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Sometimes when you’re starting your business, you have to go through an educational bootcamp. You get all of these terms and jargon thrown at you that you have no clue about. What is the difference between SEO, SEM, and SMM? We can relate!

The technological landscape of marketing is constantly changing so we always have to stay up on the latest trends. One of those trends is something called SEO. (Search Engine Optimization) Search Engine Optimization is the over arching term of optimizing a web page so that it can increase the chances of getting found on searching engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. 

For example, when someone is interested in finding a local pizza shop, in the past they may have pulled out the local telephone book and looked up “pizza shop” in a local city. Now, with the birth of the internet, people will use the web to search these terms to find what they need and answers to questions they have. People may search for “pizza shop” on Google and Google will provide them with a listing of local business websites and information that will give them the results they are looking for. This is the user perspective of SEO. 

From a business standpoint, SEO is the practice of making sure that your business website or landing page is optimized in the best possible way to be ranked and found in order to drive traffic to your website. More traffic, in turn, provides more prospective customers that will contact you about your product or service. 

There are many aspects of a website that are creatively and technically cultivated in order to get the best results for search engines to understand what your website or page is about. Here are a just a few ranking factors:

• Content quality
• Content length
• Backlinks (The more links you have from multiple high-authority domains, the better your chances are to rank well for top keywords.)
• Mobile or responsive design
• Page speed
• Schema code (Schema markup code helps search engines get a better understanding of specific texts such as addresses, phone numbers, recipes, reviews and more.)

Each one of these topics can be a blog article in of themselves. Never the less, according to Backlinko.com, Google uses over 200 ranking factors to decide how to rank and display a website page. 

Should I DIY SEO?

The world of SEO is complex, but it’s easy enough to understand the basics. There are plenty of free SEO videos and informational websites that will give you the run down and information you need to get the ball rolling. However, if you don’t have the time commitment to learn and execute, you might considering hiring a professional to handle things for you. This can save you valuable time and money so you can focus on the more important aspects of your business. Often times SEO experts will offer things like keyword research evaluations, hourly rates or monthly packages to get your website where it needs to be. 

Severity Design will put together a free SEO audit to find out how your website is doing utilizing the top 5 keywords your wanting to rank for. In the process, we might even find better keywords that are less competitive and will start driving traffic to your site in no time!