What is SEO?
You’ve probably received a ton of marketing calls from people offering you SEO services to “get your website to rank #1 in Google!” Before hanging up you probably uttered, “What the heck is SEO??” SEO is short for “search engine optimization.’ SEO is a fancy way to describe the process of designing and populating websites in a way that makes search engines find and favor them. When you perform a search – lets say for ‘clothing stores’ – the search engine will show you a listing of clothing stores. This results list, known as the ‘search engine results page’ (SERP), is populated based on a number of factors including a website’s content relevance, locations of the business and user, authority of the website, and other factors (that change constantly).Why you should care about SEO
Search engines have little robots called ‘spiders’ that crawl websites to determine if the content is actually valuable for users. Remember, search engines are incentivized to provide useful information to their end users. If they don’t, users will stop using their search platform to find “bounce house rentals in Detroit” or “cheap widget makers in Michigan,” and the search engine ultimately loses money. So, the name of the game for you is to make your website useful. The more useful it is for the end user, the more love you get from search engines. And the more love you get from search engines, the more you show up in searches. And the more you show up in searches, the more customers come to you. Get it? Good.What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The difference between search engine optimization and search engine marketing is slight. SEO, as stated previously, is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” SEM stands for “search engine marketing.” Search engine marketing deals almost exclusively in pay-per-click (PPC) media efforts and paid online advertisements (think Google AdWords), while SEO focuses primarily on organic (unpaid) search results. Usually people working in the area of search engine optimization will focus on the structure, word choice, and overall format of a website to influence search ranking. This process is often referred to as “on-page optimization.” The two areas are closely related and people often think of SEM as a branch of SEO.
