When you’re selling small business SEO services to someone it can be easy if they can for a basic answer to the question: “What is SEO?” However, if your prospect has no idea how to answer this question, things can become more challenging. This shouldn’t dissuade you from helping this business achieve a first-page ranking. You simply must learn a better way to effectively explain what you’re selling.
Explaining SEO for Small Businesses
To begin with it’s important that your client understand that SEO is short for “search engine optimization.” From there you must explain to them that this is the process of setting up a website, along with its digital marketing and online accounts, so that the website will shop up higher in the online search results. While most people will take this as merely meaning getting listed at the top of Google, there’s much more to it than this.
You also want to make sure that everyone who sees you online (regardless of where they see you online) know that you’re able to provide them with exactly what they’re searching for. This is why there’s also local SEO today, which means telling search engines where you’re located so that they know it’s relevant to show to people who are searching for your business in a specific service area.
Explaining how SEO Works to Those who Don’t Know
There are two ways in which websites must be optimized for SEO today:
- On-site SEO includes those things you can do on your website to make sure that it’s set up to tell the search engines exactly who you are and what you have to offer. Here you must make sure that your site structure makes sense and is easy to navigate; your pages load quickly; and your content has relevant keywords included within it. These things are important because Google will “crawl” through your website looking for information. As such, you must always also keep it up to date. Doing these things will tell the search engine that you’re relevant enough to include in a search.
- Off-site SEO is anything that happens outside of your website but that helps improve how you rank in the search engines. This form of small business SEO looks at how popular your website is, how relevant it is to the terms that are being searched for, how authoritative it is, and what reviews have to say about it. It’s important to understand here that Google reviews heavily affect your local search engine rankings. Websites linking back to yours is also important because it shows that you’re authoritative and trustworthy in your niche.
Essentially, the main difference between on-site and off-site SEO for small business is that what you do with your website will help lay a foundation that the search engines will use when calculating their results. On the other hand, what you do off-site will help improve upon your internet presence’s quality.
Conclusion
Answering the question, “What is SEO?” isn’t easy when someone has no idea what you’re talking about. It can be even more difficult for you if you’ve been working on SEO for small businesses for so long that it comes almost automatically to you anymore. Nevertheless, this is vital information for you to share with your clients and prospects. When you use their language and build on their knowledge, they’ll have a better understanding of what you’re talking about here. If your small business SEO company isn’t doing this for you, reach out to the professionals at the Local SEO Tampa Company because they will make sure you understand everything before any work is done.