What SEO Is and Is Not
SEO Made Simple: Part 2
SEO is a popularity contest
Remember your high school days, when all that mattered was being popular? That’s what I think of when I think about SEO. Similar to high school, with SEO everyone is trying to impress the big dog on campus-in this case it’s Google. Aside from making me shutter to reminisce about high school, thinking of SEO in this way helps me simplify it and understand it more easily.
Bare with me for a minute as I explain the parallel. As you know the high school version of the popularity contest went something like this…In order to become popular people (websites) often changed things about themselves (site structure) to make themselves more appealing (more visible in the search engines) to those they wanted to impress (Google). You may have known people who tried to impress others with their constantly updated wardrobe (updated content) or by prompting their friends to brag about how cool they were (building links). Of course a person couldn’t be popular or well known for everything, so they targeted certain things to be known for (keywords) like class clown or biggest party-er. The benefits of being popular allowed you to hang out with the other cool kids (rank high in search results).
The reason you only care about impressing Google (vs. the other search engines) is that Google dominates 63% of the market share, and that’s reason enough.
Now you may be thinking, why do I want, or need to, participate in this popularity contest called SEO? The difference between SEO and the typical high school popularity contest is that while the high school version didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, your business can greatly benefit from being popular on the web.
SEO is vital to your business.
Being in the top three or four spots for a given organic search result, is definitely where you want to be. 68% of search engine users click a search result within the first page of results, and 39% of search engine users believe that companies whose websites are returned among the top results are the leaders in their field. (Iprospect/Jupiter Research 2008)
The image below backs up that research by showing where users are looking the most on a search page. According to Google who recently conducted this eye-tracking study:
“The darker the pattern, the more time they spent look at that part of the page. This pattern suggest that the order in which Google returned the results was successful: most users found what they were look for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.”
The study also included a video that showed in real-time how a user scanned the various pages. The larger the dot gets, the longer the users’ eye pauses looking at the specific location.
Now that I’ve told you a little bit about what SEO is, how about some things it is NOT.
SEO is not…
- Not a project: SEO is a process with results being achieved slowly over time. You can’t do it once and then forget about it. It’s an ongoing thing.
- Not an end-all solution: SEO is only one piece of the marketing puzzle.
- Not free: in most cases, it’s suggested that you seek the help of an SEO consultant who knows how to get you the results you want to achieve, as quickly as possible. Even if you decide to tackle it yourself, it takes time and manpower resources.
- Not an after-thought: If possible, implement an SEO campaign before you launch a new website. Also don’t wait until it’s too late and your competitors have gobbled up the search results. Be proactive.
