Are you just starting with SEO? You may have heard that SEO can bring more people to your website and help you increase rankings, but you may not know how it works or what it is. Now you’re in the right place. Find out what every online marketer should know about SEO by reading on.
What is SEO?
SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is making a website’s technical setup, content relevance, and link popularity better so that its pages are simpler to find, more relevant to user searches, and more popular. This makes search engines rank them higher.
Search engines recommend SEO efforts that improve the user’s search experience and a page’s ranking. This is done by including content that meets user search needs. Among other SEO best practices, this means using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1). It also means using keyword-rich URLs instead of long strings of numbers and schema markup to explain what the page’s content means.
Individuals use search engines to find what they want on the Internet. Search engines are often the first place people go when they need information, whether it’s about a product, a restaurant, or a trip.
Robots called “bots” help search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web. The bots go from site to site, collecting information about every page and placing it in an index. Think of the index as a large library where a librarian can help you locate what you’re looking for by pulling up a book (or a web page).
Then, algorithms look at the pages in the index and use hundreds of “ranking factors” or “signals” to find out how they should be listed in the search results for a given query. In our library example, the librarian had already read each book and could tell you the one that contained the answers to your questions.
Users can think of our SEO factors as parts of the user experience that stand in for each other. It’s how search bots find out how well a website or web page can help searchers find what they’re looking for.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is making your website rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you get more traffic. Usually, the goal is to be on the first page of Google’s search results for your target audience’s most important search terms. So, SEO is as much about understanding what your audience wants and needs as it is about how to set up your website technically.
Why Is SEO Important?
SEO is a key part of digital marketing because people search for information about products and services multiple times every year. People often use search as the main method for discovering brands online, and it works nicely with other marketing methods. How often you are viewed and how high you rank in search engine results against your rivals can affect your bottom line.
To understand the importance of SEO, let’s break down our meaning into three parts:
Organic search: The results on a search engine results page (SERP) are the unpaid listings that the search engine has decided are the most relevant to the user’s search. “Pay-per-click” ads, or PPC ads, are a big part of many SERPs. Organic search results vary from these ads since they are positioned depending on how the search engine ranks them, not the amount advertisers are willing to pay. You can’t pay to have your page rank higher on search results that weren’t paid for.
Quality of organic traffic: How accurately the content on your site matches the user’s search query. You can invite as many people as you want. Still, let’s say Google tells them you’re an expert on Apple computers when you’re just a farmer selling apples. If that happens, those people are probably going to leave your site without buying anything. High-quality traffic only comes from those who are interested in the products, details, or other resources your site has to offer. High-quality SEO takes advantage of the way the search engine aligns the user’s search intent with the web pages listed in the SERP.
Quantity of organic traffic: The number of visitors who find your website through natural searches. Users are far more probable to click on search results closer to the top of the SERP. This is why it’s crucial to use your SEO strategy to rank as relevant pages as possible. When you get more high-quality site visitors to your site, you’ll probably get more valuable conversions.
Keep in mind that search results with features like “rich results” and “Knowledge Panels” can make your company more visible and give users more information about it in the results.
In short, SEO is the basis of a well-rounded marketing ecosystem. When you know what your website users want, you can use that information in your paid and organic campaigns, your website, social media pages, and other places.
3 Types of SEO
SEO can be broken down into three main parts that you need to know about and work on regularly:
On-page SEO
On-Page SEO ensures your site’s content is useful and gives users a great experience. It involves writing content around the right keywords and can be done with a content management system. WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, and Expression Engine are all well-known examples of content management systems.
Off-page SEO
Off-Page SEO is improving your site’s search engine rankings by doing things that don’t take place on your site. Backlinks are a big reason for this, as they help build the site’s reputation.
Technical SEO
Technical Optimization is the process of doing things on your site that will help SEO but have nothing to do with the content. Most of the time, it goes on behind the scenes.
1 Example of SEO in Action
SEO is based on keywords, but they are no longer the first step to getting organic growth. Instead, list the topics you want your content to cover as your first step.
Start by writing down ten words and phrases related to your product or service. Use an SEO tool to research these words, find out how often people search for them, and develop different versions that make sense for your business. Each keyword you’ve found is called a “pillar,” which is the main support for a group of long-tail keywords.
Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics. In this, you’ll make your pages work better for certain keywords. Use your keyword tool to find five to ten long-tail keywords that go deeper into the original topic keyword for each pillar you’ve chosen.
Set up a blog. Blogging can be a great way to rank for keywords and get people interested in your website. After all, each blog post is a new web page and another chance to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keep track of how well your content does. SEO can take a lot of time and work, so you’ll want to know whether or not your strategy is working. It’s important to keep track of your metrics to see how well your process works and find ways to improve it.
You can use your favorite web analytics tool to track organic traffic. Also, keeping track of indexed pages, conversions, ROI, and where you rank on SERPs can help you see where you’re doing well and where you can improve.
Ways to keep optimizing for new keywords and changing search intent.
Update old blog posts with new, up-to-date information every month if you want to stay at the top of SERPs.
Keep track of how your blog posts rank and which keywords they rank for. This can help you change your subheadings and copy to take advantage of new search intent that your audience may be interested in.
Give your old content more editorial value. Sometimes, a post will be completely out of date. In this case, you should do more than just the average SEO update for the past and give it a full refresh. You can do this by updating outdated information and statistics, adding new sections to give the post more depth, and adding quotes or original data to get more people to link to the post.
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In an industry where buzzwords, complicated strategies, and useless vanity metrics seem to get all the attention, we only care about making content that will help your business make more money.
Search engine optimization is the best way to get people to look at the content on your website.
UpWord Growth offers simple marketing solutions that help businesses like yours succeed by giving the most effective, creative, and scalable strategies and solutions for content marketing. We use our tools to find out what your audience is looking for. We make written and visual content about those topics that are ten times better than what the competition is doing.