Last week we talked about why you need a blog. Some of these reasons were that a blog attracts new clients, helps you demonstrate expertise in your field, and provides an avenue to give your clients valuable insight.
However, what was the number one reason for why your company needs a blog? To boost your SEO results!
I promised you in last week’s post that we would talk SEO this week. So…here we go!
What Is SEO?
In case you are not aware of what SEO (search engine optimization) is, here’s your dictionary lesson of the day.
SEO is the process of creating or improving the quality and quantity of a website’s content in order to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Basically, it is making lots of little tweaks here and there throughout the site to make the pages rank as high as possible without paying the search engine for those higher rankings.
What Is Not SEO?
To clarify, SEO is not paying for ads on search engines so that you are listed at the top and bottom of the search results page with links labeled “Ad.” This type of paid search engine marketing is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. That is a topic for another day!
Does SEO Cost Money?
Will optimizing your site for search engines cost you money? Ultimately, yes! As mentioned above, you are not paying the search engines themselves to rank your pages higher, however.
You will still have to pay for SEO services. Instead of paying for ads, you will be paying yourself (using your time), your employees, a marketing company, or a contracted copywriter (such as myself) to make these tweaks to your site or write new copy.
Why Is SEO Important?
You might be wondering why is SEO that important that you need to allocate part of your budget for it. Because it brings you organic traffic (which we will talk about next) that is very specific to your company, product, or service! Traffic equals potential clients and potential revenue.
This traffic is a result of searching! You get this type of very specific traffic because someone is searching for a topic that you’ve optimized your site for. This allows you to grab the attention of consumers who are more likely to make a purchase or interact with your brand. The amount of traffic you receive isn’t as important as how qualified your traffic is to your particular topic or product. You want traffic that converts!
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is free, unpaid traffic. It is people who click on your site through the non-paid search engine results, which were achieved based on a page’s merit and not how much money was spent on advertising.
As a result, organic search results are considered the most trustworthy, authoritative, and relative sites or pages on a particular topic.
The better you optimize your site, the higher you rank, and then the more likely you are to get more clicks and organic traffic visiting your site. This type of traffic is great because it is people who are already interested in something related to your business…i.e., the qualified traffic I just mentioned above.
How Does SEO Work?
In order to apply SEO practices to your site, you first need to understand your potential client. You need to know what they are searching for online, the words they use for these searches, and the answers they hope to achieve. When you have this information, you are then able to create copy and optimize your site in a way that will connect with your desired audience and give them the solutions that they are seeking.
SEO works by optimizing a website’s pages and posts based on keywords, meta descriptions, image tags, internal links, titles, and more.
The search engines crawl (or read) your site’s content and determine whether or not it is relevant to particular keywords/searches. The search engines use algorithms to determine these results and give each page a ranking based on this information along with a few other factors.
These algorithms are constantly changing and are very complex. The good news is that you don’t have to understand all of these nitty-gritty details of search engines to be able to apply SEO practices to your site.
Time to Implement!
I just threw a lot of information at you. Maybe you knew it all already, and this was just a quick refresher; or maybe this was all new information to you. Either way, implementing SEO tactics into your site can be very daunting and time-consuming.
If you want to start creating SEO content or publishing SEO blog posts on your site, The Inspired Copy can help!
I will do all the research for your topic, write all the content, do all the editing, and optimize it for SEO; and you can publish the blog post under your name as if you or your company wrote it yourselves (ghostwriting). I do all the work, and you take all the credit! Who wouldn’t want that?
Let me help you create SEO copy to drive more organic traffic to your site! Send me a message, and let’s chat about your blogging needs!
