Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a variety of factors both on and off your website, in order to increase the quality and volume of traffic coming organically to your website from search engines. We know, that’s a bit of a mouthful. Basically, the idea is to influence how your website is perceived by search engines so that they will rank your website’s pages higher in their results, leading to more of your intended audience finding you. With SEO, we are specifically focusing on improving your site’s visibility within the organic (non-paid) search results. This is beneficial for several reasons, most especially cost. Unlike paid traffic (from pay-per-click advertising or search engine marketing), organic traffic is basically free.

Some examples of the factors we optimize are your website’s structure, the content on your site, your site’s loading speed, links on other websites which point back to your website, etc. While there are “tricks” to obtain fast results, search engines frown upon this and notoriously penalize websites for it. It’s best to think of SEO as a long-term strategy and focus on giving the search engines—and your audience—what they really want: genuinely relevant, quality content. This does take more time and skill, but the results are lasting and ultimately, you’ll get what you really want: more customers for less.

None of this is to say that you should focus only on organic results. Ideally, you want to maximize your visibility, which means appearing in both the organic and paid results simultaneously.