In this digital day and age, many people are moving their careers to the internet, whether that be through writing and maintaining their own blog, contributing to a website, offering their services to a wide audience via social media, or even helping other people to successfully maintain their online business or career. With all of these careers and more, however, it is important to be able to successfully advertise your chosen career; if no one knows about that blog or that site, how are you meant to maintain said career?

While it is true that roughly 70% of the people who will find your site or hear about your service will hear about them in private spaces such as emails or private messaging between friends, the other 30% is a vastly important percent to concern yourself with if you hope to be successful in your online business endeavors. That other 30% will find your site through internet searches—of which there are over 100 billion conducted every month through Google alone—through advertisements posted to public social media pages. People will always recommend things to their friends via word of mouth, but the rest of the internet isn’t always so forgiving. Given the amount of people trying to find their audience, trying to gain their footing online, it is important that your site, your business, be visible in search engines.

Enter search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, reads like it should be rather complicated—though it is really nothing more than maximizing the visitors you get to your site by using keywords in your content that puts your site high up on the list when a search is done for said keywords—and therefore might scare those just getting their feet wet off; they might become discouraged and leave behind their barely started blog or business in fear that they will never become successful, that no one will ever read their blog or use their services.

And indeed, there is something of an art to search engine optimization; it’s not just about being seen in Google searches, it’s also about building a better site so you don’t have to worry about being seen in said Google searches. If you keep search engine optimization in mind during the site design stages, if you learn the basics while building your brand, there will be less stress, and less worry later on.

For example, whilst creating your site, if you can come up with a name that includes a strong keyword that people often search for, your site is more likely to pop up in searches, and will statistically rank at least 1.5 spots higher on the search list than it would had you not had said keyword in your title or name, all without you having to do much of anything at all other than come up with a good name. Your content is important, of course, and will likely speak for itself once people click onto it, but getting people to see your blog or business is the first, most important step there can be.

For some people, this can still be difficult to accomplish, which is where a different niche exists: search engine optimization companies. Indeed, there exists a multitude of companies that exist solely to help other people advertise their own blogs or businesses, help them to achieve search engine optimization. And they don’t just exist for laypeople, even big businesses hire these companies; roughly half of all marketers worldwide are now investing 50% or more of their marketing budget on digital marketing, which include SEO companies and companies that offer SEO services.

The future is now, your career is now, and if you’re not quite sure how to play the game that everyone else is playing in terms of online marketing and search engine optimization, there are people and companies out there who are much more than willing to help you out.