The Best Analogy for SEO
Imagine you’re in the 12th century. You need to go to the market to get some bread. But the way you shop in the 12th century is you go to the market with what you need in mind and pray there is a vendor selling what you’re looking for. You have to walk by each vendor’s store to see if they have your bread, similar to your local farmers’ market.
Now imagine you’re in the same time period and the way you shopped completely changed. Instead, you went to the market and held up a sign with money and yelled, “I want bread!”
Pretty soon you would be bombarded with numerous store owners trying to sell you their bread. It seems effective but there are too many choices and you aren’t sure who to buy from. You need a moderator.
When all the vendors rushed toward you offering their bread, the moderator stopped them before they got to you, assessed all the shop owners, and picked the three best ones and told everyone to get in line behind them.
The moderator then looks to you and says, “Based off of the quality of the products, their knowledge of bread and their selection, as well as good things I’ve heard, these three are the best to choose from. As a shopper, you’re probably going to take that moderator’s word and go with one of the top three picks.
Well this moderator is Google, each of those shop owners are search results, and your sign for bread is the keyword the other vendors are trying to get your attention with and ranking for.
What About the Paid Ads at the Top of Google?
Google allows up to four paid ads by business above the organic search results. These ads are targeted based on keywords the bidder wants to pay for. Your search query contained keywords that the businesses is bidding for to show up at the top.
In terms of the analogy above, paid ads would simply be a bribe to the moderator. Sir Google-alot selects the top three and pushes everyone to the back of the line. But then, someone from the back of the line walks to the front and bribes the moderator to be in front and get selected.
If the business wasn’t going to rank organically for the keywords, they weren’t going to be in the top three selected. So they did the next best thing to gain exposure.
But that doesn’t mean your organic search results and your SEO strategy should be discounted simply because other businesses are paying to be on top.
Organic search results still get 19x more clicks than paid search results, which suggests paid ads aren’t as trustworthy as organic results.
A 10,000 Foot View
This is the basics of what SEO is. In order to learn it and perform it, you have to understand what it is first. The best way I can describe SEO is like the rabbit hole. Once you start diving in, you’ll end up forgetting more than you’ve learned.
But if you’re willing to take the ‘Drink Me’ potion and dive into learning what SEO is all about, then I suggest checking out my 4-part blog series, “What is SEO”, where we’ll cover:
An overview and History of SEO
What is On-Site SEO?
What is Off-Site SEO?
What is Local SEO?