What You Need to Know About SEO, Pt.3

Previous Sections:

Part 1:  What is SEO and Why Should I Care?

Part 2: Does SEO Really Matter?

Now: What should I expect from SEO?

SEO is meant to help you accomplish one thing, increased website traffic via natural search (as opposed to paid search). To be fair, and SEO experts reading this have already figured this out, that this is a bit of an oversimplification but for purposes of this series that is the goal.  Ideally the appropriate use of keywords, titles, headers, descriptions and other elements of SEO will help people find your content.  There are many different strategies to get people to your site and SEO is just one but it is arguably the most important one.

The better your SEO the easier you make it for the search engines to direct people searching for what you are discussing.  Whether you are hiring a firm or consultant to help you with your SEO, or winging it on your own, you should expect higher ranking in search results for the keywords/phrases you identify and you should expect more traffic from those searches. You should not expect your site traffic or sales conversions to go through the roof over night, true SEO takes time and persistence though if executed appropriately, SEO can yield results in a relatively short period of time.

Up Next: How do I know if someone pitching SEO services knows what they are talking about?