Most people associate the word “organic” with fruits and vegetables. Well I’m here to relate it to something entirely different, the internet. Specifically search engine optimization (SEO for short). But before your eyes start glazing over and I loose you, I want to explain what SEO is, how it works and most importantly why it is imperative to your business. To get technical, SEO by definition is the method of improving the quantity and/or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. SEO has become increasingly important due to the popularity of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine usage. I mean if you ask anyone, I’m sure they Google on a daily bases things, places or if going on a first date, maybe a prescreen search of a person (oh come on admit it!)
Paid SEO
But one may wonder how do search engines pick the top spots for what comes up when something is searched? Well to begin, there are two types of SEO, paid and organic. Paid SEO is when a company pays Google, Yahoo or Bing to be the top listed when someone searches a word pertaining to their business. For example, when you Google “boots” two paid advertisements come up at the top of the page and are highlighted in yellow. You also have paid advertisements listed on the far right column of the page. Those boot businesses are paying Google to be on the first page and the company is usually charged on a per click bases by Google for being able to advertise on the first page of a search. However, the “meat” of the content which is listed in white on the left hand side are non-paid or organic SEO. That means the little spiders that read through the content of every website in the internet universe picked these sites as the best pertaining to the keyword “boots” and they were not paid for. So if little spiders read through everyone’s website to pick the best ones and it’s free, why would you want to pay to come up on the top of a search? Well in using organic SEO, there are specific things your site has to contain in order to be picked out by the spiders as the top website for certain keywords. If you don’t understand or know what the spiders are looking for it is easy for them to skip over your website or not pick up on the keywords you were intending. It is also challenging (but not impossible) to compete with all of the thousands of websites on boots for yours to come up on top, unless you know how many keywords to use, where to put them and how to effectively use them.
Organic SEO
Now let's go back to the boots example. In order to organically SEO, you have to list boots enough on your site to be spotted by the spiders but not too often to where they think it's spam. Over the years, the spiders have gotten smarter and are now able to spot trickery. A few years ago companies picked up on the organic keys to SEO success and were hiding keywords underneath the wallpaper of a site. This meant that you and I couldn’t see them but the spiders could which in turn boosted the company to the top of search engines. Now, if you do that, those spiders will detect that as spam. You will then move so far down the search engines rankings you might as well call it quits towards being found by an actual person, unless that person prefers looking at page 956,701 of a search.
So why am I telling you all this? Well the reason organic SEO is more important to your business than paid SEO is because 4 out of 5 people report they never click on a paid search engine site! So not only would your business be wasting money for paid per click SEO but most people won’t click on it anyway. Look, you know and I know what it looks like when you search for something and it is a paid link. In fact, 80% of search engine users report clicking on an organic listing rather than a paid listing.
Now this is where I shamelessly plug my company :) Marketing Mix Studio offers ORGANIC Search Engine Optimization! So if you are a small business and need notoriety, and who doesn’t need that, contact our team and we can help boost you to the top of those search engines, organically!
-Vanessa
Now let's go back to the boots example. In order to organically SEO, you have to list boots enough on your site to be spotted by the spiders but not too often to where they think it's spam. Over the years, the spiders have gotten smarter and are now able to spot trickery. A few years ago companies picked up on the organic keys to SEO success and were hiding keywords underneath the wallpaper of a site. This meant that you and I couldn’t see them but the spiders could which in turn boosted the company to the top of search engines. Now, if you do that, those spiders will detect that as spam. You will then move so far down the search engines rankings you might as well call it quits towards being found by an actual person, unless that person prefers looking at page 956,701 of a search.
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