SEO Infographic Shows How to Correctly Optimize Your Website

I recently came across a great SEO infographic created by Ted Chong from Ice Cube Marketing that does a great job in explaining the basics of a subject that can be very confusing for local small business owners, and I wanted to share it on my blog to help bust some myths.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most cost-effective long-term marketing strategies for local businesses.  The fact of the matter is that for better or worse, consumers tend to trust the organic search results they see in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines when looking for local service providers.   They may hear and see a variety of paid advertising messages from a company and ignore all of them, but if they do a Google search and see the same company at the top of the search results, that company has an excellent chance of getting some new business–or at least a phone call inquiring about their services.

Unfortunately, many local business owners are still ignoring even basic, fundamental principles of SEO simply because they don’t understand it.  In fact, not only do the business owners not understand it, they are hiring so-called marketing specialists to help them who also don’t understand it.

In fact, just last week I talked to a local copywriter who serves small business owners in the area, and who lists web development as one of her services.  I asked her what her process was for keyword research so that she could ensure the content she was writing for clients would be more likely to turn up in search results, and thus benefit her clients more.  She replied that SEO changed so much and was so hard to keep up with that she just didn’t bother with it.

That wouldn’t be so bad if her clients understood that the content she was writing for them was not properly optimized, and that it was up to them to do their own SEO.  Somehow, I doubt that when she gives her clients the bill for her work that she tells them “Oh, by the way, this content may not help you that much as it is–I don’t really know since I didn’t bother to do any keyword research before I wrote it”.

I share the SEO infographic below in the hopes that even if you, as a local small business owner, don’t fully understand everything it says, you can at least take it and show it to marketing service providers you are working with and ask them to explain how their services comply with the guidelines it recommends.  If they can’t give you a good answer, fire them!