You’ve made your business website. Congrats! Now, people will know to go to it, right? …Not exactly. Just like people don’t automatically know when you create a new (and obviously awesome) product, they don’t know when you’ve created a new website. In addition, people have very short attention spans on the web. So how do you get your website to be found?
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (commonly referred to as SEO) “is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.” In basic terms, proper SEO helps your website to be found online in search engines like, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. In this post, we’re going to be primarily talking about organic/unpaid SEO. SEO is important for businesses.
91% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web. ~MarketingProfs Website
Ask yourself: Would you rather market to 91% of people who use the web or just 9%?
SEO Rankings and Positioning
Search engine ranking refers to the order in which the searched results show up. The first few results generally produce the highest click through rate (CTR). Click through rate refers to the number of user’s who clicked on a specific link.
Organic SEO rankings are in yellow
The first position in search engine results is really important. According to a Chikita study of U.S. and Canada user’s, about 1 in 3 user’s click on the first organic search result. See the graphic to the right for an example of organic search results.
Specifically, the rates for each organic position are:
- 32.5%
- 17.6%
- 11.4%
- 8.1%
- 6.1%
- 4.4%
- 3.5%
- 3.1%
- 2.6%
- 2.4%
- 1.0%
- 0.8%
- 0.7%
- 0.6%
- 0.4%
Of course it’s important to get found online, but how do you get started? What can you do to jumpstart your own SEO?
Tips to Start Basic SEO
Add your business to online directories, review sites, and social media accounts. Of course, your have to maintain a consistent social media presence to produce results from that direction. We’ll bring in our guest blogger, Martha of Brown Bear Social to discuss that in a later post. For now, here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- YellowPages
- Bing Places for Business
- Yahoo Small Business
- LinkedIn Company Pages
There’s many other things that should be done, both on and off of your website, to increase your online presence. I’ll touch on those in future blog posts. Revive does offer SEO services that include monthly reporting. Get in touch, if you’re interested in teaming up on an SEO project!
Data sources: Wikipedia, MarketingProfs, Chikita
