If you want your business to last over the long haul, people need to know you exist. In this video, I’ll explain what SEO is in simple, no-tech terms. You’ll understand how SEO helps your business get found online.
It’s a bit like having a sign out the front. Without a sign on the side of the road, how will people know your shop is there?
No jargon, just the basics.
Find out the work involved for your business type: SEO First Steps.
Email me your questions! I’ll answer them in a future video.
Transcript:
Hi my name is Lou. I am a web designer and digital business consultant from Melbourne, Australia, and in this video I’m going to explain what is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
What SEO is — what it means
So let’s dive right in. No fluffing around here whatsoever. So essentially SEO is a marketing strategy. It helps improve your visibility in the marketplace.
In this case we’re talking about Google. The virtual, online marketplace. SEO helps put you in front of the right customers, and it helps them choose you.
That’s what it is. And the actual doing part? The things that we do in doing SEO, it involves a variety of tasks, a variety of fixes, some adjustments you can make on your website to make it more likely to be visible, and there’s also ongoing work involved. And I’ll get into that in just a moment.
Where can SEO help make us visible?
So, what do we do SEO for? How and where does it work?
Well, the most common example is, The example of where we’re talking about SEO is search engine visibility. It’s making you appear on search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, essentially doing SEO work on your website.
It helps to make it not only more visible when people are searching for answers on places like Google, it also increases the likelihood of you appearing near the top.
Now, there’s also SEO work that we can do online. On social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. There’s SEO for YouTube.
So there are things we can do to make it more likely that you will appear in search engine results on there too.
There’s also things we can do to make you more likely to appear in AI-generated answer machines. So places like ChatGPT.
So essentially, anywhere that people are looking for answers online, we can do SEO for. And that can be for a variety of reasons, and it can be on a variety of platforms.
So historically, we were mainly just focused on search engines like Google. But nowadays, 2025, SEO is also done for an array of places like YouTube and TikTok and ChatGPT.
So anywhere someone is looking for answers, or a product or a service, anywhere they’re doing a search, SEO helps us connect better with those people doing those searches.
Why should you care about SEO?
Alright, so why should we care? Well, SEO is a way to bring people you leads passively. And by not only doing SEO now, but committing to the ongoing work, we can ensure that you always continue to do that.
But you, whether it’s your website, or your social media presence, or your YouTube channel, we want to ensure that that’s always happening for as long as you want to be in business.
And we should care. You should care about being visible when somebody’s searching for you. Um, as you become more established and more people are thinking about your name, someone in a room that you’re not in may mention your name or the name of your signature product.
You want to be able to show up when somebody goes back to their computer or device and looks you up.
That’s why we should do SEO. We want to assure that you can be found when people are looking for you and be chosen.
What can happen if you don’t do SEO?
Why else should we care? Well, if you don’t do this, it’s a good kind of like setting up a shop front in a shopping mall or a plaza and not putting yourself in the directory or map.
Cause like, you could just set up a shop and not be on the map, but the map is there to help people find you.
And exactly where you are, it makes them a little bit easier, instead of having to, you know, call you up or ask random strangers for directions, they can just go and find you on this map. So if you’re not on this map, you’re just relying on people randomly showing up to you. Um, yeah, honestly, I feel having some sort of guide showing people how to get to you makes it more easier, more likely that people will come and find your shop.
So essentially, we want to help your customers get where they want to go.
Give them a sign.
You put a sign on the road in front of the shopping plaza, letting you know they’re there. That helps. If there’s no sign on the road, how are people going to know that you’re there?
Do you need an expert’s help?
So how can an expert help you with your SEO?
Here are some things that you need to know, some things you need to learn, and some things you need to do.
So this is not an exhaustive list, by the way, but this is a lot of the tasks that an SEO person might do for a business.
So, we need to think about and care about what keywords, so what people are actually typing into that search box in Google or YouTube, what words are they searching for.
We also need to understand the context. What they’re searching for and why. So, this is just to make sure that when they’re searching for a product, they find their product.
But if they’re searching for answers, that your answer shows in the appropriate format that answers their question. So, if somebody’s looking for an answer to the question and you want to appear in the search engine results in a product, that’s going to make that person upset because they just, they just wanted an answer. They weren’t ready to buy something there. So, that’s why we need to think about the context.
Think about helping your customer choose you
We also need to consider what is going to make people choose you. So, this comes down to our writing skills. So, how persuasive we can be, how confident we can be, and how well we can explain what we do in order to get someone to say yes. And in order to help people choose you, it’s also a good idea to collect some reviews and some evidence and proof of how your expertise and how you’ve helped other people in similar situations to the person that you want to reach.
So we also need to know how to talk to Google and other search engines. There’s some tech skills involved here. And there’s a whole other rabbit hole that I could, could go into but weren’t because I wanted to keep this presentation brief.
There’s also skills involved in understanding how to make a user-friendly website. So with getting a website up and running, it’s not just about making it look attractive and say who you are, but is it actually easy to use this website?
Can somebody connect to your website and find their way around without you having to show them? Can they do it on their own and can they confidently and easily make their way to your cart or your booking page?
SEO involves helping people and AI to see that you are an authority
There’s also showing up as an authority. So, there’s ongoing work involved here. Showing that you’re an authority might mean that you regularly, routinely publish articles to your website.
It could mean that you’re doing webinars. It could mean that you’re simply going out and meeting people or getting interviewed.
Things like that. That contributes to how good you’re doing your SEO. There’s consistency. So one big mistake people make with their SEO is that they think it’s just something they’ve got to install once on their website.
But actually if you want to ensure that you are continuing to be visible now into the future, we’ve got to be consistent with our SEO activities.
Can you keep up with how consumer behaviour is changing in 2025?
And then there’s also keeping up with how technology is changing. So again, five years ago, if I said do SEO, we might just be talking about making you and your website visible on Google and maybe some search engines.
But now in 2025, in the age of AI, people are using answer engines like ChatGPT or even Google Search now. It’s using AI-generated answers. So if you’d like to keep the momentum going, keep people coming to you and make it easier for people to find you, make people realise that you exist.
It’s also important to keep abreast with how technology is changing and how people are changing their behaviour in terms of how they look for you.
Summary and wrap-up
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you found this presentation insightful. If you’ve got any questions about anything that I’ve talked about here, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love making explainer videos And if you’d like further help and resources in understanding SEO, please check out the link in the description.
Thank you. If you’d like to go a little bit deeper and understand how SEO might work for your specific business, I’ve got an extended, jargon-free explanation of the work involved in SEO.
It’s called SEO First Steps, and it’ll help you decide what you sort of work you need to do for your specific business needs, and how to select the right expert to help you if you are looking for someone to help.
So, again, thank you for coming along, and I hope to see you around on the internet.
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