What is SEO, or search engine optimization? SEO is a technique to help websites and businesses to get found easier online.
If you started a business and you are offering painting as a service and your service area is Toronto, you want to make sure that anybody who is Googling for that service will find your business on Google and contact you. Therefore, you will earn a customer, and you will make money and your business will start to grow.
But when your customer types in painting in Toronto, they might see 30 or 40 different companies offering the same service. So how do you get your website to show up above theirs on Google?
Well, you can optimize your website better than your competitors, and therefore, your website will start to climb in what we call search engine ranking. A search engine will rank one website higher than another if it’s been optimized better for search.
These kinds of optimizations can be boiled down to two categories:
- On Page Optimization
- Off Page Optimization
On Page Optimization
The first is on-page optimization. This is everything that you can do on your own website to maximize its potential. Google has some pretty detailed guidelines for what you should do on your website to make sure it’s optimized for search. It’s about knowing what Google wants to see and making sure that your website is giving Google what they want to see.
The goal with this is that Google will understand what your website is about:
- What services you’re offering
- Where you’re offering those services
- What products you are selling.
Google’s goal is to connect a user, someone who wants to find what you have to offer and make sure that they can get there so that the user has a good experience.
Off Page Optimization
The other type of optimization is off-site optimization or off-page optimization. This has everything to do with how prominent your business and website are all over the internet.
Google uses this to understand if your website is a real website, a real business, and they use other websites to validate the existence of your business. When you set up something like a Facebook page, an Instagram account, all the different kinds of socials, you are building up your network around your website and verifying that your website is a real business.
Google will know how to find that you’ve been active in those communities because it is always looking for ways to cross-reference and check that your website is real.
It will find those other places where you’ve been, where you’ve been mentioning your business and services. Google can connect those dots together and your website will grow and become stronger for it.
Also read: Do Local Business Directories Affect SEO?
What Does This Do?
If you can work on those two categories, then your website will do fine in search rankings. In my own experience, there are a lot of businesses that are not doing anything in either of the two categories.
Just by optimizing your website and making your online presence known to Google, your website will automatically start climbing up the rankings on Google.
The goal ultimately is just to get somewhere up on the first page of Google. You can never guarantee that you’re going to get to the very top (first position on Google), but it is realistic to assume that you can get to the top of the first page, which is enough to get seen by most people and to get a lot of business from that.
SEO Replaces Paying For Google Ads
A very big benefit from doing this, and you’ve probably figured it out already, is that you don’t have to pay for Google Ads. To get a steady stream of customers coming from Google without SEO, you have to spend at least $500 a month on Google Ads.
Some people pay upwards of two, three, even $4,000 a month just to keep customers coming in. But as soon as they turn off the ads, their business goes dark and they’re not getting any calls or customers anymore.
But when your business is always showing up at the top of Google, whether you’re running ads or not, you have this constant steady stream of customers coming in, calling you, emailing you, texting you.