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SEO is all about increasing the amount (and quality) of traffic you drive to your website. In short, it makes sure people can find your content when they search for a relevant topic online.
SEO is brilliant, and you can take that from me. It’s how I grew my website to rank first for over 250 individual keywords and achieved 45k organic visitors (don’t believe me? See for yourself).
But I also understand SEO can be a tad confusing. So to help you out, I’ve put together this really simple guide to show you why SEO can be really important for some businesses.
1) What is SEO anyway?
SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) is a collection of tactics to bring more traffic to your website. It works by making your content look more appealing to search engines. And by that of course we mean the big dog, Google.
It's a bit like waving a huge colorful banner at the Google Gods and shouting ‘Hey, my website is great and my content deserves to be seen!’.
Luckily for you, SEO doesn’t mean you need to start typing out blogs for robots. In fact, SEO is more human than it is machines. It boils down to providing value to your audience by giving them relevant, informative content.
I won’t dive into the fundamentals of SEO in this guide. But if you’d like to know more, you can view my simple intro to SEO here. (It’s grandma-friendly, I promise).
2) How does SEO work?
Google is pretty transparent about its goals in its mission statement. The company wants to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.
To achieve this goal, Google needs to make sure it provides people with the absolute best content possible. It does this by sending out crawlers to websites and assessing content for things like usefulness, relevance, and accessibility.
Google’s algorithms then use this information to order websites based on how well they fit a user’s query. We might also call this ‘ranking’ websites. The more Google thinks your website is delivering value, the higher they’ll rank your page.
3) Why is SEO important?
SEO is the absolute best way to improve your website’s ranking and bring new customers to your website.
Sure, social media and paid adverts are great, but search engines account for over 93% of all web traffic. And the top search result on Google gets 27.6% of all clicks.
Improving your website’s ranking is the key to getting more people to find and click that big blue hyperlink.
As a plus, great SEO will benefit you for the long run. If you rank well for a keyword, you’ll get a steady stream of people visiting your site. It’s also completely free, by the way. No giant marketing budget needed.
4) Which businesses benefit the most from SEO?
I may be a little bit biased when I say this, but I’m a firm believer that SEO is a great strategy for everyone. Still, I’d be lying if I said that SEO is going to be equally as impactful for all businesses.
For starters, SEO is always going to benefit you the most if you have a product that people are actively searching for. If you run an eCommerce brand selling old-school t-shirts, for example, SEO will help customers searching for ‘vintage clothing’ find your business.
But, say you’re pioneering a new invention that people are yet to hear of. In that case, you’re probably going to have more luck starting with paid ads and social media. After all, if people don’t have your product (or something similar) in their vocabulary, they’ll struggle to find you online.
Second, SEO is at its best when your target audience is actively searching online. If you run a trendy bar and eatery in downtown Los Angeles and want tourists to find your business, SEO is a great way to bring in footfall.
But imagine you run a small-town bakery with an established, local customer-base. In that case, SEO may be less cost-effective than simply relying on word-of-mouth within your community.
Summing Up
So hopefully this gives you a better idea of why Google cares about SEO and how it can help your business.
If you’d like to learn a little bit more about how to actually do SEO, I’ve got a great beginner’s guide to writing SEO-friendly content. It’s super straightforward and will set you up to appease the Google Gods and climb the rankings. Good luck!
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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