In Marketing, having that first spot has always been the best way to land new customers. Many years ago, the best way to do that was to name your business with many “As” to get the first spot in the yellow pages. If you look up AAA right now, you will see many businesses that once enjoyed a benefit that today is obsolete.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and it is the process of optimizing a website to make it rank higher in the different search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many others, without having to name your business with a “AAA” at the beginning.
There are many moving parts to an SEO campaign. Keyword research, content creation, backlinks, internal links, site speed, to name a few. But I believe that the single most important part of a good SEO campaign is to provide value. Give something to your users that keeps them coming back to your website, and not for just half a minute, but for along period of time. This is why Amazon has such a good ranking in every search engine. People spend hours shopping in Amazon. Remember, that first spot is nothing if none of your users see value.
SEO vs SEM
SEM stands for “Search Engine Marketing”, in other words, running ads to get that first spot. The question is usually: Why would someone run ads if SEO is free? Because SEO takes time, in some cases, more than a year to see the results. In some industries it might seem impossible to even get to that first page, but with patience and diligence you will rank. The frustrating part is putting months and months of work seeing minimal variations in the results. It gets better, I promise.
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