SEO: What is it? And does your business need it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the term used to describe the practice of optimizing your online presence in order to perform better in rankings on search engine queries. In simple terms it is basically the way a business would change their website in order to be listed higher on a search engine results page.  If you want to attract customers online, chances are your business would benefit from Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

You can do one simple thing to determine if you need to do search engine optimization: Perform a search engine optimization audit. It’s simple and takes 10 mins.

Search Engine Optimization Audit:

1. Write a list of typical search terms you would expect a consumer to use to find your business. For a florist, it might be “flower shop that delivers”, for a restaurant, it might be “Italian Restaurant Toms River”, etc.
2. Open a browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox) and create a private connection. This is important because your computer will have stored your typical activity and will influence the search engine results. With Chrome, the shortcut to a private browser window is Ctrl+Shift+N. If you are not sure how to do this on your computer, you can always use the computers at a library!
3. Go to Google.com and type in your search terms. Are you on the first page? Are you in the top 1-5 spots? If you are a physical business, do you show up in the map view?
4. Now do the same for Bing.com.
5. Record your rankings per below for each search term:
   • What page of results was your website?
   • If you were on the first page, what ranking (1, 2, 3 etc)?
   • Were your main competitors higher than you? Did your main competitors have a paid advertisement in the results?
   • Was your business listed in the map view? (If you have a physical storefront)

One important note: If your typical customer is in the United States, the two major search engines are Google and Bing. In other countries, the major search engines can vary, so if you are a global company be sure to perform an audit on the most popular browsers in your target countries.

With your search engine optimization audit results complete, were you satisfied? If you were not on the first page of both Google and Bing as well as ranked higher than your main competitors, chances are your customers are not finding your online presence through search engines. Finally, given the fact that Google processes on average 40,000 searches every second, you are clearly missing customers without excellent SEO.

               Call SocialTrend today and let’s get your business ranking higher tomorrow!