Resources

What Is SEO?

We’ll start with the basics first. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The focus of SEO is to increase the quality as well as the quantity of website visitors through non-paid (also called organic) search engine results.

Many people talk about SEO as figuring out how Google’s algorithms work and attempting to adjust your website and the content on it to match their system. But there’s actually a lot more psychology behind SEO and at the core it’s about understanding what people are searching for online.

This includes questions they’re asking, the types of answers they are looking for, the words used to ask the questions, and knowing the type of content they want to consume. You need to know your potential website visitor and deliver content they want to see, but you also need to deliver it in a way that search engines can find and understand the information.

Why Is SEO Important?

There are many different ways to generate traffic to your website. Most are familiar with paths like paid advertising or social media, but the majority of online traffic is driven by organic searches primarily on Google.

While Google is shifting their SERP or Search Engine Results Page around quite a bit (more on that in the local SEO article)[eventual link] organic search results still take up the majority of each page. These results seem more credible to searchers to understand how ads work and receive many more clicks than paid advertisements.

SEO has around 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC.

SEO is also important because it’s essentially free. Anyone can do SEO work and improve their site’s ranking without having to pay Google anything to show up higher (more about PPC in our Google Ads article)[eventual link]. SEO pays dividends over time. Once you turn a Google Ad Campaign off, it no longer shows up on the top of a search results page. But a solid piece of content that ranks for relevant keywords can snowball traffic over time.

Local SEO

If you are a local business or have an actual storefront, you’ll want to set up Google My Business. Having a properly set up account there will greatly improve your rankings with local seo. This is also a place where you can drive customers to leave reviews for your business as well as respond to reviews.

You can also create posts inside the Google My Business platform that can show potential customers offers you have going on or just what is happening in the life of your company. Google loves it when you interact with their platform and adding your service area as well as the services you offer can have a huge positive impact on your local rankings.

Understanding User Intent is the Bedrock for Good SEO

While everything else covered in here will discuss things like having the right sitemap file uploaded for google, keywords, website layout best practices, etc. the real goal for good seo is providing excellent content for the user.

If you have the choice to build a website that is flawless in it’s backend or technical SEO and has amazing links but has junk content or a poorly built website with amazing content, the great content is the choice every time.

If you can provide solid content that users actually want to read, you will outrank other sites.

This is why research is so important to seo. You need to understand what users are trying to find out when they search for keywords related to your business. People search for things in different ways, so take the time to figure out what people searching on Google are actually looking for and write content that is clear and actually helpful. Just putting up a blog post that is stuffed with keywords doesn’t work anymore.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital to understanding user intent. It also can be a massive help when starting to think about the way you want to build the content on your site.

Structuring Content

4 Main Pillars of SEO

Before thinking about getting started, you should know the 4 main pillars of SEO. We’ll break these down a little bit, but the 4 pillars include:

• Technical
• Content
• Linking
• On-Site

Technical SEO

Technical SEO includes a lot of background things on your website, when performing a full website audit we look for things like:

• Sitemap.xml issues
• Page Speed
• Large JavaScript and CSS files
• Proper use of heading tags
• 4XX or 5XX status codes
• Pages blocked from search engine crawling

These are just some of the issues that can create problems for you on the technical side. One of the biggest aspects of technical SEO these days are page speed issues. Google has said that page speed is a ranking factor. It’s important to keep this in mind when looking at ways to improve your SEO.

Content SEO

A popular saying in SEO is “Content is King.” Where the other pillars are more important for search engines finding your website, content is the main pillar for ranking your website. Content SEO includes keyword research, long-tail keywords, clear and organized information, and helpful pieces that make users actually want to stay on your page.

It’s important to build a manageable content building strategy. You can do this by improving the current content on your site and then assessing where your content is lacking.

Linking SEO

The linking pillar in SEO includes both backlinks to your website as well as a proper internal linking structure. Backlinks are considered by Google and other search engines as ways of saying that people recommend your content. A backlink is when a different website has a link to a page on your website.

An internal link is a link on your website to another page on your website. It’s important to build a strong internal link structure that makes it easier for visitors to find other relevant information on your website. When planning out your content schedule, content clusters are recommended because they naturally build a good internal linking system.

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO generally is a mix of the other pillars and generally includes things like:

• Url structure
• Title tags
• Description tags
• Alt image tags
• Schema

With on-site optimization, we look to improve things on your web pages. This can include adding structured data called SCHEMA that helps search engines understand the content on your website. On-site optimization also includes the meta title and description optimization, alt image tags, and proper url structures.

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How Do You Get Started With SEO?

If you’re looking to get started with SEO, our preference obviously would be that you take that leap with us. But like we said earlier, it can definitely be done on your own.

When we first take on a new SEO client we do a few things:

• Run an SEO Audit
• Examine the website for content issues
• Look at trending and ranking keywords
• Begin building a plan

Run an SEO Audit

When we do an initial SEO Audit we are looking to get a general overview of things that are possibly wrong with the site.

We then take a deeper look at all of the potential obstacles in the way of having your content being found on search engines.

All of the errors we find make it harder for search engines to properly find and recognize your website content.

Examine the Website for Content Issues

After figuring out a lot of the technical issues from the Site Audit we examine the current content on the website. We’re looking to get an understanding of what the company does based on the content. If there are pages that are performing really well, we take note of those and measure them against pages that are performing poorly.

We begin to get an idea of where we might want to build out content going forward.

Look at trending and ranking keywords

While looking at the website for content issues, we begin tracking the keywords that you’re currently ranking for. We look to see what is the gap between what you want to rank for and what you currently rank for? We want to know how difficult it will be to rank for the keywords you really desire.

Any company that tells you they can get you on the first page for very difficult keywords in a very short amount of time is lying to you in order to gain your business.

Begin building a plan

Once we have all of this data and analysis of the website, we can begin creating a plan of action not only for fixing any errors that show up, but also a detailed content plan that uses a strong internal linking strategy.