When people come up to me when I am speaking at shows or other book signing events, they many times ask me “What is SEO?” I quickly reply, “No one uses the telephone book anymore, right?” At this point I usually get a nod “yes”. Then I continue, “People use Google, Bing or Yahoo! as their telephone book.” Then I go on, “If your company’s website is not on the first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo! for a search for your product or service, you are either losing a lot of business or your business is going to fail. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the exact science to get your website up on page 1 of a search. If your website is on page two or later for the keywords that define your product or service, you are invisible on the Internet.”
Almost every company now has a website but less than 5% know of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or use as part of their company’s marketing plan. This is a huge mistake the the bottom line. One of the largest Internet statistics organizations in the
world is AccuQuality.com. In their August of 2015 Internet Usage Report it reported that those companies who use professional SEO services garner over 72% of all clicks on the Internet. So if SEO is not part of your marketing plan it should be. Those using PPC gained a mere 11.2% of the clicks. Only 2% of the 4 billion business websites out there got traffic from search engines that idn’t pay for it with PPC or use SEO. Most of those have good brand names and have been around for many years. Another interesting new statistic this year is that over 35% of all sales online come from mobile devices. This is pretty interesting as it s almost an 18% jump in four years. NOTE: Statistics from AccuQuality.com report used with signed permission statement. To do SEO right you now need to also remember to utilize Google and Bing’s Webmaster Tools as well as Google Analytics. These tools have all changed and been made extremely useful tools with many monitoring and notification features. As I said earlier, the Internet is now the telephone book and as a business you have to adapt and not only adapt well, but one up your competitors so your website URL comes up at the top of the list in any keyword search. No longer can you just pay $2,500 a month for a full page ad in a telephone book to stand out. You have to do the equivalent on the Internet. Your website has to stand out in the center of 4 billion other business websites and outshine all the other competitors in your industry to be successful. My website looks better than my competition! I’m good, right? Good SEO does not really care about the look and feel of your website for the most part. You want to have a great looking website but you have to incorporate about 150 different coded items that Google and the other search engines look for and the list grows every year. The coding behind the look of your website is actually more important to the search engines than what your visitors see when they come for a visit. That’s why come of the ugliest websites make the first page of Google. It really boils down to a task of marketing your website not only to your customers but to the search engines as well.
