What Is SEO and Why

What IS SEO?

SEO can be an intimidating topic to understand, but it doesn't have to be. Here is how I explain it to people new to SEO:

"Search engine optimization is a process that helps writers and content creators to craft their content to match how people are searching for that content."

Admittedly, this is an overly simplified way of explaining what SEO is. It doesn't take into account the technical aspect of optimizing your pages, the details of how Google crawls web pages, or why search traffic can ebb and flow even on an optimized site with relevant content.

While those details are important, the most crucial concept to understand is this: SEO is about helping the search engines understand your content so they can serve it to the people who are looking for it. And it's about understanding how your audience searches for your information so that you can help them find your content.

This Aint It:

Effective SEO is NOT about tricking or trying to outsmart Google - this never works long term, because Google is constantly updating their ranking algorithm to close these “loopholes”. If you base your SEO strategy on exploiting a loophole, when (not if) Google closes that loophole, the road to recovery is so much more difficult than the road that got you there. It's a net-loss, every time. Consider gaming the Google algorithm to be like gambling in Las Vegas - the house always wins.

Why Is SEO So Important?

Publishers often get site traffic from multiple sources, or channels. These channels are usually search, links (internal and external), social media, email, referral, the mystery known as direct traffic, and sometimes, paid search.

In an ideal world, the relative amount of traffic coming from each channel would be almost equal. This is so that if one channel saw a sudden decrease in traffic, the net effect on overall traffic would be minimized. For example, if Meta were to make changes to their algorithm and your Facebook-sourced traffic goes down, you want your email, referral, and search traffic to be strong enough to make up the difference.

The problem is, this rarely happens. Too often, the vast majority of a publisher's resources and budget are put into a traffic strategy that's fast acting and short lived, at the expense of strategies that provide long-term, scalable traffic.

A relatively small investment in SEO best practices (optimizing your site and your content creation workflow) will have both short term and long-term benefits that drive traffic and revenue gains multiples of your investment. And the best part is, with an effective SEO workflow in place, you don't need additional resources to see sustained increases in site visibility (impressions) and traffic (clicks and sessions).