SEO explained for business owners with no computer skills

Difficulty: Beginner

You have no idea what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is and you may have either never heard of it or have only recently discovered its existence. You may have a website for your business and have decided you want more people to visit it.

SEO will help with this process.
So let's break down SEO step by step because whilst you may own a computer, use Google or even run a business, this doesn’t automatically mean you have some magically assumed knowledge of SEO...

Search: Search is the act of seeking something out that you wish to know more about and in this instance using the internet to do so.
Engine: The engine is what you are using to search the internet and this is more often than not, going to be Google. The other “engine” you may have heard of is called Bing, but isn’t used nearly as much as Google.
Optimisation: Optimising in this instance is aiming to optimise and increase how much your website is seen by people or potential customers when they search for something related to your website.

OK so combining these three elements we can now suggest that SEO is about optimising your website to drive customers searching with the search engine Google, to said website. However, this also involves a multitude of factors like keywords, backlinks and Google’s secret “algorithm” but again we’ll keep it simple.

Keywords: are the terms or phrases that make up what somebody has searched and tells Google what websites to display. For example if someone searches “best pizza in Australia”, Google can tell from the keywords used which are the best websites to display relating to pizza in Australia. So it stands to reason that having keywords relevant to your product or service scattered throughout your website, will give your website a better chance of being seen by a potential customer searching for the product or service you offer. Your keywords must work in tandem with your website.

Backlinks: So bear with me; a backlink is when two websites connect or ‘link’ to one another. This is achieved by one website providing the other websites link (the www thing) in their website. All you need to know about backlinks is that the better quality the website and the connection with said website, the better this is for you.

Google's Algorithm: Google’s very secretive algorithm is basically how they find the best search results for what is searched. So the goal is obviously designing a website that fits in well with Google’s algorithm.

SO I have bored you with some simplified definitions, I will now liven things up with a metaphor.

Your website is the destination. Keywords are the road signs. Backlinks are the road surface. Google’s algorithm are the roads to the destination. The customer is driving the car.

Basically...
You want to make sure that you have a high quality destination, with high quality road surfaces, working with a variety of road signs relevant and directed towards your destination, that the customer driving the car will head towards on the roads provided by Google.

Now you can attempt to guide the customer in his car towards your website or destination by yourself, all the while shouting over the incessant noise of the billions of customers being guided in different directions…

OR

...you can give this task to SEO specialists who will do this for you. They will spruce up, renovate or even build your destination, resurface the roads towards it and plant as many road signs as necessary to guide the customer in your direction. They’ll even give the customer a GPS to make sure they’re going down the right Google roads.

Simply put there’s a reason SEO is a multi-billion dollar industry.

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