Two things to keep in the forefront of your mind when exploring how to get to the top of Google: 

• To get to the top of Google, avoid buying into any “expert” who guarantees you will get to the top of Google.
• The most important thing about getting to the top of Google is that getting to the top of Google isn’t the most important thing.

How to get business on Google is an entirely different question than how to put my business on Google. What we mean here is simple: Getting your web pages to rank highly on Google is great — as long as those high rankings translate into new business. 

The good news is, there are many free online resources to learn SEO.

The bad news is, there are many free online resources to learn SEO. 

This is good and bad because you have to distinguish reliable online resources that will help you learn SEO marketing from those offering bad or outdated information that will teach you nothing — or even teach you methods that are incorrect and will hurt any SEO campaign with which you become involved.

Understanding how to do e-commerce SEO starts with defining the overall goal and strategy.

Your SEO goal is steadily increasing qualified organic traffic from Google — that is, traffic with a high potential for making a purchase, either now or later. The focus should always be on conversions. The rankings you achieve and even the amount of organic traffic your site gets are secondary issues. Think about it: Which would you rather have, number-one Google rankings and 10 sales a month, or number-five rankings and 30 sales a month? Would you rather have 5,000 visitors from Google that collectively account for 20 sales, or 3,000 visitors who account for 50?

Local SEO is a branch of SEO that uses special techniques to make your company website content more visible on Google when people are looking for a business in the geographic markets you serve — usually defined as towns, cities, zip codes, neighborhoods or counties. Understanding how to do SEO for local business is important if your business:

If you’re wondering, how much does SEO cost, there is a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is this: Setting up an SEO campaign costs a few hundred to several thousand dollars; ongoing charges for a small to midsize company’s SEO campaign range from $1,000 to $10,000 per month. Some midsize companies find it profitable to invest even more.

How long does SEO take to work? How long for backlinks to take effect? How long does SEO take to see results?

These are all great questions, and questions you should ask before committing time and money to an SEO campaign.

The short answer to the question, how long does it take for SEO to work, is simple: Generally, it takes a while.

How long is a while? That depends mainly on your SEO starting point: 

• The overall SEO-readiness of your website
• The number and quality of links pointing to your website
• The position of your website relative to your SEO competitors
• The competitiveness of the keywords you need to target
• The budget available to implement the SEO campaign

To back up for a moment, let’s define keywords. Keywords are the words, or more often phrases, that people use in their search queries on Google and other search engines. Search engines try to match the user’s keywords with the most relevant and valuable content. Thus, if you want Google users to find your appropriate web pages for your products and services, you must try to match those pages with the best possible keywords.