Why an SEO skill set is so valuable in business

Disclaimer: Jason Parks, president of The Media Captain, is the author of this article. Some resources within the article link to themediacaptain.com for more information.

Key Takeaways:

• SEO can yield the best ROI for businesses
• Large budgets aren’t required to succeed 
• Entrepreneurs can grow their business with SEO

Search engine optimization requires a leadership and entrepreneurial mentality. I’m sure you’ve at least heard of SEO: It’s the ability to get your site to rank well on Google and major search engines. And it’s accomplished through strategy, technique and tactics.  

Did you know that 90.47 percent of all worldwide searches made on desktops are done via Google? [source]. In fact, Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide [source].

The beauty about SEO is you don’t need a special degree or a certain amount of experience to achieve success. If you are willing to put in the time, get your hands dirty while staying on top of trends, you can achieve SEO success.

SEO can help you grow a new business from scratch, increase sales for an established business looking for growth or become an asset within a company’s marketing department. Whether you want to start an eCommerce site or run a local marketing agency, SEO can help you grow profitably.

GROWTH, EXCITEMENT AND LEADERSHIP 

Why does SEO require an entrepreneurial mindset?

You are working from a blank canvas, coming up with your own strategy and deploying your own tactics for the hope of seeing improvement in rank. It can be lonely and frustrating, but the upside of succeeding keeps you going each day, much like entrepreneurship.

Along with being entrepreneurial, you must be strong, resilient and patient — all characteristics of a solid leader.

There’s no better feeling than seeing your business rank on the first page of Google. It’s where your business can go from being a pretender to a contender. Ranking well on Google can help you achieve the following:

• Revenue growth
• Employee growth
• Growth of new and existing divisions within your company
• Further establishing your expertise

Getting Your Hands Dirty

According to Search Engine Land, the key areas of SEO that site owners need to consider are the following:

1. Technical SEO: Making sure technical functionalities with your site, such as site load speed time and hierarchy, are intact.
2. Content: Having authoritative and relevant content.
3. On-Site SEO: The optimization of content on your site to include important title tags, keywords and more.
4. Off-Site SEO: The authority of your site based on factors like backlinks.
5. Local SEO: Ability to rank well in the local map results.

The best way to learn the tactics above is by getting your hands dirty. This means deploying these tactics on your own website or for a business’s website.

TIP: If you want to get better at SEO, offer this work for free for a local business. You’ll learn invaluable experience and they might pay you if you get them good results!

On average, there are over 2,000 algorithm updates per year [Source]. By the time you read a book that’s been published, the landscape has changed drastically.

Along with getting your hands dirty on your own site or a family friends’ site, follow the top industry experts. I compiled a list of 40 SEO Experts to follow on Twitter [view article]. Each of the key areas above (technical, content, on-site, off-site, local, algorithm updates) have niche experts within them. The amount of information you can learn from these experts is immense (and it’s free!).

My Background

I started The Media Captain, a digital marketing agency, out of my shoddy apartment on a shoestring budget.

I knew in order to grow, I had to generate leads. In order to generate leads, I had to rank on the first page of Google for valuable queries pertaining to digital marketing in Columbus, our home base. 

When I reference “getting hands dirty,” this happened early on. I was thrown into the fire when doing social media work for a national insurance company. They were hit with a Google penalty in 2012 based on the work of an outside firm. I was only doing social media at the time, but I became so immersed in helping them recover from this penalty that I dedicated the next year of my life to better understanding Google’s algorithm.

[Podcast: How Jason helped a $1 billion company recover from a Google Penalty]
 
After eventually helping this insurance company recover from its penalty, I knew I had what it took to surpass my own competitors with a larger budget and more bandwidth.

I started to love the entrepreneurial mentality associated with SEO along with the accountability and leadership it took to succeed.
 

ROI

Why does SEO yield such a great return on investment? You don’t have to pay for each click. The placement on Google is “earned.”

Let’ say someone searches on Google for “Columbus SEO Company” and finds The Media Captain. I don’t have to pay-per-click (PPC) since I’ve earned the placement. Yet if I wanted to bid on the keyword via PPC, according to Google’s keyword tool, this would cost $33 PER CLICK.

SEO is like owning a home and PPC is more like renting.

It’s the reason why 61 percent of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. It’s also why 70 percent of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC [Source].

The Media Captain’s success shows you don’t need a fancy office or a hefty budget to succeed in SEO. The little guy or gal can win.

Do you have what it takes to succeed in SEO? If you made it this far in the article, the answer is likely yes.

Additional Resources

• Choosing a good domain name for SEO [source]
• How to Build Citations for Local SEO [source]
• Auditing Your Site for a Google Penalty [source]
• Conducting Keyword Research for SEO [source]