Explaining SEO to Businesses Owners: Five Great Analogies

How to Get Massive Whitehat SEO Traffic to Your Site Or Blog

by Victor Rhee
Every day, some of the best search engine optimization firms on the planet answer questions from business owners about search engine optimization. Most of these discussions include explanations about "on-page" optimization and "off-page" optimization. SEO typically involves a line-by-line inspection of website content and its coding. Of course, off-page SEO will always involve some form of linking. In other words, the way the rest of the Internet relates back to your website. As of this writing, successful campaigns usually include direct and indirect back-linking, social media participation and citations from trusted websites.

It's no surprise that the web design process is still very much a design-driven industry. This is because most web design companies are owned and managed by web designers and as such, the main goal of the design process is to create a great looking design. A web designer's main goal is not usually, however, to create a website that is designed to achieve high organic search engine rankings.

It takes 3 types of talent to build a search engine friendly website. The first is the designer. While SEO should always be the end goal, you need to have a great looking website that creates a positive impression and is easy to navigate. Second, you need an SEO-savvy web developer that can convert the digital artwork and convert them into clean, best practices website coding. Finally, you need a search engine expert to manage the entire process and to populate the website with content that is both optimized and presented in a way that will convert to sales or leads.

While this three-pronged approach is the ideal, website are rarely created in this way. All the effort is put into the design. The coding is often hacked together just to get the website to meet the minimum functional requirements. Internet marketing is usually not addressed at in the design phase. It is not until later when the client realizes that their site has no search engine visibility that the SEO problem is addressed. Then they often seek out an Internet marketing firm for assistance.

Then the company gets the bad news: they have to re-code the new website from scratch to get search engine rank - which is what motivated the company to re-develop the site in the first place! As SEO's we need to be able to explain in clear and simple terms why brand new (and often costly) websites do not rank. The following are some popular anecdotes that have been used by a leading Kansas City web design company:

1. The Race Car Driver: This is an effective SEO analogy and may be among the best. To excel on the search engines, you need to have an optimized website that is well structured with search engine friendly coding. Your website is the race car. No matter how fast your car is, it still needs a driver to be able to compete. A skilled driver cannot win with a substandard car, and a poor driver cannot win with a the most advanced race car. This is an ideal analogy for search engine optimization - you need a great driver and a great car to win the race, just like you need a great website and a great Internet marketer succeed with Google. The only difference is that with Google and the other major search engines, the race never ends.

2. New Home Construction: Many prospective clients can identify with the home building process. Web design in particular is very similar to the construction process. In home building, the architects will draft construction plans for the project. This is like the design process where the designer creates website mockups. It is during the website design phase where the business owner can easily modify the artwork. In home building, it's easy to change the floor plan prior to construction, but once construction starts, its very difficult and often expensive to make changes. Website development is the exact same. Once approved web artwork is committed to the coding process, design and layout changes are much more difficult to implement. In web design your search engine optimization professional is like the builder and inspector, making sure that the site has proper coding, structure and usability.

3. Sharp Shooting: The analogy of the sharp shooter is another good one. This one is simple and makes the point clearly and concisely. The world's best sharp shooter is powerless without a great firearm, and a the best firearm on the planet cannot shoot by itself. The same goes for SEO - a perfectly coded website cannot rank itself and a the world's best consulting firm can't do anything without clients and websites to rank.

4. The Landscaper: The landscaping analogy plays into the nature of SEO as an ongoing strategy. Just like search engine optimization, you need a plan. Then to execute the plan, you need upfront effort to prepare, grade and prep the soil for installation. In most cases, a property with a new landscape will not have value as a property that has a properly maintained and mature landscape. SEO is VERY similar. We work hard in the initial months, and most often this effort does not yield ranking results several months later. Further, just like your home's landscape, routine maintenance yields the best results.

5. Fishing: Second to the race car driving analogy, Fishing is one of our favorites on so many levels. The best angle to use for this analogy relates to net fishing. Think of recreational fishers in an area using chum and other luring techniques to draw fish into a body of water. Fishermen use specialized lures, bait and equipment to catch fish one-by-one. This is akin to traditional marketing where companies use mass marketing to target a relatively small group of potential buyers. In SEO, we call this: offline demand creation. As fishermen use all their fancy methods to attract fish, think of a commercial fishing vessel that comes by and scoops up all the fish. This is EXACTLY what SEO does. Consumers see the demand creation by companies on TV, print and radio...then then run to the Internet to research when they are actually ready to make a purchase decision. SEO, when done effectively, enables your company to steal this market share created by your competitors.

If you are an Internet marketing professional and run into trouble explaining SEO and web development to a prospective client, try using one of the above analogies or even creating a new one of your own.
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About the author: Kansas City Web Design is an Internet marketing and web development company based in Overland Park, KS. For more information on the author, visit: www.Kansas-City-Website-Design.com