Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1351540
ASSOCIATIONINSIGHT Portable Sanitation Association International News BIWEEKLY EDITION MARCH 17, 2021 Page 21 Continued on page 22 Have a Website? You Need SEO By Todd Ginter, PSAI's Director of Marketing Note: This article is the third in a series about the importance of your business website and how websites can enhance your business when done properly. The previous articles focused on both small and large company websites, what they need, and how your website can be more valuable than you may think. If you have not yet read those articles, check them out here and here. You will find them valuable for getting your company ready to make your online presence effective for your business. W hat is SEO? The letters stand for Search Engine Optimization. Hang with me here. You want customers to find you and your website, right? That's what SEO is. In the portable sanitation world, your customers will first be looking for you via a search engine like Google. Without doing a little work to optimize your business website, your listing may be way down the search list and may never be seen. Worse yet, your competitor who is higher up than you in the search results will likely get the call. It has just become a fact of life that businesses higher up in search results are more trusted. Every day, there are 3.5 billion searches conducted on Google. That is 40,000 searches each second. And that's just on Google. Individuals use other search engines too, including Bing and Amazon. With all that constant activity, showing up on the front page of Google can be the deciding factor between a business that's thriving and one that's, well, struggling. How SEO Works Let's say that you and your closest competitor both rent portable units and hand wash stations. If your website is optimized with the information about your hand wash stations as keywords, and if it includes details about the stations and maybe even a blog post about the importance of hand washing units, you are in good shape. By contrast, let's say your competitor only has a photo of what they offer in a hand washing station. You can bet that Google is not going to pick that up. So when someone searches for "portable toilet and hand wash stations" in your area, you are going to be right up on top and your competitor will be lower because Google will not recognize them as offering the hand wash station. When you do a Google search for, let's say, something like "best ice cream in town," how far down the page do you look? How often do you make it to page two of the results? Google says that 67 percent of the first five items in a search are clicked. Where are your competitors landing? If they are above you, or way above you, keep reading. How to Make SEO Work for You Properly utilizing SEO is something you can definitely do on your own. However, you may be busy and may not have the time to be optimizing your website. It is understandable. This article is not meant to be a "how to" for what you should be doing to increase your SEO. However, if your website setup doesn't allow your company to take advantage of the following benefits of SEO, you may want to make some changes and gain more customer calls.