Yesterday I spend an amazing day at Hick Tech – a technology conference here in Owen Sound. Starting at 7:30 am and finishing at 6:30 pm, I was exhausted by the end of the day.
But I learned a ton, particularly in the workshop on SEO by Yahoo! Canada’s Darryl Peddle.Darryl made SEO sound simple. Today I’ll share his five reasons you need to learn about SEO.
1. SEO = More Traffic
Putting search engine optimization (SEO) to good use on your site will increase your ranking in search engines leading to an increase in traffic. Well duh!
2. Good SEO = Better Traffic
The better you are at SEO, the better quality of traffic you have. Particularly if you can optimize your site for long tail searches your customers and prospects are actually using.
What’s a long tail search? A search of a very specific keyword or phrase. Not as many people are searching these keywords, but the people who do will be highly targeted. For example: the long tail search of the phrase “cheap flowers for Mother’s Day” is much more effective for a flower shop than optimizing for “flowers”.
First of all, the competition is much higher – more people are using that word in their website. Second, the keyword “flowers” may also get gardeners, poetry lovers wanting poems about flowers, and students researching a paper on the reproductive cycle of a flower.
3. Better SEO = Increased Sales
All selling is a numbers game. More traffic and better quality traffic will always lead to more sales, even if the copy on your site is less than stellar. You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t want more sales.
4. Good SEO Protects You
Nobody’s perfect and nobody can please everyone all the time. It could be you dropped the ball on customer service or it could be the customer hates the colour of your eyes. It doesn’t matter why, but occasionally anyone can get a client who has a hate-on for them.
The crazed ex-customer may spend an inordinate amount of time on the web bashing you. If you aren’t paying attention to SEO around your name, you could have potential customers doing a Google search and discovering the first five listings are for www.yourcompanysucks.com.
5. Good SEO Leads to a Snowball Effect
If you score in the top three of the search engines, you’ll be seen as an expert. Bloggers and journalists will start calling you and writing about you – they don’t have time to look lower on the list. The just want the best people they can get to quickly. If you’re on the top of the list, that’s you.
The more people are writing about you, and linking to your site, the better search engine ranking you have. The better search engine ranking you have, the more people will write about you …
Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing more of what I learned about SEO.
Andrea J. Stenberg
