Welcome! Search Engine Academy offers you SEO information, perspectives and on occasion, rants about search engine optimization (SEO).

Despite the fact that the internet has been around since the early 1990’s and SEO was thought of and implemented right then as well, I am still surprised to this day to hear someone ask me, “What can SEO do for my business?”

OK, since you asked, let’s just hit upon some of the bigger reasons why your business – specifically your website – needs SEO.

It’s cost effective – by applying SEO to your site, you can rank high in search results without doing advertising. It’s possible. It may take awhile, but if you choose the right keywords, create interesting, useful content and publish a website that’s easy to use, you can get your money’s worth out of SEO because you’ll attract more visitors and they’ll stay longer on your website. Plus, they’ll buy your products and services, which is what all this is about, right?

It’s not hard to do – usually. If you don’t want to dive into schema.org or Google authorship, you can master the SEO processes and techniques that you’ll use time and time again. Basically, you’ll find the right keywords, create good content, upload the page, view and analyze the results, and make adjustments. You’ll do this time and time and time again. SEO is not a one-shot deal. Sorry.

It can beat your competition – if your competitors are lazy and too cheap to do SEO, you’ll beat them out in search results, visitors and sales. It really will happen. Sadly, most, if not all of your competitors are also hip to SEO, which then makes SEO a sort of nuclear arms race – you do something, they do something, you do something else, and so on and so on.

It can establish you and your site as the authority, or “go-to” site – do enough SEO and do it right, and you could find your website and you becoming the authority in your industry. By creating useful, informative, timely content, implementing a sane linking strategy and staying highly visible, you can be king poop of doo-doo mountain.

It complements your social media strategy or vice versa – social media and SEO are different, but they need each other. Just like peanut butter and jelly are totally awesome together, but only so-so alone, so it is with social media and SEO. Did you know the search engines pay attention to social media signals? You do now.

From doing “organic” SEO, or non-pay-per-click search engine optimization, you may move into more sophisticated marketing strategies such as online advertising on other sites. It’s a natural stepping stone.

Whether you do it yourself, hire a dedicated resource or contract it out, know how and why SEO can boost your business. If you’re not already doing it, we can certainly teach you, help you devise and implement an SEO strategy and mentor you for six months. Just holla!

Until next time, please keep it between the ditches!

All the best to you,