Everyone is connected these days. Well, everyone might be a bit of an exaggeration. It’s estimated that about 45% of the entire world population uses the Internet, though almost 90% of North Americans are in that group. That’s a pool of about 3.2 billion people who are online. People have computers in their pockets, and there are jobs that exist solely because the Internet does. If you’re a business, you obviously need a website, but you need to do more than just build a site.
The Internet is a competitive place. It can be harder for your business to get noticed on the Internet than at its physical location, but that’s only if you don’t take the right steps to get noticed. While you do have to compete for online visibility, digital marketing gives you much more reach than traditional advertising. That’s why search engine optimization is necessary for a good online business plan.
SEO is important?! What wonderful and amazing news that nobody has ever heard before! Watch where you step because the cat is out of the bag! Everybody knows that you need to employ an SEO strategy if you want to be successful online. 9 out of 10 people don’t click through to the second page of search results, so it’s definitely important to increase your rank in search. Being on the second or third page of results is like building a store behind a billboard for your competition: it’s going to be hard to get business.
Enter SEO. The best kind of search engine optimization is excellent content that is written with both human beings and search engines in mind. But there are plenty of tips and tricks out there. People who want to sidestep the need for highly usable, correctly optimized content that communicates well with search engines will rely on tips and tricks, and those methods might give them a temporary advantage. Plus, we admit, good SEO can give a more permanent advantage.
Since search engine optimization has become common practice, search results can sometimes yield results that aren’t necessarily relevant to your search. Let’s say that you’re trying to find information about lemons. So you type in “information about lemons”, and in addition to facts about lemons, your search results produce a link to a self-help blog that used the phrase “when life gives you lemons…”, and maybe a plumbing company named Lemons & Sons. Maybe the blogger and the plumber are better at implementing SEO techniques than the lemon aficionado, so the actual information you’re looking for drops lower in the search results.
Results like these can be a sign of a change in the wind: it’s getting close to Google algorithm update time.
Google’s customer is the person searching for information about lemons. They make every effort to show the best possible page for the searcher. Google’s engineers work on this every day, and small changes are made often. When the search results are no longer providing the most useful options, the search engines have to make changes to improve the experience they give their customers, just as any business has to change and adapt to keep serving their customers well.
When an update happens, sites that have been relying on tips and tricks will see their traffic fall. Sites with good SEO may see changes, too — they may see a fall in traffic but better targeted traffic that is more likely to convert. Lemons & Sons should be glad when that happens. Instead of having site visitors who want information about lemons, they’ll get more visitors who want plumbers.
The people who actually have information about lemons to offer? Their page might rise in the rankings if there’s a change in the search engine algorithm. But there is no reason to sit back and hope. Search engine optimization offers the highest ROI of any marketing investment you can make. Your neglected company pages could be doing much more for you. Instead of resenting the websites that are better at SEO, you can use SEO strategy to improve your position.
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