How to Beat Google at Their Own Game: 6 Quick Tips for Conquering SEO

The Google algorithm is constantly changing.  This makes it very difficult for marketers to consistently appear on the search engine results page.  Most recently, we’ve watched advertising become much subtler in search engine results pages (SERPs), with paid Google advertisements appearing as almost identical to organic search results.  Additionally, Google SERPs have migrated away from the traditional “ten blue links” format in favor of a much busier interface.  Google is making these changes in an effort to confuse the consumer.  It has been shown that when a change to the search engine results page is made, click-through rates drastically increase for a short period of time until the consumer becomes more familiar with the updated design.  Because of this fact, we can expect Google to continue to change their SERP layout in the future.  

Editor's note: Amanbir Dhade is a MBA student in the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI and currently in ISM 7505: Inbound Information Technology

How to Attract that Search Engine 

What is search engine optimization?  Search engine optimization or SEO is all about improving your website to get found.  SEO is important for Inbound.  The main thing is that SEO brings in new people who are searching for your products, services, and ideas, and that’s GOOD for your business.

Things have changed, and how people are searching has changed now too.   The internet is chalked full of information and much of this information is highly sought after.  Bridging knowledge and your business together is key in SEO.  How do people search?  They search for solutions to their problems.  For instance, instead of buying lightbulbs one may search ‘how to know when to replace your light bulbs.’  Google gets over 3 billion searches every day, that’s important because there’s a lot of searching going on out there.  So follow these SEO steps to get found. 

Editor’s note: Senior undergraduate students, Shylan Ghoujeghi, an ISM major and Natalia Kumar, a dual major in ISM and Marketing, co-wrote the following blog post based upon their participation at the recent HubSpot Inbound 2014 annual conference in Boston.

The Next Generation: Students Natalia Kumar and Shylan Ghoujeghi offer concise user's guide to Search Engine Optimization

Recently, we joined a group of students and faculty from Wayne State University’s School of Business to attend the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, where we (students) were introduced to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What we learned there immediately impacted our student website but, perhaps even more importantly, showed us the impact of SEO in business.

The Power of SEO

At the conference, people around us were throwing out words like “spider” and “Panda,” and if you think they were just talking about animals, so did we. As students, whose knowledge of SEO was the extent of a quick Google search of the definition and tools, it took us a while to truly understand how this three-letter acronym was going to help us attract new members for our ITO organization at Wayne State University, and how we could utilize it for our website.

 After numerous inbound marketing sessions and tutorials, we came back to Detroit with a whole new respect for HubSpot software and a better understanding of how to use it. Throughout the semester, we gained a deeper understanding of SEO and saw significant benefits of using it for our website.