Diving into the world of Search Engine Optimization (known as ‘SEO’) can be terrifying. The industry itself is a mystery to most people and the profession has changed so drastically over the past decade that it’s borderline unrecognizable. To help you better understand what SEO is in a simple and easy-to-understand fashion, we’re going to break it down into the bare basics. And we’ll try not to use any scary sounding terms to confuse you.
The Golden Rule of SEO
Simply put: the goal of an SEO is to improve a user’s experience on a website. Yes, there are other tasks that SEOs do. Yes, that’s an oversimplification. However, that is the very core of what we do as SEOs. It’s a simple reward system where you improve a user’s experience and Google, Bing, Yahoo and whoever else give you a reward. That reward is better rankings and more trust (which is a metric known as ‘authority’, they’re synonyms).
Think of Google as an omnipotent person. They need to decide how to rank websites and in what order to list them, but they don’t know any of these websites. So how do they know what to do? Well, think about what you would do if tasked with listing websites based on the most trustworthy ones.
Product websites? You’d list the sites with the biggest inventory.
Informational websites? You’d look for ones with a good track record of telling the truth.
Service websites? Well, what do their previous customers think of their service?
And in all of those cases you’d also want to make sure the site is safe, secure and user friendly.
Putting yourselves in Google’s shoes is something people rarely do because they’re still stuck in the early 2000s when SEO was all about ‘gaming’ the search engines. Those days are over and Google is smarter than that. In fact, they’ll penalize you for trying to game the system now, so don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s the way to go.
I want to do SEO myself, what do I do?
While we offer SEO plans ranging from small buckets of time to recurring monthly programs, many people want to try SEO on their own and we encourage everyone to at least dip a toe in the water to better understand the industry. There are a few options here:
1) You can get training from professionals. This includes individual training as well as business consulting.
2) You can start learning SEO on your own. A great resource to start out with is Moz. They have a segment called “Whiteboard Fridays” (I’d recommend the ones done by Rand Fishkin, the previous owner).
3) You can find a different website that looks nice to you and see what they’re doing right, then try to replicate that. Remember, as long as you’re improving a user’s experience or improving your visibility on search engines (Google My Business page, getting reviews from customers, etc.) then you’re doing SEO. It’s a very random field that’s essentially a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of tasks.
Someone cold-called or cold-emailed me offering SEO services, should I take them?
No, run away. If someone is cold-calling you or cold-emailing you then there’s a 100% chance that they’re absolutely terrible at SEO. Ask local businesses and friends/family who they’ve used that they trust. Worst case scenario, we’ll point you towards someone. The industry has been plagued by terrible SEOs and we’ve watched countless clients get hurt and waste enormous amounts of money.
The SEO industry is hard to navigate for a business because there’s no formal training. Colleges don’t teach it and the self-taught people usually only get as far in as learning Metadata, which is the bare basics you need to know. If you plan on contracting an SEO then use your network and ask around or contact us and we’ll push you in the right direction.