And Why is it critical to all businesses?

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is figuring out what makes search engines like your business enough to list you above your competition. If done correctly, SEO becomes a piece of the growth hack.

What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking is analyzing your business, your competition, and your industry and then creating a set of strategies to cause your business to grow at an otherwise unnatural rate and at a much lower cost.

The most critical thing to understand is you must always pay attention to the rules and changes in algorithms. That is what hiring an SEO Expert is all about. A good SEO expert strategist will keep up with everything the search engines companies have said.

When you want customers, you do not have to do this. You can pay someone a few hundred bucks to put you together a website, and you can write a little information or a lot and wait. And watch the grass grow while the paint dries. You get a few customers from some friends and family and feel like it is growing. Then you take that little bit of money you made and hand it to Facebook and Google for advertising.

Or worse, you drain your life savings or borrow money for marketing. You are entering the eternal cycle. You will never have the spare cash or time to get actual growth. Sure, you got customers, you made some money, but at what cost?

Right now, in pest control, companies in my area have to pay google up to 70 dollars to get a customer! After all the expenses of doing the job, it costs money if not a break-even, then warranty message comes in, and they saw more bugs, now you are at a significant loss! Your only hope is that they become regular customers so you can afford to stay in business.

This pushed me to learn everything I could, so I don’t have to pay for advertising very often. Every so often, I will pay Facebook. But to this day, I have only paid 40 dollars for the entire year, and it was just for experimentation.

Back to the paint drying, the grass growing. Weeks, months, possibly years pass, and you still are not on page one of the search. You are not much closer at all to it. The paint is still drying. Had you put that marketing money into Growth Hacking such as SEO, you would be getting customers for free all this time within a few months.

You can still pay for Facebook ads and such while waiting, but now you have fertilizer on the grass, you have a fan blowing on that paint to dry. Once this gets going, then you never have to pay again; this is called organic. It just happens.