SEO is essential to your business

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This article was first published by iowabusinessjournals.com

Let's say you operate a dental practice in Clive named “Clean Teeth.” You have a decent number of clients but you have the capacity to take on many more. The first moves are always the same: circulating ads in print and potentially local radio or TV. Next comes social media with a Facebook page and ads. The problem is advertising is great for market awareness but doesn't always convert to sales and social media is a bottomless ocean your business might drown in unless you are a particularly savvy poster. To take your fate into your own hands you need a tool that generates continual visibility with little work from you. This is the perfect situation to employ Search Engine Optimization.

Best known as SEO, search engine optimization takes your businesses website and tailors it so sticks out to search engines. Without SEO in place a customer searching the web for a dentist in Clive may completely miss Clean Teeth. Falling through the cracks of a search engine is easy to do if your company doesn't have the most generic name imaginable; e.g. Clive Dentist Office.

In essence SEO is a background website programming tool that takes all the boring elements of the web and makes them homing beacons to search engine algorithms. Keywords, linkbacks, analytics tracking, RSS feed population and monitoring- all these tools and more are essential to SEO and if you work with the right venders then you barely need to know what they mean.

Search engine optimization is an industry onto itself with consultants commanding heavy fees. Thankfully your initial steps into the market can be free with tools like Google constellation of SEO tools; Analytics, PageSpeed, and Keyword Planner scan your site for best keywords and SEO practices after implementing a simple tracking link on your site. Beyond Google there loads of SEO tools with many website platforms already offering analytic functionality waiting to be used. In many cases even the tech illiterate can watch a two minute tutorial, click three or four links, and discover the most popular keywords consumers use to discover your business’s online presence.

How will lead to more clients? Well proper SEO will push your business to the top of web searches for a plethora of word combinations, and if suddenly Clean Teeth becomes the number one search result for “Clive Dentist” you can guarantee you'll be scrubbing dozens of new mouths in no time.



Patrick Boberg is a central Iowa creative media specialist. For more tech insights, follow him on Twitter @PatBoBomb

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