What is SEO and how it will help your business get noticed
It’s time! We’re excited to share the first installment in our social media marketing glossary series. For those of you who missed our thrilling glossary intro, we’re here to help you become seriously savvy on basic terms of social media and marketing.
Ready for your first lesson, grasshoppers?
Let’s start with one of the biggest and most important terms out there: SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
Simply put, it means doing something to get your content or website to rank higher on Google.
Rank higher? Do we get a medal or a cookie or something?
Ranking is essentially how close to the top of the page your website is when people search for you in a web browser. Obviously, the higher the better. People often lose patience after flipping through one or two pages.
Here’s a real-world example:
Say you want, nay need to search for the old 80s movie called Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna. You can’t recall a plot point where someone gets sawed in half as a magician’s assistant, and life can’t move on until you figure out who it was. So you type in “Desperately Seeking Susan” in the Google search bar.
Presto, and thank you Google! Results pop up. There are the usual suspects at the top of the page, like Wikipedia and IMDB. Scroll down further, and you’ll see related articles and reviews. How far did you scroll down? Did what you were looking for even make it on the first page of results?
And there’s the point, friends. When searching for something, 75% of users don’t click forward to the next page. That’s why it is so important to get your content high on the list. How do you do it? Getting your content high on the list comes from good SEO.
How does SEO work?
When writing content, you can place keywords or phrases that have a high ranking (aka people search for them a lot) into the copy. For example, “easy dinner recipes” is a high-ranking keyphrase. When you write a blog about your famous veggie lasagna, be sure to include the phrase “easy dinner recipes” throughout the copy a few times.
This helps your blog or article to rank higher on the page of search results, because it contains words that people are searching for commonly. Voila! You’re using SEO.
Wait, why is SEO important?
SEO draws traffic to your business and increases your brand’s visibility. It engages with potential clients and builds awareness of your brand and products. When done right, it can increase not just the quantity but the quality of the viewers and bring you the right potential clients.
Also? Two words: Free Advertising.
Don’t overstuff
Tempted to overload your next blog article with keywords in order to up your ranking? Listen carefully. *Burp. That’s the sound of overstuffed content, and it isn’t pretty. Why? Well, first of all, most readers can spot keyword or phrase repetition and it’s a big turnoff. As in, there’s nothing worse about reading an article about the dog version of Squid Game on Tiktok and then reading the phrase “K-9 Squid Game” 14 times. Like most things in life, there can be too much of a good thing. SEO is no different. Use your keywords and phrases selectively for best results.
The best advice we can give here is to always, always write for your audience and not the search engines.
The Googles of the world will reward you if your content is authentic and of value to the reader. Be strategic in your use of keywords or keyphrases and you’ll see your ranking improve in no time.
Ready for more Social Media and Marketing terms?
If you found our little lesson on SEO helpful, stay tuned for the next one in our series. And guess what? If you want to take it a step further, Blue Flamingo offers SEO services. Contact us to help your brand get noticed!
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