What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your website content, structure, and overall online presence to enhance your visibility and search ranking on a search engine results page (SERP). In return, optimizing your SEO, will increase your website traffic, drive conversions and boost sales.
How do search engines rank their search results?
There are numerous search engines, for the article we’ll focus on Google. Google’s main aim is to deliver the most relevant and quality content to searchers. They do this by crawling websites and indexing pages to serve the best search results. Google ranks the relevance of the content they serve according to 5 key factors: meaning, relevance, quality, usability and context.
It’s important for any business to invest the needed time and capital into a professional SEO strategy in order to comply to Google’s criteria, and reap the benefits of having a strategy in place.
5 Core elements you need to implement into your seo-success-plan
1. Keyword research and planning
The goal is to create quality content that will rank best for specific search terms. This involves a tailored, in-depth keyword research process to identify the highest ranking search terms for your business’s services or industry expertise.
For example, a business that offers waste management services would benefit from appearing for search queries related to ‘emergency oil spill’.
2. Content creation and optimization (on-page SEO)
To have the best chances of ranking for a specific keyword, you want to provide the best possible content. This can mean that you need to create new, relevant content, or it could be optimizing your existing content. Optimizing smaller on-page SEO components like title tags, internal links, and content structure can provide improved performance for your business’ SERP’s.
3. Link building (off-page SEO)
Off-page SEO refers to actions taken off of your website to improve your search rankings and generate organic traffic. Largely, this means link building and backlink management.
Backlinks are links on other websites that direct to your website. Google’s algorithm considers backlinks in its ranking factors, so your backlink profile matters.
Building high-quality backlinks can be done in many ways: guest blogging, digital public relations, creating quality content that collects natural backlinks, and more.
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a broad category relating to the technical infrastructure of your website. Stated simply, there are factors other than content, keywords, and backlinks that lead to better rankings and more traffic. Like page speed, website user experience, and mobile-friendliness.
5. Local SEO
Local SEO is about optimizing your website and related properties to increase local visibility and traffic. While it doesn’t apply to all businesses, it’s extremely important for those that have a local focus or a physical location.