WTF is SEO (and other tales)
A slight foray into the arcane undergirding of digital marketing
I’ve been asked to give another brief talk for my business networking group this week; about some element of what I do for people. So I figured, why not loop you in for the ride…?
Quillpower is a multipurpose Digital Marketing Agency that I launched in January 2020. That’s right—I quit my restaurant job and started an online business right on the brink of You-Know-What. So apparently I’m extremely brilliant, blessed, and/or lucky, depending on your views.
5 years later, I’m still waiting for it to feel like work. I make a living writing and telling stories…in a way that connects with people who need help, and translates to lots of money for my clients.
It sounds funny when I say it aloud, but I spend roughly 60% of my workday in a creative flowstate—developing narratives and ideas that will eventually come to life…and transmute to gold, via various digital processes.
And for the less glamorous or more technical aspects (or the stuff I just don’t like)…I have experts who handle it for me.
So WTF is SEO?
SEO means Search Engine Optimization—and it’s essentially the art & science of getting your website found online, by incorporating the words, phrases, and questions people use when searching for solutions to their problems.
How you accomplish that ranges from duh! to incomprehensibly complex…but at any level, SEO is a critical component of online marketing.
Unfortunately, because it’s so little understood by civilians—SEO is also the snake-oil buzzword of online marketing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this conversation with a small-business owner:
“We had a guy doing SEO for us.”
“Oh yeah? What did he do?”
“SEO.”
“Sure, but how? What was he actually doing for $900 a month?”
Blank stare…
Then audit & analytics return an equally dismal answer—and I get to be the bearer of bad news (but also of great hope going forward).
Where does SEO go?
SEO can be organic or PPC (pay per click)—each with myriad options & tools for reaching prospective customers. Let’s stick with organic baseline SEO for now…i.e. the website; foundation of any business’s online presence.
Organic SEO vehicles (roughly in order of urgency):
Website homepage
Google Business Profile (not website, but fundamental)
Website service/product pages
Other key topic subpages
Blog articles
Beyond that, you can get into GoogleAds and soup up any keyword or campaign target you want…but without a good baseline website with clear info & SEO organization, running ads is basically a spigot with no garden.
Organic SEO on each page:
Title (H1 – only 1 per page)
Headings (H2)
Subheads (H3)
Text (especially Q&A format)
Meta data (titles, descriptions, images)
How you include specific keywords (and variations) throughout the page depends on purpose & audience…but always keep it organized in sections, with relevant information and links to reliable outside sources (set to open in a new tab, lest you accidentally bounce your user).
SEO in the wild
Benefits With Apex started as (and still mostly is) a homemade website. But this very basic scenario illustrates the power of incorporating baseline SEO for a business website.
The owner wasn’t ready for a big investment…so we had to decide the single most effective way to boost traffic. As a health insurance agent, almost all of his business happens in November-January (i.e. Open Enrollment). But guess how many times the phrase “open enrollment” appeared on his original website…?
So we created a dedicated service page focusing on iterations of that term. Here’s a slice:
FAQ sections are a great way to sharpen your organic SEO…and also help you show up in AI search answers.
At the end of the day, Google (and other search bots) are looking for helpful, informative, well-organized websites and information to enhance user’s lives. The more relevant and helpful you are, the more you’ll show up in rankings and get clicked.
SEO results – website traffic with new Open Enrollment page:
Not every SEO investment will return immediate drastic results like that. More typically SEO is a long-game focus, aimed at compounding gains.
Rebranding SEO or starting from scratch
For most new SEO strategies, I generally caution clients it can take a good 3 months to see the effects. It takes a little while for Google to crawl the data and analyze user experience over time, and then quantify your traffic & trustworthiness for rankings.
Paula Fendley is a coach who wanted a new look to match her new specialization…which also meant targeting a different audience, using different search terms and topics. We developed her new brand and website, and launched in September—with a new slew of keywords added, which we tweaked here and there as data came in.
Here’s her Google Analytics for Nov-Jan with her new website, compared to the previous year:
The average position (keyword ranking) shown above doesn’t seem impressive—until you realize it’s comparing the new keywords with the previous website keywords she ran for many years. Below is her growth in rankings since the rebrand:
And that progress is just the new website alone—without any additional new content going out, or any search ads targeting the keywords. We’ll get into that powerful stuff soon enough…
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Phew—there’s so much more to share, but this is already getting long, so I’ll cut it off here.
Got questions about your own SEO? Don’t hesitate to reach out…