SEO – Always Changing And Always Necessary For A Successful Website

SEO – Always Changing And Always Necessary For A Successful Website3 min read

When you have a website, and potential customers are searching for a business that offers the products and services that you do, a well designed SEO program will help to bring those potential clients to your site. You can think of SEO as a match game for you and prospective customers, and without a good SEO program, many potentially profitable matches may not happen for you.

By definition, SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results, which are results that occur naturally, not as a result of an advertisement that you’ve bought.

To keep your site working effectively, it’s absolutely necessary to refresh your SEO strategy on a regular basis to match the methods people are using to find you, because those methods aren’t the same as they were 5 or 10 years ago.

Since the birth of the Internet, the ways in which people gain access to the Net and how they use it have changed drastically, and businesses with successful websites have adjusted their websites to maximize their effectiveness. Since the early days, keywords, which are the terms that people use in searches, have been vital parts of SEO. That’s still true in the general sense, but the specifics have changed significantly.

For example, 10 years ago, a visitor looking for a “Dive Bar in Coudersport, Pennsylvania” would have entered that term in a search engine. And if you operated a dive bar in Coudersport, you would have likely employed a technique called keyword stuffing on your website.  That means that you would have used phrases such as “Dive Bar Coudersport, PA” and “Coudersport, PA Dive Bar” as many times as you possibly could in describing your place. Then, when a potential customer would have searched for “Dive Bar Coudersport, PA”, your fine establishment would have come up near the top of the results, and you would have gained a customer.

But in the world of the Internet, nothing lasts forever. The people who run the search engines (as well as visitors to your website) frowned upon keyword stuffing, and the practice fell out of favor. Meanwhile, the way people gain access to the Internet has changed. Today, more searches take place on mobile devices than on desktop computers, and to be effective, a site must have an SEO strategy that works for mobile devices.

This trend to mobile devices has been going on for several years, and Google recently released its Mobile-First Indexing, which means that having a mobile-friendly site is even more important that it was just last year.

All those mobile devices have also brought with them another change to the way people search. Now, instead of typing in search terms, people are asking Siri questions such as, “Siri, how do I get to best dive bar in Coudersport?,” so it’s important to have content that responds to common conversational queries, meaning the way a person would ask a question to a friend.

The bottom line on SEO is that SEO, or lack thereof, can have a big effect on your bottom line. Potential customers are looking for you, and if you want them to find you, it’s crucial that you keep your SEO strategies up to date. At Sharp, we are experts in SEO, and we’ve helped many of our clients attract more visitors to their websites, so give us a call to be sure that your site is working hard to bring you more customers.