SEO Demystified: Enhance Your Business's Online Presence

Kristina Stubblefield: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another insightful episode of WedPro Business Solutions. I'm your host, Kristina Stubblefield. Today, I'm going to be diving into a topic that often seems complex, but it is crucial for your business. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, as you've probably heard it called. Now, I encourage you to stay with me because I'm really going to break down what it is, why it's important, and I'm even going to touch on how you can leverage it to boost your online visibility.

Let's start with SEO. What is it? It is the practice of enhancing a website to improve its visibility when people search for your products or services related to your business on search engines like Google. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and [00:01:00] attract perspective.

Customers to your business. Now, I know this is going to be a lot to unpack, but I think it's really important for you to know why is SEO so important? The digital age has transformed how consumers find and interact with businesses. Today, the majority of purchasing decisions start with an online search.

If your website isn't showing up in those search results, You're missing out on a significant amount of potential business. With SEO, you can ensure your business is found when customers are searching for what you offer. Let's try to understand how SEO works. As I said, it can seem complex. I'm going to break it down.

Search engines, like Google, use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information [00:02:00] about those pages, and putting them in an index. Algorithms then analyze pages in the index, considering hundreds of ranking factors to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. Okay, now that you've heard the technical breakdown of how this works, let me explain it like this. Imagine you're a librarian, but instead of a local library.

You're in charge of the world's largest library with endless rows of books. This represents the vast internet. Your challenge is to help people find the exact book they need. Searching billions of others. Here's where bots from search engines like Google come into play. Think of these bots as incredibly efficient

librarians. [00:03:00] They sift through every book or website on the internet, reading and categorizing them to understand what each one is about. This process of visiting and categorizing websites is known as crawling and indexing. Now, when someone comes to you, or in this case, makes a You need to suggest the most relevant and useful books or websites.

But with so many options, how do you choose which ones to recommend? That's where algorithms come into play. Algorithms are like a set of rules or criteria you use to judge which books are the best fit for the person's request. These rules may consider how often the book is referred to by other books.

This is what we call backlinks. If the book's title [00:04:00] and content match what the person is looking for, We call that keywords. How current the information is, we know this as freshness or keeping your content fresh. And many more. When you type in a request or a query into Google, it's like asking that super efficient librarian for the best books on a specific topic.

The librarian, or the Google algorithm, then provides a list of the most relevant, trustworthy, and informative books or websites based on the rules it has. Okay, now you can take a breath. That is how SEO works. Now that's at a super high level, but I just wanted to break it down in a better terminology through this example.

I want you to understand this information so that you can optimize so that your [00:05:00] website or web pages appear at the top of search results, giving you a better chance for them to be visited more. Okay, I'm going to keep going because an essential aspect of SEO is using the right keywords. Keywords are the words and phrases that customers use to find online content.

By incorporating these keywords into your website content, you can improve your chances of appearing in relevant searches for many businesses, especially small businesses, local SEO is crucial. This involves optimizing your website to attract traffic from local searches. This becomes especially important when you consider that near me. You know how people type in the search, find blank near [00:06:00] me. And those have really increased over the past few years.

Now, SEO isn't just about pleasing search engines. It's also about providing a positive user experience. A well optimized site is user friendly, easy to navigate, and provides valuable content, all of which contribute to a better user experience. Thankfully, You don't have to navigate SEO alone. There are numerous tools and resources available, some of which are even free, to help you understand and improve your SEO.

Two of the tools that I would like to share with you are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Those two can provide valuable insights into your website's performance. I know that this has been a lot of information to really take in, but I think it's so [00:07:00] important for you to have an understanding of how something works and why it's important, especially when you talk about search engine optimization and online presence.

These two intersect more than people realize. And so many people, their eyes glaze over when they hear that SEO term, or when someone starts to say search engine optimization. But that's a problem, because when you start to understand the importance of it, And you then open your mind up to trying to understand how it works.

What are the pieces to the SEO puzzle? You can then take small steps to increasing how you come up in search results. Because I'm here to tell you. The smallest [00:08:00] step in a forward direction when it comes to SEO can make a huge impact by using keywords. In your blog post that you put on your website by using keywords on your home page, on your services page, your about page, all of those help increase your website ranking and the higher you rank.

The better or the more times I should say that your website will appear in search results. As I wrap up this episode, I hope that I've helped demystify SEO for you and your business. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires time and consistent But the payoff in terms of increased visibility, more website traffic, and ultimately more customers is [00:09:00] well worth it.

I hope that you found this explanation and information helpful for your business. If you're not already part of my free Facebook group, I encourage you to join WedPro Business Community. We continue the conversation about this episode as well as others. I also share additional strategies, tips, and software that I recommend throughout the week. You can find all of that inside the group.

And remember, if you need help coming up with a strategy for your business, you can always schedule a free consultation with me to find out if we're the right fit to work together as a collaboration for your business, just visit WedProSolutions.com until next time. Keep working on your business and take care.