'HOW TO SEO, Search Engine Optimization Explained'
One of the prime challenges faced by small businesses is that of effective reach and visibility. Constrained as they are by limited resources and stretched thin by business demands, quite frequently they also find their business focus digressing from building a good brand presence in the market. Often, this situation is worsened by the lack of time business owners experience due to the daily rigor of conducting business.
Quite obviously, what owners of small businesses looking to establish a presence need is a means of doing so that minimizes consumption of scarce resources like marketing dollars and business owner’s bandwidth. Equally obviously, this needs to be done without compromising on the reach, which in fact needs to be maximized.
An online presence, or a business website, solves some of these problems to some extent. It offers an easy and unbelievably quick way of setting up a presence and provides a platform from which to market your offerings. It is a godsend to small business owners especially in today’s globalized markets where establishing physical presence in each target market remains the privilege of big businesses with deep marketing pockets.
A business website makes your brand and its offerings accessible to practically the entire target market globally. But how many of your target customers are actually accessing your business’ website? How many even know that such a website exists? At worst, none. At best, probably a fraction of the target population.
What makes matters worse is competition. The World Wide Web is known to host well in excess of a trillion websites. Your competitor websites may well number in the thousands or millions. The only way for users to find out about you online is by searching on a search engine. If you consider the fact that three out of every four such users do not look past the first ten or twenty website links returned by search engines, the monstrosity of the problem in front of you becomes apparent.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a marketing paradigm that addresses just this business problem. SEO is the science of enhancing the visibility of your website when customers search online for products and services your business can provide. SEO is the art of knowing what type of website content and what marketing tactics can make your target customer population knock on the doors of your business’ website instead of on your competitors’.
A Search Engine Optimized, or simply ‘optimized’, website works around many of the problems small businesses face in reaching out to their customers. Given that adequate expertise is applied, it is relatively easy to reach millions of target customers with the right technical interventions and the right communication. Compared to conventional marketing channels and tactics, SEO is relatively easier on your pocket too. The best part is the outcome. Optimized websites are known to register up to 20 times more traffic than non-optimized websites and help the business they represent garner up to 40% more revenue.
This book is geared towards helping you and your business do exactly that. It takes you through the fundamentals of SEO and helps you judge if the optimization effort is worth it for your business. It also gives you in-depth insights into the intricacies of good SEO and pitfalls to watch out for. And like all responsible articles, it provides an unbiased view of whom to engage with on your SEO journey.
Happy reading!