[Music] search engines have quickly become one of the most powerful means of company growth over the last few decades by taking advantage of the 99,000 searches that happen every second on Google businesses have acquired more website visitors and converted them into loyal paying customers strategically modifying and adding content to your website to earn top visibility on Google and other search engines is known as SEO or search engine optimization let's dive into SEO and how you can use it to drive transformational growth for your [Music] business so why should you a marketer or business owner care
about SEO and integrate it into your marketing strategy I'm sure you're already starting to get the picture there are a handful of major benefits of SEO first unlike ads the traffic you get from SEO is free your website is simply being rewarded with more visibility for the work you put into developing great content for users second once you rank high that website traffic keeps rolling in search engines aim to keep valuable results at the top of the list as long as your web pages remain valuable you continue reaping the rewards of your work third you'll
be able to reach new entire audiences you never thought possible and finally and the best reason to pursue SEO better organic visibility contributes to in increased website traffic and more chances to make a sale or earn customers and [Music] clients let's take a minute to show you an example of how great SEO translates to Money in the Bank the phrase plumber near me is search roughly 1,600 times per month in the Chicago area on average websites that rank in position one receive 30 to 50% of the website visits generated by that search query this means
your website could see 400 0 to 800 visits per month by ranking in the top position for the search phrase if you have a conversion rate of 10% or one quote request per 100 visits you're looking at anywhere between four to eight potentially new customers every month just from this one single phrase now break it down just a bit further and carry this math across more phrases you know your close rate is one sale for every three quotes you produce so this single keyword has now generated one to three new customers every month multiply the
amount you charge for the average job and boom you can see how much each keyword phrase could be worth to your company in new Revenue one to three new customers per month doesn't sound like much but plumber near me isn't the only search you want to show up for phrases Like Water Heater replacement costs toilet repair and kitchen sink installation are each search thousands of times per month by developing website content in written and video format you can qualify to rank high for hundreds or thousands of unique phrases worth real money for your [Music] business
we know you're familiar with Google but there's a reason they're the epicenter of SEO discussion we focus on Google because it dominates 90 plus% of online searches and Google provides the most information about its processes and even gives us Clues to help us understand what it's looking for from us not only that but many other search engines model their processes off of what Google's doing Google utilizes a system of robots designed to crawl the internet through website links and gather as much information as possible as each crawler or spider moves link to link the information
on each page that it finds is saved in an index so it can be recalled later Google crawlers work 247 365 to identify new useful content on the internet to build a massive catalog of information that can be accessed by people all across the world think of that giant filing cabinet in your basement whenever you receive something new worth returning to you file that document away for easy access later when you search for something like how to tie a tie Google sifts through trillions of pages in its index containing matching keywords and information related to
how to tie a tie and tying a tie to give you the most relevant results in less than a second because there are millions of different pages describing the process of tying ties Google uses complex algorithms to determine which results are most relevant to display and in what order to show them you can see in this example that Google believes videos of someone teaching how to tie a tie is the best possible result followed closely by a written article describing the process this concept is known as search intent if Google can determine why a phrase
is being searched it has a much easier time identifying results that answer the query better because search results are more complex than simply matching words words and website Pages Google uses a system known as a Knowledge Graph to go beyond simple phrases to try to understand people places and things how does Google search algorithm work while the exact answer to this question is a closely guarded secret Google does provide documentation about how it determines what information is the most helpful Google's algorithm analyzes somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 different factors including the search phrase used
keyword relevance web page usability content quality and even the user's location browser settings and browser history each factor is then assigned a weight which helps determine in what order search results should appear this becomes a bit more complex when we remember that the reason for a person's search can change Google's algorithm Alters the weight of each factor based on what it believes the intent behind the search was a great example of this is displayed through content freshness for searches where new information is important like current events or news Google's algorithm places a higher weight on
how new a particular piece of content is whereas searches about the location of a building like the White House rarely if ever change one of the most important characteristics Google looks for in website and webpage content is quality while everyone has a subjective definition of what quality looks like Google's algorithm aims to prioritize the most reliable sources first Google's four major categories for understanding how reliable a source is and what level of quality their content is can be grouped into four major groups experience expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness Google's documentation states that trust is the most
important and the other three feed into trust after all if you can't trust a source why would Google want it to be seen by millions of people arguably the most important component of authoritativeness and trustworthiness are backlinks or links from other websites pointing to yours Google views backlinks as a vote of confidence for the authority and Trust of your website in other words the more votes of Confidence from other websites you earn the more Google views you as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information as you might have guessed people have figured out various ways
to earn massive amounts of backlinks in an effort to cheat a major portion of Google system to combat this Google has developed additional algorithms to identify and penalize spammy practices another major factor Google utilizes to rank websites is their usability again Google's aim is to provide the best possible resource for each query searched this means it's not only about the content type and quality websites and pages that are deemed difficult to use ultimately make users unhappy which in turn lowers the over all effectiveness of Google's result there are a small handful of confirmed ranking factors
that Google uses to determine how usable a web page is the first is Page speed Google's analysis found that slow loading web pages lead to an extremely high rate of Abandonment as the length of time your website needs to load increases users are more likely to leave your website alt together in addition to page speed other ranking factors like cor web vitals have been developed to take usability to more granular levels than just speed the second major factor is known as mobile friendliness when internet access for smartphones Was A New Concept web Masters never needed
to consider the different types of devices that might be visiting their websites today more than half of web traffic flows through mobile devices users expect your website to look and function great no matter what device or browser they're visiting from this is more commonly known as responsive web design this shift caused Google to reconsider which type of website it was prioritizing for visitors and began moving to a mobile first indexing model in 2016 this means all website content will be indexed and ranked from the perspective of a mobile device user first of course there are
more page experience and usability factors that Google looks at but we've covered the basics here now that we've given you a Launchpad for a solid understanding of what SEO is and how it works check out our other written and video resources linked below or reach out to the SEO team at Ral mind about SEO services for your brand happy [Music] optimizing [Music] [Music]
