There’s a list of things you need to make your brand marketable. Some of the basics are creating a logo, website, social media, and more. Ensuring that all these elements you’ve so delicately created are able to be found online, search engine optimization (SEO) is needed to complete the package.

SEO is a term used quite often within the marketing/advertising industry, but some don’t know what SEO really is or how it works. It’s the process to make sure you’re showing up when people are looking for your product or service online. To help make it easier to digest, I’ll use the analogy of a librarian organizing all of the world’s books. There are millions of books with different titles and topics. These books represent the vast amount of websites. To keep track of all the books and make sure a reader is given the right book, one must have a system to organize it all. These systems use algorithms and ranking measurements to give you a list of options of books to choose from. The suggested books are relevant to the title or topic you are searching.

The big three: Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the librarians that organize the world’s books or websites in this case. To make sure that these search engines choose your website as an option to display for readers requires having good ranking factors. This means that the site must have certain elements and be organized to secure a higher ranking. The higher the ranking, the more likely your site will show up on the first page of options for the user.

Most of us find what we’re looking for on the first page of search results. How many times do you remember clicking to the second, third and additional pages on Google? Research proves that traffic drops off by 95% for the second page of Google results.  You have to truly have the time and energy to continue clicking through all those results. As a business, this means that you want to show up on the first few pages of results and make sure you are front and center for a user to click on your link.

There are ads that show up as the first three options, but these are paid results. The rest of the results underneath are called organic results, which are unpaid results that lead to traffic on your site. To make sure your business is an option on the organic search results, you must employ good SEO practices. Without SEO, it’s like working out, but still eating fast food and expecting to see results The two just don’t go together. You can have a beautiful site, but if it’s not optimized, how are people going to find you? Well, after this post, I hope you know that the answer is SEO.

To jumpstart your SEO practices, I’ve included three easy steps to get started. This is just the beginning though. There are many more tricks to make sure your website ends up on the first page. If you need help or don’t want to do it yourself, slide in my inbox and let me know more about your business. I’m happy to work with businesses, entrepreneurs and more to improve their rankings.

3 Key Tips to Keep in Mind

1.Keywords

When people first start their search journey, they type in keywords to find what they’re looking for. For example, a hungry couple looking for new sushi restaurants would search “Sushi restaurant in Miami” to find places near them. One of the keywords is sushi so as the restaurant owner, you need to know what your potential customers are searching so you can include those terms on your site and be found easier.

2.Titles of Pages

The title of your page tells a user what they are about to see and read. On search results, the title of the page is a snippet that tells the user what they can expect on your page. Without a title, a user is confused and may not end up clicking on your site. The title should also include your keywords as mentioned above.

3.Titles of Images

Images are often forgotten, but they can also help drive traffic to your site. Naming an image “005.jpg” does nothing for your site. Having a title such as “Tigers-in-the-jungle” is easier for the search engine to categorize and show interested users that search for those terms.

Contact me if you want to improve your SEO and start driving more traffic to your site.