Understanding SEO: All About SEO

Introduction

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be much simpler than it is today.

You perform a quick site analysis, create a semantic core, ensure that all content is original and that all keywords are in their proper places, and that's pretty much it.

But things have changed. Your SEO toolkit is now much broader and more complex.

Nevertheless don’t worry, in this blog, we’ll give you some Key Takeaways and concepts to make you understand all the basics of SEO.

Ranking in Search Engine

What factors do search engines consider when ranking your content?

Understanding how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks your content is essential for getting it to rank well in search.

Getting your content to rank highly in search results is primarily determined by two factors:

One is to improve discovery and relevance by producing a large amount of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for, and the other is to establish authority by obtaining a large number of high-quality backlinks to your website.

There are 3 stages to finding out how a search engine works:

• Discovery
• Relevance
• Authority

The first stage is DISCOVERY. Search engine bots find your website by "crawling" it, which simply means that it finds your website and records all of the content on it.

The following stage is RELEVANCE. When a search engine bot discovers your content, it indexes it to determine its relevance to specific search queries based on signals such as keywords within the content.

The AUTHORITY stage comes next. This entails establishing enough credibility through backlinks and other means that search engines regard your site as authoritative enough to rank high in search results. Ranking strength is directly influenced by authority.

These three stages and actions are mutually dependent.

No matter how authoritative your content is, if it isn't relevant, it has little chance of ranking and again, if your website isn't authoritative, it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is. And if your website can't be found in the first place, it has no chance of ever ranking.

SEO Strategy

There are so many different SEO strategies and tactics available that it's difficult to know where to begin.

Several factors will influence your SEO strategy.

• How well-established is your company online?
• What resources do you have available for SEO?
• What industry do you work in?

A healthy SEO strategy balances building relevance and authority.

This entails producing high-quality, relevant content while also constructing high-quality backlinks. The amount of time you devote to one versus the other is determined by the level of authority your website currently possesses.

An SEO strategy includes website goals and KPIs.

Goals

The next step in developing your SEO strategy is to set goals for your website and establish KPIs. Setting goals and assigning numbers to those goals will allow you to determine whether your SEO efforts are paying off. Many companies will simply state, "We want to rank #1 for this keyword," but this is insufficient.

What are your primary goals for your website?

• Do you want to boost your organic traffic?
• Would you like to increase the number of leads generated by your website?
• Do you want to create a mobile-friendly website?
• Do you want to make certain that your website is accessible to people with disabilities?

Make certain that your SEO strategy does not have any ambiguous or unrealistic goals. Goals must be specific and linked to business objectives.

They should be attainable and realistic based on the authority of your website and the resources you devote to SEO. They should also be time-bound, which is especially important given how long SEO takes.

It may take some time to see results, so be thoughtful and realistic about what you can achieve in a given timeframe.

KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critical indicators of progress toward a goal.

Choosing KPIs to track is an important part of your SEO strategy.

Consider the following indicators:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword ranking
• Conversion rate
• The bounce rate
• Page loading speed
• Creating backlinks

Establish official key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website's SEO strategy.

Once you've determined your SEO goals for your website, you can create KPIs to help you stay on track. Of course, the specific KPIs and numbers you choose will be determined by your website, goals, and business.

Measuring SEO Authority

Several factors contribute to your website's search authority, but the most important ones revolve around BACKLINKS. Measuring authority comes down to evaluating the VOLUME and QUALITY of backlinks to your website.

To truly assess the authority of your website, you must examine your "backlink profile." What exactly is your "backlink profile?" Your backlink profile is a list of all the sites that are currently linking back to your site, including how they are linking to your site and which pages they are linking to.

Your backlink profile displays the number of inbound links to your website, the number of distinct domains that link to your website, and the QUALITY of those links, which is determined by factors such as the authority of the web pages that link to your site.

Analyzing your backlink profile is not something you can do manually, but some tools can help that are inexpensive and well worth the investment. There are also free versions of these tools available that will provide you with a high-level overview of your backlink profile.

Moz is a tool that can help you discover backlinks to your site, find link-building opportunities, and identify links that may be harming your authority. Other paid tools that perform similar functions include SEMrush, Majestic, and Ahrefs.

Thinking about and measuring your website's authority and credibility will give you a good idea of the state of your current SEO and what you need to do to rank higher.

Keyword Research

Your SEO efforts will be guided by keyword research.

It allows you to better understand your target audience by providing insight into what they are looking for. If no one searches for what you're writing about, your site will not receive any Google traffic.

Keyword research is useful in this situation.

Keyword research can assist you in answering questions such as:

• What do people look for?
• How many people are trying to find it?
• In what format would they like to receive information?
• How difficult will ranking for that search query be?

There are various types of search terms in the field of keyword research. These are known by various names, but they all mean the same thing.

They are referred to as Head Terms, Body Keywords, and Long-Tail keywords.

Head Terms are single-word keywords that have a high search volume and competition.

The number of times a specific keyword is entered into a search engine per month is referred to as search volume.

This phrase appears frequently in the SEO world, particularly when it comes to keyword research.

Body Keywords are 2-3 word phrases that have a high search volume but are more specific than head terms and have less competition.

Long Tail keywords are more specific phrases that receive less search volume while being less competitive.

The majority of online searches are for long-tail keywords.

Long-tail does not simply imply that the keyword is extremely long.

Below are some examples of long-tail keywords.

• How to make a good cup of coffee?
• How many cups of coffee is fatal for an average male/female?
• Is coffee bad for your health?
• How old do I have to be to drink coffee?

Your keyword strategy should include a combination of long-tail and body keywords that are guided by head terms.

If a head term has a lot of search volume, the long tail and body keywords beneath it are likely to have enough volume to warrant creating content.

These keywords will be less competitive to rank for and will add up to the same amount of traffic as if you ranked for the head term.

Link Building

When it comes to ranking in search results, creating great content is no longer enough.

Google isn't interested in how interesting your content is; it's interested in how interesting others think your content is. And Google primarily measures this through backlinks to your website.

Backlinks are hyperlinks that connect one website to a page on another. They're also referred to as "inbound links," "incoming links," or "one-way links." Backlinks are regarded as "votes" for a specific page by Google and other major search engines. Pages with a large number of backlinks perform well in organic search results.

Relationships in Link Building

Building links is entirely dependent on relationships.

Consider this: Relationships are all about making connections. You must have a relationship with the person writing the blog post for it to link to your website. You must have a relationship with a news outlet to publish a news piece on their website.

Building meaningful relationships is the goal of link building.

Link building is the process of carefully and tactfully developing meaningful relationships with the right people who can and want to link to your website.

As you can see, link building isn't as simple as blasting cold emails to every blogger, journalist, or influencer in your niche.

It is all about carefully and tactfully establishing meaningful relationships with the right people who can and want to link to your website.

Rich Results

The search landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years.

One of the most significant changes is the introduction of rich results, also known as rich snippets or SERP features. Let's take a step back and define a few terms to better understand rich results and their role in SEO today.

Rich results are visually enhanced search results that provide additional information to a web page's title, URL, and meta description.

Rich results can appear only on pages that contain specific types of information.

Google produces rich results by utilizing structured data from a page, which is only available for certain types of content.

There are numerous types of rich results, and a comprehensive list can be found in the Google Search Gallery Documentation. Because not every type of rich result will be relevant to your business, concentrate on those that are.

Commonly optimized rich results include:

• Image packs
• Local Packs
• Reviews
• Recipes
• Site Links

Image Packs are results that appear as a horizontal row of images and link to a Google Images search.

Local Packs include the three physical locations deemed most relevant to the search query by Google.

Reviews include products, recipes, and other relevant items and are displayed by ratings.

Recipe searches, a carousel of recipes with rating information and ingredients are displayed.

Site Links are searches for a specific domain, Google may return an expanded list of up to ten site links.

There are numerous other types of rich results, but some are beyond your control as a website owner.

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages are Google's responses to a user's search query (also known as "SERPs" or "SERP").

SERPs commonly include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs, and video results.

Another way to put it:

You type something into Google (or speak it). And the result is the SERP.

In the early days of search, SERPs simply displayed "10 blue links."

These were purely organic search results with links to web pages.

However, SERPs have become much more nuanced as Google has grown more sophisticated and developed new ways of displaying information to better assist searchers.

SERPs may include the following:

• Organic results
• Paid advertisements
• Featured snippets
• Google Knowledge graphs
• Rich Results

SERPs are crucial for SEO because they determine how your website appears on Google.

Structured Data

Structured Data is a standardized format for providing page information and categorizing page content.

A markup language is used to create structured data.

A markup language is computer code that humans can write, read, and understand. HTML is an example of a common markup language with which most marketers are familiar.

Structured data, like HTML, communicate content in an organized manner so that search engines can display it appealingly in SERPs.

Structured data assists Google in better understanding the contents of your pages and the purpose of your website, allowing it to provide more relevant, helpful results to searchers.

Google's goal is to provide results that are contextualized to a searcher's query, location, and preferences. Because one of the primary goals of SEO is to optimize your site so that search engines can crawl and index it more effectively, structured data is another tool in your SEO toolbox that can help you achieve this.

Developers are the primary implementers of structured data.

Because it entails writing and editing code, many marketers prefer to outsource this task to a web developer. However, if you are a marketer with limited development resources, you can still benefit from structured data.

Not all Schema markups are created equal: some are easier to implement on your own, while others necessitate more work with additional properties that are either required or recommended.

A good rule of thumb is that the more recommended properties in markup, the more likely you'll want to work with a developer.

Featured Snippets

A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user's query that appears at the top of Google search results. It is extracted from a webpage and contains the title and URL of the page.

Google pulls featured snippet answers from one of the pages on page one of search results, but the page that wins the featured snippet is not always the top result. This opens the door for content that isn't in the top spot to appear above the top spot.

You should be concerned about featured snippets for three reasons.

The first reason, featured snippets appear for many of the terms your target customers search for. Google favors featured snippets for "Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How" queries, which your online content tries to answer. They also tend to appear for high-traffic terms and broad topics.

The second reason is that featured snippets frequently appear first in voice search results. 71 percent of desktop search queries that triggered featured snippets resulted in the featured snippet appearing first in voice search results. This is significant because, according to Google and Bing, voice searches could account for half of all mobile searches by 2020.

The third reason is that you will fail to attract customers if you do not have an effective strategy for capturing how customers are changing the way they search. The featured snippet feature is now capturing significant organic search traffic on desktop, mobile, and voice searches. You should adapt as your customer does.

Conclusion

We know all of these sound a little bit daunting but once you understand them and use all these Takeaways in your SEO Strategy your Inbound Business will thrive! SEO can be confusing but it’s not difficult to learn. All you need to do is be willing to put in the time and effort required to learn the various SEO concepts.