novice or seasoned veteran, knowing the ins and outs of modern SEO is vital to a flourishing career. Clients and businesses alike are all clamoring for their shot at optimized content, and they’re paying top-dollar for the best tools, consultants, and flashy website plugins.
If you’re ready to advance your sales and marketing career in 2020, it’s time to learn the whats, whys, and hows of SEO.
So what is Search Engine Optimization, and why does it really matter?
The Whats
SEO is a method used to boost a website’s placement and visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Everybody who owns a website can benefit from SEO, no matter the purpose. It’s especially important for those involved in sales and marketing in any capacity to understand SEO and how to implement a successful strategy in order to drive new views, visits, clicks, and generate leads.
The Whys
With proper SEO strategies, businesses can grow their presence organically online and appear to their target demographics on the first pages of search results without the use of paid advertisements. Strong SEO also improves website rankings, which, in turn, improves positioning on search engine results. The point of SEO is to establish a website to search engines as a go-to place for relevant and trustworthy information to be accessed.
The Hows
There are several different ways to optimize a website. Below are a few of the most popular, but keep in mind there are several more which may be beneficial to learn about depending on your profession.
Keywords: Arguably the most popular and easy way to increase SEO, this is the method of mentioning keywords and phrases in headings, body text, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc. Seasoning a website with relevant terms helps search engines index a website. Keywords can be locations, products, services, ideas, phrases, questions, and more. It is a common beginner mistake to overuse keywords, which can turn potential leads away and display a lack of professionalism. Keep in mind that synonyms and variations of keywords are crawled and indexed by the search engines as well, so there’s no need to repeat the same words and risk sounding like a broken record.
H1 tags: An H1 tag is the headline of a web page, sandwiched in the code <h1></h1>. SEO-friendly H1 tags are strategically picked keywords and phrases since the search engines look at headers to get a general idea of your content. It’s best to avoid vague statements, arbitrary phrases, jokes/puns, etc. and get right to the point instead.
Meta descriptions: When searching something on Google, the listed results show up in the form of a title and small blurb from the web page. This blurb is called the meta description and can be custom-written to complement an SEO strategy. If there is no meta description written, search engines will do their best to pick the most relevant part of a web page to show instead. A strong meta description has relevant keywords and phrases to the subject being searched.
Permalinks: Links to different pages of a website are called permalinks. A website with strong SEO will have custom, correct, error-free permalinks containing relevant keywords. For example, if you are selling dog leashes, the permalink should be websiteexample.com/dog-leashes. All pages should have permalinks to reflect the content. If you’re trying to push sales for your last batch of tie-dye leashes, the permalink should be websiteexample.com/tie-dye-leashes. If left untouched, websites get messy and permalinks get overlooked, turning into jumbles of letters, numbers, and characters. Specificity goes a long way when search engines are trying to read a website’s links.
Rankings: Website rankings are where user interaction comes into play. Where and how your website ranks is dependent on several factors, such as how many visitors the site has, how long they stay on the site, what links they interact with, what keywords they find, if the site is secure, easy to navigate, contains clean codes, and more. Rankings are attached to a domain, NOT just the web design, so it’s important to ensure that any new designs launched are clean and optimized.
The Whos
Obviously, this article just the very tip of the iceberg. There's plenty more to learn about SEO, and there are experts standing-by to teach you everything they know. The most notable SEO expert is Neil Patel, who has a ton of content on his website about how to rank high in search results. You can also check out Jeff Bullas and DigitalMarketer, or head to the Project Riser platform where you can search all the training groups that specialize in SEO.
To wrap up this mini-lesson, SEO is a long-term process that requires a hands-on approach and an adaptable strategy for an organically growing web presence. Overall, it’s the method of keeping a clean, relevant website running at all times by employing keywords in multiple facets. Messy spaghetti codes and broken links often get overlooked and pile up over time, confusing search engines and pushing websites to the deep, dark, inner-pages of results.
Stay tuned for more sales and marketing insider tips, coming soon!