Video Transcript

00:00:00:15 – 00:00:25:14

Welcome to the GetNetSet SEO Video Series for tax and accounting professionals, where we talk about search engine optimization and marketing your business online. Effective SEO not only brings more visitors to your site, but also encourages those potential clients to reach out to you and set up that all important first meeting. There’s a lot of mystery and confusion when it comes to SEO, and this series aims to clear that up and help guide you and your SEO efforts.

00:00:25:26 – 00:00:47:19

In this video, we’ll be discussing what SEO is, what optimization means in this context and what is not. SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is the idea of improving your website to show up higher in Internet search results. Let’s take a quick look at a typical Google page so we can talk about how this works. This is called a SERP or Search Engine Results page.

00:00:47:27 – 00:01:07:14

For this example, I just did a search for CPA’s near me, and the first thing that you’ll see are the pay per click or PPC ads here at the top., and then we have what are called rich snippets like this map here, and this people also ask here. Rich snippets are elements that Google includes on their SERPs in order to make it easier for searchers to find the information that they’re looking for.

00:01:07:24 – 00:01:26:28

They won’t show on every search but they’re pretty common. And with SEO, our main focus is on these organic results right here, which are these ten big blue links that appear in the middle of the page. So SEO is the process of trying to show up in these organic results. If you succeed, then people are more likely to visit your site and pay you for your services.

00:01:27:09 – 00:01:46:04

However, it’s important to remember that search engines are a meritocracy, so these organic results are earned and not bought. What this means is that while you never have to pay money to get your site listed in search engines, you can choose to pay for tools or third party services to help. SEO is something that is paid for in time and dedication.

00:01:46:08 – 00:02:13:23

-either yours or someone you hire and with the right approach, that time and dedication can pay off for years. The heart and soul of SEO is improving your website, but what does that mean? Well, when it comes to optimization there are three main parts: relevancy, value and technical. Relevancy is what your site or web page is about. Basically, the services that you offer. Your website isn’t about chocolate chip cookies, so you will never rank for searches for chocolate chip cookies.

00:02:14:06 – 00:02:32:09

However, it’s important to keep in mind that just including topics on your site doesn’t mean that you’ll rank for them. Saying, “I do tax preparation” on your site is good for relevancy, but search engines are looking for more and that more is value. Value is the usefulness of your site and the quality of the information that you provide.

00:02:32:18 – 00:02:55:28

You can boost your site’s value by educating your website visitors and answering their questions. Search engines have a vested financial interest in presenting the best results possible for any given search query. When a person does a search that’s called a search query and search queries are fundamentally questions, and in this context, best means content that is relevant to the user’s query and provides the information that they’re looking for.

00:02:56:13 – 00:03:16:16

Think about the questions and information that your clients ask and search for. Does your site respond to these needs and concerns? If not, then why would a search engine want to rank your site highly for that search? Basically, search engines make money based on the accuracy of their results. If a search engine doesn’t provide results that actually help people, then no one would use that search engine.

00:03:16:22 – 00:03:39:18

And without searchers, search engines don’t make any revenue. And this is what search engines have specifically said is what they want. They want websites to provide valuable content for their intended audience and not try to game the system to impress the search engines. In summary, valuable content is content that addresses the client’s needs and answers their questions. We’ll go over how to add value in a later video.

00:03:40:10 – 00:04:07:14

The last part of SEO is the technical portion, which is the architecture of the code that actually builds your site. Here, search engines are trying to assess how well a site works for users. Among other technical concerns, your site should load quickly, have up to date security features and display well on all screen sizes, especially mobile devices. Having relevant and valuable content is important, but it won’t benefit you if nobody can access that information or view it easily.

00:04:07:23 – 00:04:25:13

You want to make sure that your site is set up in a way that makes it easy and convenient for users to find and read the valuable and relevant content you’ve included on your website. Each of these elements has its part to play, and no single one will guarantee that you improve your rankings. SEO is a topic that has a lot of depth to it.

00:04:25:17 – 00:04:46:15

And these descriptions are just barely scratching the surface. If we compare SEO to a game, search engines play the role of the referee while the players are you and your real life competitors. Because of this, there are no guarantees with SEO. So even if you enhance your site’s relevancy, value, and technical optimizations, there’s no guarantee that you’ll move up in the rankings.

00:04:46:27 – 00:05:23:06

We’ll discuss this idea in greater depth in future videos. Now that we’ve identified what SEO is, let’s go ahead and talk for a second about what SEO is not. A lot of people think that SEO includes every form of online marketing, but that’s not the case. SEO is a specific type of marketing included in the overall umbrella of SEM, which stands for Search Engine Marketing and includes both free and paid for items like PPC or pay per click. Other examples of what SEO is not include email campaigns, social media, traditional TV and radio ads, and so on.

00:05:23:29 – 00:05:48:15

Basically, if you have to pay for it or it doesn’t directly impact your website’s rankings, it’s not SEO. Now, I’m not saying that these things are bad or they won’t help you grow your business. They can absolutely be beneficial to your marketing. They’re just outside the scope of this particular series. Today we discussed what SEO is, what optimization means in this context and what is not SEO.

00:05:48:18 – 00:06:14:22

SEO is a very specific type of marketing that relies on working to earn better rankings by making your site more useful to search engine users. And SEO has three main parts: relevancy, value, and technical. To be more relevant, you need to include information about the topics you want to rank for. To add value, your site needs to provide the information that your visitors are looking for, and to optimize the technical elements of your site,

00:06:14:25 – 00:06:29:06

your website needs to be accessible, convenient, and secure. As always, if you’re looking for an expert to handle the heavy lifting for you, we encourage you to reach out to us here at GetNetSet.com. Thank you so much for watching and we look forward to seeing you in the next video.