Why should you care about SEO?

I know that for lots of you, SEO is a really confusing topic - and understandably so! No matter where you look online, if you try to learn and teach yourself about it, or if you ask people that have a good knowledge of SEO, the answers you get and the things that you read tend to be PRETTY confusing, amiright?!

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there is a lot of technical jargon and terminology, but I want you guys to rest assured that I'm committed to breaking those down for you so you actually GET it!

One of the biggest myths about SEO is that is involves complicated trickery. Not true! Just be real..png

SOON YOU WON’T BE RUNNING AWAY SCREAMING WHEN I MENTION THINGS LIKE METADATA OR ALT-TAGS BECAUSE I’M GOING TO BREAK THINGS DOWN AND MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU.

Let’s have a look at why we should even care about this tomfoolery at all.

You may already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and you’ll probably have a reasonable idea that it has something to do with being found online, right?

Absolutely right!

SEO is essentially the process of making sure that all of your content, all of your website pages, and all of your online presence is optimised so that Google will pull it up when somebody searches for a relevant keyword within your industry, your niche, or your market.

Let’s break it down even further:

Imagine you’re a physiotherapist and you have a practice in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in the UK.

In that case, you’re going to want to come up on the Google Search results when somebody searches for:

physio cheltenham

knee pain cheltenham

deep tissue massage glos

Still with me?

What you need to do is make sure you’re optimising all your content and all the elements of your site that contribute to the Google rankings, to make sure that the people who are in your target audience can actually find you when they search.

It is really quite as simple as that!

If you think about the fact that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 68% of those use Google, you'll understand why, when we talk about SEO, we tend to talk specifically about Google. It's pretty clear from the statistics why we focus on Google - and why it’s so important to make sure that we are optimising all our online content for the Google algorithms.

Algorithms?! Eh?!

36% of Google users will click on the first search result..png

Now, this is another one of those pesky jargon-words that you’ll probably have heard if you’ve ever looked into SEO before, along with words like ‘bots’, ‘crawlbots’ or ‘spiders’. Let’s dig in…

Google, as a search engine, works to a certain algorithm - this contains the elements and the factors it takes into consideration in that stupidly-short millisecond of time between you clicking search (or hitting enter) and when you're presented with the results page.

Nobody knows exactly what the Google algorithm looks for at any one time - however, experts in the SEO field have a pretty good idea, and one thing is for sure - Google’s algorithm has changed massively in the last few years. We dive right into the details in my online SEO MADE SIMPLE course.

If any of you were around in the online space in the late nineties and early noughties, you will more than likely have come across something known as ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.

You may not know that term, but you’ll almost certainly have encountered websites that are using these ‘black hat’ techniques. More on ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ techniques to come in the SEO MADE SIMPLE course, but let me say one thing - and that’s that the Google algorithms have changed hugely over the past ten to fifteen years and using black hat techniques will NOT help you now.

Click to Tweet.png — “
Ultimately, Google wants to provide the absolute best quality result for the search in question. It wants to make sure that when somebody types a query into the search engine, they are rewarded with the most relevant results. That is, essentially, what Google aims to do (and, what they indeed achieve most of the time!)”

- Dani Juson, Thrive Marketing

So, what we as entrepreneurs, marketers and business owners need to do is use SEO techniques to make sure that we are optimising our content in order for Google to find it relevant, valuable and helpful and show it to the right people. We need to use SEO to give ourselves the best possible chance to get higher up on that search results page (or SERP, in SEO-speak!).

Again, WHY does this matter?!

Because the top five links on a Google search engine results page account for 67% of all clicks (and remember, 93% of online experiences start with a search engine…)

Just take a moment to let that sink in, and hopefully you understand why rising to the top of the search engine results for your chosen keywords is so important!

Want to know how? Take the SEO Made Simple self-study course + learn everything you need to know in easy-to-digest, bite-size online video modules.