As SEO continues to become an increasingly popular subject, business owners want to know what it is and how they can use it to grow their business. This information lets us know two things. First, many people aren’t actually aware of how to utilize SEO to grow their business, otherwise they wouldn’t be asking those questions. Second, it shows us that there’s still a great advantage to using SEO, since so many people are still trying to play catchup.

In order to understand how SEO works, you need to have a basic understanding of how a search engine works. Let’s start from the beginning—when you want to find out information using the internet, the most common action is to choose a search engine (most likely Google) and type in your question. Easy enough, right? But have you ever thought about how Google comes up with the answers, or decides which sites to show you? This process is called ranking.

Google is constantly scanning the web and creating indexes—lists of websites that contain related information by category or topic. When you type in a question, such as “What is SEO”, Google pulls from these indexes and uses a few different ways to determine which pages should come up at the top of your list. These are things like the reputation of the website (do many people interact with this site often, or have only a few people visited the site recently), the quality of the information on the site, and most importantly, the relevance of the information to your question. At the end of the day, Google wants to provide you with the sites that will give you the best answer to your question, so that you keep using it.

In order to do this, it scans for something called keywords, which is where SEO comes in. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Essentially, when using SEO, the user is gathering past data from an SEO search tool (there are many out there, some free, some requiring subscriptions) to find out what people have been looking up on the internet. These tools will gather the highest searched words or phrases, which are called keywords. These keywords are what Google scans for when trying to decide which websites shoulder rank higher than others.

So now that we know all of this, the real questions are, how do I use SEO, why should I care about this as a business owner, and how can SEO help grow my business? Let’s say the owner of a sports medicine clinic wants to find a way to improve business, not because the customers they get aren’t happy, but because they need new customers to find out they exist. A great way to do this is through optimizing your website.

To start, the business owners might run SEO analytics on what users are searching around sports medicine. After running their search, they find out that “sports medicine massage therapy” ranks as one of the highest searched keywords, and even though they do offermassage therapy at their business, their website doesn’t reflect that. To take it a step further, SEO also allows you to narrow your search by location. Their office may be advertising themselves as being located in Colonial Heights, Virginia, but it turns out, the data shows most people are searching for sports medicine doctors in the Greater Richmond Region, which still technically applies to their business. They’ve now missed two major opportunities for Google to have their website show up at the top of the list of those people who are searching for exactly what they do. When using SEO, it allows business owners to strategically choose website content that improves their Google ranking, which increases their visibility, resulting in more business.

At Pell Software, not only do our expert software engineers build custom, user-friendly software, but we also have a greater understanding of what it means to run and operate a successful business. This means being able to provide suggestions on additional website enhancements such as SEO and website optimization. Our goal is to provide a truly unique experience to our customers, that results in business growth.