Squeak of the Week

Editor’s Note: In the first part of an ongoing series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), The Creative Department’s SEO BMOC, Officer Artie Grossman, rants that SEO don’t get no respect.

SEO practices have been around since at least 1995 and Google turns 10 years old next month, so why, WHY?!? in 2008, do I have to explain to businesses what SEO is and why it’s important? The acronym should be as prevalent as CRM, B2B, NDA, or POS.

Since you’ve already navigated the series of tubes to find yourself here, I’ll save you the trouble of surfing over to Wikipedia to find the definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

So why does that matter? As the owner of Jabba’s Used Starfield Emporium why should you care?

40% of users abandon their search after reviewing the first page of results.(1)

That means if someone is looking for a quality, used starfield and they type “used starfield” into their favorite search engine, you better be on the first page, in the first 10 results. Otherwise they ain’t gonna find you and you’re gonna end up with a lot of dusty starfields lying around.

Google represents 62% of all search traffic.(2)

That’s right. Google represents more than half of all searches on the Interwebs. If you’re nice to Google, Google will be nice back to you.

What exactly does being nice mean?

Being nice to Google means making sure SEO techniques are prominent on your website and present on every web page. Employing SEO, tracking keywords (words that may be used by viewers searching for information, i.e. “used starfields”) frequently, and sweating every time your site moves up or down a Google ranking or two.

If you’re not currently using SEO and/or haven’t worked up a sweat yet, try typing in the words that your mom might search for to find your business – assuming that radio jingle you paid for didn’t drill your business name into her head. How many of your competitors are ranked higher than you in the results? For every competitor that’s ahead of you, that’s another sales lead that is going to someone else. That should make you sweat.

Hmmmm. Maybe a jingle is the way to get people to remember SEO… I’ll have to work on that.

Stay tuned for Part 2, when Artie goes into more detail about why SEO is important to your bottom line and why your marketing department should invest in it.

(1) iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study - April 2006
(2) Nielsen Stats - April, 2008