Many times, we are asked: “How much do you charge for SEO?” or “How much does SEO cost?”. The problem with these questions is, that it’s kind of like asking a dentist “how much is dental treatment”. The dentist could probably give you an hourly rate but could not really answer your question because there is no catalog item “dental treatment”. Is it an extraction? A filling? An implant? Well, you get the point. Keep reading and we’ll help you to understand SEO a little better.
We decided to create a handy guide that explains what SEO is, why SEO is important, how to do SEO yourself and how we can help you with it. Excited? Let’s do this!
Understand SEO as a continuous process
Imagine the owner of a large shopping mall. What does his success depend on? Visitors! How does he ensure that visitors are satisfied and returning to his mall? Make sure they find the shops and products they are looking for!
It is the same with Google or Bing. In our example these search engines are the shopping mall, your website is the shop or product, and the visitors, well they are the visitors.
Offer quality. Stand out!
Based on the example, it should be easy to understand that the top priority for a search engine is to give a visitor exactly what he or she is looking for – because otherwise people would leave – or worse, not even come in the first place… So, in order to please Google, you have to make sure that you show visitors that YOUR website provides the right content and products. However, since there are so many websites out there, it is not enough just to offer the right product, it’s also about the looks and feels. You need to make sure that you stand out (remember our mall example – products that stand out, sell better).
For your website, you achieve this through good website design, great content and other smaller tweaks that we will elaborate on throughout this SEO-guide. Remember, the better you rank on each of these variables, the more traffic your website will generate. The more traffic your website generates, the more favorable Google will treat your website in its search results. Therefore, search engine optimization is all about tweaking your website and content to perfection to increase organic reach to attract the right visitors. You want them to stay on your site as long as possible.
Or to put it in the words of the Google Search Quality team: SEO is “about making small modifications to parts of your website [that] could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.”
Be customer-centric!
As someone who runs a company, a blog, or an e-commerce shop, you always have to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Would they like the product presentation in such a way? Do they understand the content I publish? Is the website easy to navigate? Does the website load fast enough? When doing search engine optimization, it is questions like these that should guide you on your quest to rank on Google’s first search result page!
Next up. How do Search Engines work?
