What is SEO? Why is it so important? What are paid results and what are organic results? Let’s dive into the business owner SEO guide and make it clear for you.

Many times during initial consultations clients ask us about SEO. Most clients have a basic understanding of what SEO means, and they want to include it in the package of building or maintaining a website. However, very often they don’t understand what it takes to optimize a website.

For a business owner SEO is important, Why? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It simply means improving results of a web page or a website in search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo! when a user searches topics that are similar to our website, it has a tremendous impact on driving traffic or our website. As a result, it increases sales and revenue. In most cases, having a website alone will not be effective. Many companies spend a fortune on SEO campaigns. According to Search Engine Land, the SEO industry will be worth $80 billion by 2020.

Paid Results Vs. Organic Results

There are two types of categories of results that search engines display when they list results: Organic results and Paid results.

What is the difference and how can we identify them?

Paid Results

Websites owner have to purchases and they are displayed as Paid results at the top or in the sidebar of the search engine when a user looks for certain topics. Those results have a small ‘Ad’ square below the title to let users know that it is a paid result.

Search engines claim that they don’t spam the search result page with unwanted results and that if there are no paid results that match the search none will show. Paid results are becoming very popular and they are in the category called SEM, Search Engine Marketing.

What’s the advantage of paid results? Easier way up to the top of the ranking results.

Are there disadvantages? savvy users know that these results are ads and many times they ignore them and scroll down to the organic results. Website owners have to pay for the campaign each time a user clicks on the result, there are many paid advertisers and the competition is getting tougher.

Organic Results

Organic results are websites that search engines display through an ordinary search. They are below the paid results (if there are any).

What’s the advantage of organic results? Organic results are a good indicator of a successful business. Links near the top of the search results generate more clicks. Web users will consider giving you their business if it appears that your website gets a lot of hits.

Are there disadvantages? It usually takes at least 3-6 months to start seeing results. If you are about to launch your website, don’t expect it to show up high in the search results during the first few months. Google has over 200 factors for ranking websites, and it takes the time to climb up the ranks.

While you as a website owner might be able to complete some of the tasks necessary to generate favorable search results, such as writing a fresh content for your website there are other several technical factors are website performance and strategy. That’s where we can help!

The Business Owner SEO Guide will continue next week with another blog about how to make SEO work for you.