An Easy Explanation of Why You Need SEO

Last Friday, I met with one of my clients to talk about the latest work that Pan Galactic, my search engine optimization agency, had done on their ecommerce site. The developers that I work with had just finish adding a new product line to the site, and I was excited to talk about well the site was already ranking.

That’s when I got asked the classic question, “Do I really need to have you do this work? I mean won’t I just naturally show up when people look for my products?”.

I came up with this off-the-cuff explanation of how search engines work and why “one does not just simply appear in search results”. As an SEO, it’s often difficult to explain much of the technical work that I do, so I thought that I’d share this explanation for other SEOs to use.

Most of us remember a library card catalog. Most of us have read at least one book. That’s all you need to understand the basics search engines and ranking.

When you search the internet, you’re not actually searching the internet. You’re searching a copy of the internet that a search engine has stored on its servers. The copy of the internet that a search engine has on its servers is called an index. An index is like an old fashioned, library card catalog.

An index organizes website into different buckets, so that people can find it when they do different types of searches. For example, A website about Pet Accessories will show up in Google when someone searches for dog leashes, cat toys, etc.

The entire internet has not been indexed by any search engine. At least not Google, according to this post they’ve only indexed around 12% of the internet.

Why hasn’t Google indexed the entire internet? Think of a website being analogous to a book. A book that is easy to read and understand is well written. It is organized and has an identifiable structure. If Google can’t read your website it won’t add it to it’s index/card catalog. If Google finds it hard to read your website/book, Google won’t know all the places to put your site in it’s index/card catalog. As a result, your website will only show up for a handful of searches.

What does all this have to do with the job of an SEO? In a nutshell, an SEO makes your website/book easy for a search engine to read. If your website/book is easy to read, then Google knows to put it in many different buckets in it’s index/card catalog. As a result, your site will show up in a search engine for many different kinds of searches. Without SEO, you only show up for a small number of searches. Your traffic is limited and so are your sales.

Believe me, this is the most basic explanation of how a search engine works and what search engine optimization does for a website. But hey, it worked! The client understood why we did all of this work to his site, and it gave us a basis for conversations in the future.

Trust me, a client that understands more about SEO is a happier client. They don’t feel like they are just throwing money around, and you’ve just become their greatest asset!

Pan Galactic is an SEO Agency in St. Louis, Missouri. We also serve many clients as their primary Social Media Marketing firm.

We are renaissance Search Marketers who also have experience in email marketing, display advertising, and paid search. This broad background enables us to create unified strategies for brands across all digital channels and use data from one channel to inform decisions in another. Our past work runs the gamut from small, local businesses to household brand names like Dell Computers, Shasta, Purina, Botox, Columbia Sportswear, Kotex, and Coach.

Pan Galactic has cultivated relationships with the major search engines and Social Networks. Our staff has been a beta tester for the Bing interface, Google’s Agency Land Search Marketing education portal, as well as numerous social media analytics platforms. We are also certified in the use of Google’s Adwords PPC marketing program, Google Analytics, and proficient with paid advertising on various Social Media networks.

Because of our experience with digital marketing, Pan Galactic’s staff has been asked to speak at several local conferences and has been asked to blog for Searchfuel, Trada, Hubspot, Social Fresh, and Marketing Profs.