Consider life before the internet. If you needed a plumber, you might just flip open the yellow pages to the plumbing section and select a few possibilities that are close by. Nowadays, you are much more likely to toss aside those bulky phonebooks and google it instead. This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, can help you.
On the internet, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are the phonebooks. Instead of flipping to the plumbing section, you would just search for “plumbers,” or even more likely “plumbers in Chicago” – or wherever your location might be.
In just a microsecond, the search engine will produce a page of results. These results are not random. Rather, they are the product of a complex algorithm – with many variables – that the search engine performs in order to bring you the most useful results. In short, SEO is learning how the search engines work, understanding the variables involved, and then reacting appropriately so as to ensure the highest search ranking possible.
Now, you might be thinking, “so what if I’m ranked high or not? Customers will find me eventually. After all, I have a website.” Unfortunately, the internet just doesn’t work like that. A study of nearly 10 million searches, conducted in 2006, noted that 89.82% of searches resulted in the user clicking a link on page one. Only the remaining 10.18% ever made it to page two and beyond.
By and large, internet users are a terribly impatient group of people. You cannot count on them to stumble upon your site by chance. You must take measures to get your search rankings as high as possible. There are people out there searching for what you provide and they will choose one of your higher ranked competitors long before they find your site.