I’m going to be breaking down SEO today for business professionals who might not specialize in marketing and have a harder time tying KPIs at the company level to SEO efforts.

I will break down SEO into its components and make this a user-friendly guide on how to improve your SEO and what goes into SEO as a whole.

If you don’t have time to learn SEO consider outsourcing to a trusted partner like Stories with Substance or 829 LLC. Stories with Substance’s onboarding process is very easy, you can schedule a call today to get started.

• 68% of online experience begin with search
• 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search
• 93% of global traffic comes from google search, google images and google maps

In general the reason why SEO is so effective is because when people search for keywords they are likely to be in a particular part of the sales funnel. Whether that’s consideration or awareness, you can find certain search terms that align with those parts of the sales funnel and then customize pages or blogs to that particular part of the funnel and move users along in a more strategic way.

Let’s compare SEO to other marketing efforts like billboards. With billboards you’d have lots of different kinds of people driving or walking on by your promotion and looking at the billboard.

With billboards you pay according to the amount of traffic passing the sign.

If the billboard is on a highway you’d have a variety of people passing your promotion- some people may be commuting to work, some people enroute to the airport to go on vacation, etc. Every company has an ideal audience, and with such a variety of people who use the highway, it’s unlikely most of those who see your promotion would match that demographic.

Even if you have a more generalized audience, marketing is getting more personalized. With custom and niche offerings on streaming services, customers have a growing affinity for targeted messaging. With a billboard, you only have one chance to say your message- you can’t customize what the billboard says to match each individual target demographic driving on the highway (although this is coming with smart car windows in the coming years).

In addition to this, even if each driver was in your demographic, they are going to be in various parts of the sales funnel. For example, If you’re promoting bike rentals for vacationers you’ll end up promoting your message not only to the people going on vacation who might rent those bikes but also people who are commuting to work. So you’re showing one message to people in various parts of the sales funnel.

Essentially with other marketing efforts there is no guarantee in the demographic who will see your ad and what part of the sales funnel they will be in. This severely limits the customization of messaging discussed that is so important today.

With SEO and Google Search you’re able to show specific messages on pages that are customized to demographics and where users are in the sales funnel. In addition, others outside of your target demographic won’t see your ad, so you won’t have to pay as much hypothetically.

The goal for SEO is generally to get on page one for a search term relevant for your target audience. 

Traditionally we think about SEO keywords. We may think that jamming in keywords on your webpage will increase your SEO.

But if we actually break down what goes into Google’s algorithm for SEO, SEO actually has a lot more to do with domain and page authority. They in total represent about 40% of how SEO is calculated and are essentially backlinks. 

Authority represents other web pages linking to your domain and individual pages. Any other websites or domains that are linking to your domain- that increases your domain authority. And the higher domain authority of the linking websites, the more that will increase your domain authority.

For example, a little local newspaper backlinking your website will not increase your domain authority as much as say Wikipedia backlinking to your website. Wikipedia has a domain authority about 92. Maybe local papers would have a 30 domain authority score. So you want not only quantity of links but also quality.

For authority, it’s really important to have press coverage. If CNN features your business that’s a huge win to get a backlink. 

Some other components to note are page level key words. Most page 1 results mention the key word exactly 1 to 3 times. Google has gotten smart- they don’t like keyword stuffing anymore. Be sure to focus on relevancy and use synonyms.

We get it- you have a lot on your plate. If you don’t have time to learn SEO consider outsourcing to a trusted partner like Stories with Substance or  829 LLC. Stories with Substance’s onboarding process is very easy, you can  schedule a call today.

Written by Sarah Vancini

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