This is the big chunk of your marketing strategy!
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
It is the art of getting your website to appear as high as possible in the search results.
Let’s get back to the example of your Chinese restaurant in
If you type “Chinese restaurant Manhattan” in your search box and your site appears in position 3 in the search engines, that’s a very good result!
Your site will get lots of traffic, maybe 5 to 20 visitors/day (Estimation, ok? ;)).
That’s “free” traffic!
If you are position 53, the traffic you will get will be much less.
Probably 100 to 1000 times less than if you are in the top 3 positions.
It means that ranking high in search engines is one of the keys to online success!
Now, this is such a complex field for the newbie that many businesses never have the time to dive into it!
You need to get the on page optimization elements right!
You need to know exactly for what key phrases to optimize your pages + exactly how to do it.
In theory, you need as well to build links with other sites which is going to boost your credibility in the eyes of the search engines.
All that is very complex!
It is a profession in itself!
Thousands of SEO experts promote their services online and want to help you do just that: rank high in search engines!
One of the key challenges with SEO is the fact that changes you make to your site can take months to appear in search engines.
This means that you might work on SEO strategies for months and see no results.
Then, suddenly, your site starts ranking higher with no apparent reason.
Nowadays, there are ways to get search engines to visit your site and index your pages faster.
You can for instance create a site map which is a list of the pages on your site to make sure that the search engines crawl (visit or spider) your site.