I need to write brief intro to SEO for a client- and would love your input. What am I leaving out? What am I assuming they understand? Am I being too patronizing?
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of working with a website to help people searching for a particular product or service find a website that offers a particular product or service. To do this we need to make sure the search engines understand what a website is about. We do this in a couple different ways:
- Change the layout of the website. We need to make sure that the search engines can visit and read a website (aka “crawl” the website). The search engine has a program (called a “spider”) that reads web sites. Just because a human can get to a page on a website, doesn’t mean the spider can. We need to make sure the spider can visit every page on the website we want it to see.
- Change the content of the website. Like any good marketing we need to use the words that our audience uses to describe our services- which might be different than the words people in the industry use. Search engines take text input and try to find the best website that is described by that text. This is why it is important to have the same text on a website that people give the search engines. These phrases can also be called, “keywords.”
- Change the way other websites refer to your website. There are many pages that have the same keywords on a page- so how do the search engines decide which one should be ranked before the other in the search results? They consider what other websites say about the webpage. They do this through links to websites. The links tell the search engines which pages are the most authoritative (because they have the most links from the best websites) but also a little about what the page is about (by what the clickable text – aka “anchor text” – says).
How Can You Measure SEO?
We know these efforts are having a positive effect because we see it in the data from “non-branded natural search.” These are visits from search engines from people who do not necessarily know the brand name of the company offering the services. We exclude searches from brand-related keywords because we cannot control the number of people who have heard about a brand name. Instead we want to take credit from people searching for products having never heard about our clients’ brand name.
We measure the success of our SEO efforts by keeping track of…
- Ranking of Keywords in Search Results. This is a common way of measuring SEO efforts. Unfortunately it is very ineffective. Besides the fact that there are an infinite number of keyword possibilities that a website could rank for there is no way to accurately and consistently measure search engine rankings (Google changes results based on personal browsing preferences, geo-location, and even depending upon which server farm a search result comes from). Besides, just because a website ranks for a term does not mean that anyone will click on the listing or that people are even searching for that particular term.
- Visits from Non-Branded Natural Search. Visits are a good way of averaging the ranking of a website (the higher the ranking, the more visits from non-branded natural search). Although we cannot keep track of the ranking of every search term, we can measure every visit from non-branded natural search. At the end of the day, however, business websites don’t typically make money just because someone visited- which is the point, isn’t it?
- Leads resulting from Non-Branded Natural Search Visits. Leads (or sales, if appropriate) lead more directly to revenue than any other factor we can measure on a website. Additionally, if we know that a particular keyword generates leads this also helps us learn where we should put our effort into increasing ranking (and thereby visits) from this keyword.
