Search Engine Optimization – Why Its Important

More and more business owners are getting calls, emails, salesmen stopping into their stores(we’ll talk more about that down below)……all saying that they’re there to help get your business at the top of the search engines.  Unfortunately many business owners may have heard of search engine optimization or SEO as it is often called, but they may not understand what it is and why its important.

To put it in layman’s terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies and processes which are used to get a website as close as possible to top of the first page of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  OK, now you may be asking, why is it important to be at the top of the Search Engines….how does that affect me and my business?  As we discuss on our SEO services page, more and more people are using the internet to search for goods and services.  Think about the last time you contacted a company by hearing a TV or Radio ad….or saw and ad in the newspaper, or picked up the phone book and looked for a business.  We’re sure it hasn’t happened in a very long time.  These days we all have one of the greatest search tools ever created in our homes, at work, and most of us have that tool in our pockets or purses….we all have access to the internet and can quickly find answer to our questions as well as businesses who sell the products and services we’re searching for.  

With more and more people searching for these goods and services online, it has becoming exponentially more important to be listed at the top of those search engine results.  Put is this way, if your business isn’t listed on the first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you’re missing out on nearly 90% of all of the searches for your goods and services…..that means that your competitors who are listed on page one are getting that traffic.  The way you make money off of your company website is via the following formula:  Traffic + Conversion = Profit.  As indicated in this formula, the first thing you need to do is to get traffic to your website.  If your website has a nice clean design, easy to navigate, and has clear calls to action, then it should convert a percentage of that traffic to paying customers.  Again, if your website ISN’T on page one of Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you’re missing out on over 90% of that traffic.  This is where Search Engine Optimization comes into play…..

Search Engine Optimization involves making sure that your website is optimized for the web.  Basically it helps ensure that your website is attractive to the search engines, meets their recommendations, etc….  Another component of this is what is called “Off Page” search engine optimization.  This is where the heavy lifting comes in.  This involves a number of factors which includes the number and quality of links to your website, what social signals your website may have, the number of online reviews you have and more importantly, if those reviews are positive or not…..and there are MANY other factors as well.

At the end of the day, you an continue to ignore search engine optimization if you want….but we can assure you that your competitors aren’t and this is getting them more customers and taking more and more market share away from you.  Whether or not you use Spark Local Marketing for your search engine optimization, you need to involve it into your overall marketing plan.