What Is SEO? Do I Need It?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The easiest way to explain what SEO does for your website is to say: SEO is what helps your website get to the first page of Google (or Yahoo, Bing, etc.) for keywords that describe your business best. It is what makes your website appear on the first page “organically” – as in “not a paid advertisement”
We will refer the term “Search Engines” by “Google” for ease of understanding simply because Google is really the main search engine people use now.
Example: If you are a Physical Therapist in New Orleans:
Generally you will want your website to be on the first page of Google (or other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing) when someone searches terms such as “Physical Therapy New Orleans” “New Orleans Physical Therapy”.
If your website is not on the first page or is not climbing to the first page of Google Searches for the keywords you want – you will likely need multiple things such as optimizing Social Media, Website Content, Pictures, and multiple other things. This is where SEO becomes useful. SEO can become very tedious and complicated, which is why it has become an actual JOB.
Google never intended SEO to exist. All they wanted was for the best, most relevant websites to come up first in their search engine. However, when the entire world wants to be on the top of the first page of Google, it became a necessity that people NEEDED to grow their business. This is why SEO exists now. People pay SEO’s(Search Engine Optimizers) to start doing all the “tricks”(and believe me there are a lot of them) to get their website ranking better. It’s become a necessity if your website isn’t ranking on the first page for terms you’re looking for.
So do you need SEO? If your website is not ranking on the first page of Google for keywords your business NEEDS to rank for (and we’re not talking about Google Adwords – Paid Ads), then it is very likely you will need SEO work.
Now this is just a very simple way to explain SEO. It gets very tedious, in depth, and complicated to try and rank “organically” which is why most businesses don’t want to deal with it. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.