Website’s SEO is why you can usually find exactly what you are looking for on Google and other search engines when done correctly. Yes, even if you Google a step-by-step guide to repair your flat tire promptly.
So, it’s no surprise that Website’s SEO is one of the top areas marketers invest in this year. HubSpot data reveals that 32% of marketers plan to leverage websites, blogs, and Website’s SEO as part of their overall marketing strategy in 2024.
In this director, you’ll learn what SEO is, discover a strategy for increasing your online attendance (search engine optimization (SEO)), and how to run your site in search engine outcomes.
In addition to sharing my knowledge based on seven years of practical Website’s SEO experience, I have selected some of the most amazing specialists to share their Website’s SEO best practices with you.
What is SEO?
SEO means search engine optimization. Website’s SEO aims to expand a company’s visibility in organic search results. As a result, these efforts bring more visitors to the business’s website, increasing its chances of getting more conversions, which translates into more customers and revenue.
When requested to explain what Website’s SEO is, I often call it a strategy to ensure that when somebody searches for your product or service category on Google, they find your website.
There are many ways to improve the SEO of your site’s pages. Search engines look for title tags, keywords, image tags, inside link structure, and inbound links (also called backlinks).
Search engines also analyze site structure and layout, visitor behavior, and other outside factors to determine how your site ranks in its SERPs.
But before we dig deeper, I want to point out that many resources make SEO complex: they might even scare you. I promise this guide is not like that. I’ll break down SEO into its most essential parts and show you how to use its elements to create your successful SEO strategy.
How does SEO work?
SEO the whole thing by optimizing a website’s content, conducting keyword research, and generating inbound links to increase that substance’s ranking and the website’s visibility. While results can usually take effect on the SERP once a search train has crawled and indexed the web page, SEO efforts can take months to materialize fully.
Rankings
Search engines use this to determine where to place an exact web page in the SERP. Rankings start at position zero and go up to the final number of search engine consequences for the inquiry, and a web page can be ranked one position at a time. Over time, a website’s ranking can change due to age, competition in the SERPs, or algorithm changes from the search engine itself.
Visibility
This term describes the importance of a particular domain in search engine results. Lower hunt visibility occurs when a domain is not noticeable for many relevant search queries, while the opposite is true with higher search visibility. Both are responsible for attaining the main goals of SEO: relevant traffic and domain authority.
What’s the importance of SEO?
There is another crucial reason why you should invest in and use SEO: the strategy virtually helps you position your brand through the entire purchasing process.
SEO can ensure that your marketing strategies match new purchasing behaviors.
As Google admitted, customer behavior has changed forever.
As of January 2024, Google-owned 81.95% of the global search engine market share.
Additionally, customers generally prefer to complete most of the purchasing process themselves.
For example, 86% of customers say search engines are the best way to get information. People massively use search engines to get answers online from one generation to the next.
They then evaluate alternatives based on reviews or advertisements on social media before consulting a company directly. But this happens after all sources of information have been exhausted.
Therefore, customers can only notice and consider you if you appear in their search results.
How does Google see how to rank a page?
Search engines have a purpose. Its goal is to provide users with the most relevant answers or information.
Their algorithms choose the most relevant pages for your query whenever you use them. And then sort them, showing the most authoritative or popular ones first.
To provide the correct information to users, search engines look at five main factors:
- The meaning of a person’s query, their most likely intent when they search, and how that intent relates to the most helpful content.
- Search engines evaluate the relevance between the search query and the content on a page based on several factors, such as topic or keywords.
- Content quality uses the E-E-A-T model (we’ll discuss it later) to surface the most advantageous content based on signals such as experience, knowledge, authority, and trustworthiness.
- A site’s usability considers page speed, mobile-friendliness, and other factors related to the visibility of a site’s content.
- Context is based on the searcher’s past behavior and parameters such as location.
When determining significance and authority, following the E-E-A-T framework can significantly help. E-E-A-T in SEO means “knowledge,” “experience,” “authority,” and “trustworthiness.” Here’s what each one means:
- You are an expert on the subject.
- You have personal experience with the content you write about.
- Others see it as a source of authority, just like other sites linking to your site and vouching for its credibility.
- Their website and content are credible and current.
Professionals who responded to our web traffic and analytics report ranked trustworthiness and experience as the most important ranking factors for appearing in SERPs, followed by knowledge and authority.
As you’ll soon see, adding additional content, optimizing image file names, or improving internal links can affect your search rankings and visibility. And that’s because each of these actions improves a ranking factor.
What is Website’s SEO strategy?
An SEO advertising strategy is a comprehensive plan to fascinate more visitors to your website through search engines. Positive SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords, and off-page strategies, which generate inbound links from other websites.
Three Core Mechanisms of a Solid SEO Strategy
To optimize a site, you must improve ranking factors: technical website design, content, and links. So, let’s go through them one by one.
Practical Setup
For your website to rank, three belongings must happen:
First, a search engine needs to discover your pages on the web.
It would help if you scanned them to understand their topics and identify their keywords.
And finally, you need to add them to your index: a database of all the content you’ve found on the web. This way, their algorithm can consider showing your website for relevant queries.
Sounds simple, right? There’s nothing to see here… After all, since you can visit your site without any problem, Google should, too, right?
Well, there is a problem. A web page is different for you and the search engine. You realize it as a collection of graphics, colors, formatted text, and links.
To a search engine, it is nothing more than text.
As a result, anything you cannot represent in this way will remain invisible to the search engine. So, even if your website looks good from their perspective, Google could find your content inaccessible.
Notice some things about it:
The page is just text. Although we designed it carefully, the only elements visible to a search engine are the text and the links.
Therefore, you cannot see an image on the page (note the item marked with an arrow). He only recognizes his name. If this image contained an important keyword we wanted the page to rank for, it would be invisible to the search engine.
This is where technical configuration, also called in-situ optimization, comes in. It ensures that your website and sheets allow Google to crawl and index them without any problem. The most important factors that affect it include:
Website navigation and links
Hunt engines crawl sites just like you would. The links follow. Search engine bots arrive at a page and use links to find others gratified to analyze. But as you saw above, they cannot see the images. Therefore, set navigation and links to text only.
Simple URL structure
Search engines don’t like interpreting lengthy strings of words with complex structures. Therefore, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them to include as little as possible beyond the primary keyword (the one you want to optimize the page for).
page speed
Search engines use capacity time (the time it takes a user to read the page) to indicate quality. Many elements of the website can affect it. Image size, for example. Use Google’s Page Rapidity Insights tool to get submissions on how to improve your pages.
Dead links or broken redirects
A dead link sends the visitor to a non-existent page. A broken redirect of opinions to a resource that may no longer be there. Both deliver a poor user experience and prevent search engines from indexing your content.
Sitemap and Robots.txt files
A sitemap is a humble file listing all your site’s URLs. Search engines use it to identify pages to crawl and index. On the other hand, a robots.txt file tells search engines what content should not be indexed (for example, specific policy pages you do not want to be shown in search). Create both to speed up the crawling and indexing of your content.
Content
Whenever you use a search engine, you look for content: information on a particular topic or issue, for example.
This content can indeed be presented in different formats. It can be a manuscript, like a blog post or web page. But it can also be a video, a product recommendation, or even a list of companies.
It’s all content.
And for SEO, this is what helps you get greater visibility in searches.
Here are two reasons why:
- First, content is what customers want when they search. Whatever they are looking for, the content is there for them. As long as it’s high quality, genuinely helpful to the end user, and doesn’t violate Google’s anti-spam policies, the more you post, the better your chances of getting higher search visibility.
- Additionally, search engines use content to determine how to rank a page. This is the idea of relevance between a page and a creature’s search query that we discussed earlier.
By exploring a page, they determine its subject. Analyzing aspects such as the length or structure of the page helps them assess its excellence. Based on this information, search algorithms can combine a person’s query with the pages they consider most relevant.
The content optimization process begins with keyword research.
Keyword Research
SEO is not about attracting visitors to the site. You want to entice people who need what you sell and can become potential customers and, later, customers.
However, this is only possible if you rank for the keywords these people would use when searching. Otherwise, they will have no chance of finding you. This is true even if your website appears at the top of search results.
That’s why SEO work begins with discovering the phrases that potential buyers type into search engines.
The process usually involves identifying terms and topics relevant to your business. Then, you can convert them into seed keywords. And finally, you can do in-depth research to discover related terms your audience would use.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, safeguards that search engines a.) comprehend a page’s topic and keywords and b.) can match them to relevant searches.
Note that I said “page,” not content. This is because while most of the on-page SEO work focuses on the words you use, it ranges from optimizing some aspects of the code.
You may have heard of them: meta tags such as title or description are the two most popular. But there is more. Below is a list of the most critical on-page optimization actions to take.
Note: Since blog gratified prevails on most websites when talking about these factors, I will focus on blog SEO, that is, optimizing blog posts for relevant keywords. However, all these tips are also valid for other types of pages.
What is a backlink?
Links, also named backlinks, are references to your content on other websites. Every time another website mentions and directs readers to your content, you get a backlink to your site.
For example, this Entrepreneur article mentions our Not Another State of Marketing report page. There is also a link to it, which allows its readers to see other statistics in addition to the one mentioned.
Links Quality Factors
Suspicious or low-quality links (for example, those that Google would consider deliberately created to make it feel like a site more authoritative) could lower your rankings.
That’s why, when building links, SEOs don’t focus on old links. Your goal is to generate referrals of the highest quality possible.
Naturally, like the search algorithm, we don’t know what factors determine the quality of a particular link. However, over time, SEOs have discovered a few:
Link Building
In SEO, we call the process of acquiring new backlinks link building. And as many practitioners admit, this can be a strenuous activity.
If you want to do it right, link-building requires creativity, strategic thinking, and patience. To generate quality links, you need to develop a link-building strategy. And it’s nothing.
Remember that your links must meet several quality criteria. Additionally, it may not be obvious to search engines that you created them deliberately.
How to Monitor & Track Website’s SEO Results
Technical setup, content, and links are essential for a website to appear in search results. Tracking your efforts helps to improve your strategy further.
Measuring SEO success means tracking traffic, engagement, and link data. While most businesses develop their sets of SEO KPIs (key presentation indicators), here are the most common ones:
- Organic traffic growth
- Keyword classification (divided into branded and non-branded)
- Conversions from organic traffic
- Average time on page and bounce rate
- The best landing pages that attract organic traffic
- Number of pages indexed
- Link growth (including new and lost links)
Local SEO
Until now, we have focused on the site’s ranking in search results in general. However, if you have a local business, Google also allows you to position it precisely for potential customers in your area. But for this, you use local SEO.
And it’s worth it.
46% of Google explorations are for local businesses. They look for supplier suggestions and even specific business addresses.
81% of patrons use Google to search for local businesses and look for online reviews.
But wait, is local SEO different from what we’ve been discussing all this time?
Yes and no.
Search engines follow similar principles for local and global rankings. However, since they rank a site based on specific location-based results, they must consider other ranking factors.
Even local search results are different:
- They only appear in searches with local intent (e.g., “restaurant near me” or when someone has clearly defined the location).
- They contain specific results in a relevant location.
- They focus on providing specific information to users who don’t need to go elsewhere to find it.
- They primarily target smartphone users because local searches are often performed on mobile devices.
Local Search Ranking Factors
When crawling local websites, Google analyzes the proximity to the searcher’s location. With the increase in local searches covering the phrase “near me,” it’s only fair that Google tries to show the closest businesses first.
Keywords are also essential for local SEO. However, an additional element of on-page optimization is a single page’s business name, address, and phone number. In local SEO, we call it NAP.
Again, this makes sense because the search engine needs a way to evaluate the location of the business.
Google evaluates authority in local searches, not just links. Reviews and citations (references to a business address or phone number online) also show your authority.
Finally, the information a business includes in a Google business profile (the search engine platform for managing local business listings) plays a vital role in its ranking.
What is black hat Website’s SEO?
The last aspect of SEO that I want to highlight is something that I hope you will never be tempted to use on anything other than a test site.
To put things in context, some SEO specialists are experimenting with black hat SEO for their test websites. Through testing, these SEOs can demonstrate proof of concept and learn how to protect their clients’ websites based on their experiences.
But I repeat: do not use these tactics with your clients or employers because these are not your places of experimentation.
That said, while it may have its appeal and can be used on test sites, black hat SEO generally carries a penalty in search listings.
Black hat practices aim to operate search engine algorithms using policies against search engine guidelines. The most shared black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking (hiding keywords in code so users don’t see them, but search engines do), and link buying.
So why would anyone use Black Hat SEO? Well, ranking a site according to Google guidelines takes time. In some cases, depending on budget, existing website authority, etc., this can take a long time.
However, many “get rich quick with AI” types sold people a severe SEO strategy that turned out to be a significant part of large-scale content abuse.
Should you outsource SEO or keep it in-house?
Whether you work on SEO yourself, delegate it to another team member, or outsource it entirely, you’ll want to make this decision with as much knowledge as possible.
Doing Website’s SEO Yourself
Be honest with yourself: are you absorbed in learning SEO? Do you have a period to learn the basics? Do you have the resources to help you if you redesign your website and unintentionally deindex several pages?
If the response to any of these questions is “no,” then you may not want to take on the responsibility of SEO.
SEO is a long-term task; like a muscle, you must work on it constantly to see results. This may require considerable commitment. If you have doubts, try the best solution: delegating the work.
Learning more about the process and becoming an SEO specialist will prepare you well for content creation because you’ll know exactly what’s most important. And a wide variety of SEO tools help you along the way.
Today, 50% of writers also use AI-powered SEO tools to improve content presentation, and 65% of web analysts say it helps their pages rank better in SERPs. Bloggers also say that AI tools are very effective in assisting them to align their web content with search intent (which influences two of the four factors used to rank pages).
Delegate Website’s SEO to a team member
If you’re unsure you can handle SEO, consider delegating the work to a team member. If you have someone interested in growth marketing, development, or web design, this would be a valuable skill to help grow their career.
Funnily enough, that’s how I got started in SEO. I was an office administrator for work, but I was creating my own website and learning about blogging in my free time. As my journey “home” progressed, I realized that my employer did not cover SEO or blogging as well as it could.
I contacted the CEO to explain why we should invest time (my time) and resources (me) in these areas. It aligned with my business goals and my career goals (I needed to do something creative), so I got the green light.
Outsource Website’s SEO to an Agency
You have no interest in SEO, your team is at capacity, and you can’t spend the budget to fill a full-time SEO role. Now that? The best value for money is to entrust SEO to a trusted consultant. Because?
First, a well-respected SEO adviser is highly skilled at driving organic traffic, leads, and business conversions. They do it day in and day out, so they won’t need the preparation time that you or someone on your team would need to learn the basics.
Incurring SEO costs can mean an investment in your organic search strategy or the amount you pay for salaried search engine marketing (SEM) services like Google Ads.
If you pay for a marketing tool, consultant, or agency to help you optimize your web content, your bill can vary significantly depending on the scope of services you receive.
