SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving a website’s content, structure, and influence across the Internet to increase its rank or visibility on the search engine result pages, and drive more traffic from them. If you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur, you’re very familiar with the word marketing, and when you’re doing marketing, you might also be familiar with Internet marketing. SEO is one of the most effective types of Internet marketing, and therefore, could be an important part of your business and marketing strategy.
Making SEO a significant part of your business strategy involves costs in terms of time or money. If you already have a SEO knowledge and experience, you may do it yourself to save the cost of hiring a SEO expert or SEO company. But if you have no idea how to do it, getting SEO services from the experts can be your good option. But should you really implement SEO to achieve your business goals? Should it really work for your business? To answer those questions, we have to learn how SEO can really help a certain business.
So how can SEO help a certain business to grow?
Let us say you have a budget hotel and restaurant business in Manila, Philippines. You also have several competitors.
Because people nowadays are using search engines to find information about the product or service they are looking for, a person who’s looking for a budget hotel in Manila will usually use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to search for its related terms, like “budget hotels in Manila”.
Now, if you don’t have a website for your business or if you have a website but have not optimized it yet for the search engines, the chances are, what people will find on the search engines are your competitors. This makes your business rivals get more potential customers from the search engines. And because most of your potential customers are already using the Internet, this will be a big loss on your part.
SEO can be a great advantage for any business that targets Internet users, especially Google users, to find more customers. It helps your company website be more visible on search engines, and compete with your competitors websites when it comes to ranking and driving traffic.
SEO also improves how your business appears on the search engine result pages by optimizing your page titles and descriptions to be more appealing and to encourage more clicks from users of search engines.
SEO strategies can also be used to manage your online reputation. Since search engines can index most of website pages on the Internet that talk about your business, there’s a chance that false and negative mentions about your business will also be indexed. Through SEO, you can counter these negative mentions with the right publications about your business.
By implementing good SEO techniques and strategies, your business website can also avoid errors and mistakes that lead to penalties imposed by Google and other search engines to websites that are not compliant with Webmaster’s guidelines.
With billions of people all over the world already using the Internet and search engines to find answers to their questions, search engine optimization should not be ignored by business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers.
If you think that your business need to build a strong online presence and create good relationships with people on the Internet to establish your brand and increase your profit, SEO could be one of the best online marketing strategies that will help you.
Victorino Q. Abrugar is a marketing strategist and business consultant from Tacloban City, Philippines. Vic has been in the online marketing industry for more than 7 years, practicing problogging, web development, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and consulting.
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Every Success is a battle well-fought
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Tell me about SEO!
It’s pretty hard to optimize a website, you need hardwork and a strategy before you go out and link, link and link without anything in mind. Doing SEO work is not for everyone but you will definitely reap great links if you know how to do it well.