Search engine optimisation is a technical achievement over anything else. Ask any marketing major and it is more than likely that he will say that marketing is more of an art than a science. While that statement might sound good on a dinner date, it does not help you as a businessman looking to get the best bang for your buck. So, can SEO benefit your business? Is it worth putting in the time and effort into something that you probably do not fully understand?
What can SEO do for you?
SEO can help you improve your blog’s search result rankings. What this means is that a properly optimised website will appear higher up in the search results page than one that has not been optimised for search engines. Now there are a plethora of caveats to mention here, the least of which is for SEO to be really effective, you need to spend a significant amount of time and resources in developing the proper strategy. Just reading the free articles on SEO off the internet will show you results but for the very best you will have to shell out some cash.
What exactly does SEO entail?
Whether you are doing SEO marketing for dentists or photographers, the basic fundamentals do not change. Figuring out the proper keywords that will lead people to your website is the first step. Now this is where you can spend a ton of resources to eke out an edge over your competitors. You can use technical terms or long phrases, but the closer your keywords to what people actually search for, the better your chances of being featured at the very top of the results page.
Niche businesses and services have the obvious edge here; they are already quite specialised so if someone is searching using those terms, it is more than likely that they are probably interested in the services you provide. Generalised terms like “travel” are too broad to be of any use, so hoteliers are probably better served by not having “travel” as a keyword; “accommodation” or “budgets friendly” are better choices.
It is not just keywords that you have to worry about. There are a number of other factors that have a significant impact on how well your SEO strategy performs. Keywords might be an important parameter but it is not the only parameter. You can make your SEO strategy as simple or as sophisticated as you like. But remember that your expenses will scale accordingly.
Are there any benefits to all this?
Yes. If you use your website to sell your products and services then SEO will definitely help you out. SEO, unlike advertising or other forms of marketing, does not directly cost you money. And of course, you can do your own SEO if you are up to the task. But any form of SEO will benefit your web traffic. There is a law of diminishing returns at work here, so it is best if you spend a modest amount of resources on your SEO strategy, mostly on the analytics part of it. However, some SEO is certainly better than no SEO at all.
