If you are new to the idea of having a website or blog for your business you probably aren’t too familiar with it but you have heard the acronym, maybe, SEO. So what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. And you want yours to be top-notch!
What is SEO? And why should you care?
SEO is what search engines like Google and Bing use to find your content and share it with people searching for your content. It is the vital information that tells the search engines the key details of your site’s purpose or role. Without a basic understanding of its purpose and implementation of it nobody is going to find your site, no matter how attractive or functional your site is set up.
Think of it as the exterior of a building, it includes the building’s address and gives people driving down the street a good idea of what happens in the building. If you are looking for light fixtures you would not drive up to a building that is advertising llama feed, right? Therefore, you need to make sure your site and your content match what your ideal customer would be searching for when they use Google!
How do you know if your site is optimized?
Well, you could spend ages learning about it or you could follow some really easy-to-implement approaches. Since you are to this point in the article, I am going to guess you would like to know some of the easy ideas. Right? Because being about to answer what is SEO isn’t as important as having good SEO!
#1 Use a tool to help analyze your content
Regardless if you have to ask what is SEO or you know it like the back of your hand, having a tool installed on your site to help analyze your content is a sound practice. We like to use Rank Math for our site. Yoast is useful, too. Both services have a free and paid version. Learn more about Rank Math and Yoast in this post (plus some more SEO details, too!).
#2 Make your content accessible
What is accessibility? Accessibility is making sure things are accessible to all users. Continuing with the building analogy, it is the ramps at the curb so that everyone can easily walk up to your building. It is the handrails in the restroom to accommodate all users. Want to learn more strategies to make your website content accessible? Read more about it in our website accessibility guide.
#3 Stay on topic
All of your site’s content needs to be related. Going back to my light fixture store analogy, if you walk into a light store you are expecting to see lights, light bulbs, resources to help you install light fixtures, customer service reps that know everything about lighting, and ALL things light fixtures. You are not expecting to see anything about llama feed, right?
Therefore, all of your content needs to stay on topic. Your website cannot be a mash-up of all the things you love in life. Search engines will not know what your content is about and will bury your website on page 127 if you do not utilize strong-SEO practices. The more content you create on your topic, the more that search engines will serve your content to people searching for it! Need ideas for content, then you should read this post about finding topics to write about!
Other SEO considerations
Now that you can answer what is SEO, let’s talk about another thing that is important for SEO. Keywords! That is what users type into the search bar of their favorite search engine. Your site needs to utilize keywords and the content you create does, too. Learn more about finding and using the right keywords in this post so you are starting on the right foot.
And want to get in the habit of creating accessible and optimized content for your site? Follow these tips in our post 5 easy steps to creating blog outlines!
Still mystified about what is SEO?
We get it, sometimes an idea needs to be talked out to make the lightbulb click. Let’s set up a time to chat to make that spark light up! Or we can just be punny together!
