What is SEO?
SEO means “search engine optimization.” It’s a method of increasing your brand’s quantity and quality of web traffic and exposure via non-paid (also called “organic”) search engine results.
SEO is more about people than the engines, regardless of the name. It’s about knowing the things people are looking for online, the solutions they’re looking for and the terms they’re using, and the kind of content they want to consume. Understanding the answer to those questions enables you to reach out to online users finding solutions that you can provide.
If understanding the intentions of your target audience is one part of the SEO, then delivering it in a manner that search engine crawlers can easily find and comprehend is the second. In this article, you’ll discover how to accomplish both.
What is a Search Engine?
Search engines are answering machines. They analyze billions of pieces of information and weigh hundreds of variables to determine the most likely content to be able to answer your question.
Search engines perform all of this by cataloging and identifying every piece of content available on the Internet (web pages, pdf, images, PDFs, videos, and so on). This process is known as “crawling and indexing.” Search engines then sort it by how closely it matches with the query. This is what we call “ranking.” We’ll go over-indexing, crawling, and ranking more in-depth during the subsequent chapter.
What are Organic search results?
We’ve said before that organic search results are earned by an effective SEO strategy and are not paid for (i.e., they are not advertisements). They were once simple to recognize because the ads were identified as such, and the other results typically consisted of “10 blue links” listed below them. But as our search has evolved, How do we identify organic results?
Today, search results pages, often called “SERPs,” are packed with more advertisements and more dynamic organic result styles (called “SERP features”), unlike anything we’ve seen before. A few examples of SERP features include prominent short snippets (or answers boxes) and “People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, and more. A new SERP feature continues to appear, driven mostly by what users want.
For instance, if you look up “Mumbai weather,” you’ll find a forecast for the weather in Mumba directly in the search results instead of an external link that might offer the forecast. Also, if you search “pizza in Mumbai,” you’ll get the “local pack” result made from Mumbai pizza restaurants. Convenient, right?
It is important to keep in mind that search engines earn money by advertising, and they aim to answer searchers’ inquiries (within SERPs) to keep users returning and keep them on the SERPs for a longer period.
Good SEO can certainly affect certain organic SERP features on Google. This includes featured excerpts (targeted organic results that show answers inside boxes) or related inquiries (a.k.a. “People Also Ask” boxes).
It’s important to remember that there are other search tools that, even though they’re not advertising-based, can’t usually be influenced by SEO. They typically have information obtained from private sources such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.
Why SEO is crucial
It is true that paid ads, social media, paid advertising, and other online platforms drive traffic to websites. But search engines are the major contributors. Organic results are more extensive in the digital space, appear more trustworthy to sophisticated users, and get more clicks than ads. For instance, according to Acuracast, the average click-through rate for PPC ads is only 2 percent.
SEO is also among the few online marketing channels that, when properly configured, will yield dividends over time. If you have a quality piece of content worthy to rank well for the correct terms, the traffic could grow over time, while advertising requires continuous funding to bring users to your site.
Google’s search engine is becoming smarter, but they require our assistance. Optimizing your website can assist in providing more relevant content to the search engine so that your site’s content is properly indexed and displayed in the results of searches.
Do I want to engage an SEO consultant, professional, or agency?
Based on your speed, ability to learn, and the degree of difficulty your website(s), If you are willing to learn, you can do some basic SEO on your own. However, you may find that you’d rather get assistance from a professional. Whatever you decide to do, it’s fine!
If you’re looking for professional assistance, you must be aware that various agencies or specialists “provide SEO services” but may differ greatly in quality. Selecting a reputable SEO company will save you a significant amount of time and money since the incorrect SEO strategies could harm your website more than they can aid.
White hat SEO vs. Black hat SEO
“White hat SEO” refers to SEO methods and best practices, and strategies that follow the rules of search engines; its principal goal is to increase value for people.
“Black hat SEO” refers to strategies and techniques which attempt to trick search engines. Although black hat SEO may work, it places websites at risk of being penalized or removed from indexation (removed from results of searches) and can have ethical consequences. Websites that are penalized have ruined businesses, and it’s another reason to be cautious when selecting an SEO professional or agency.
Search engines share the same goals as SEO
Search engines are eager to support you to succeed. Google even offers a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide similar to our SEO beginner’s guide! They’re also extremely in support of SEO professionals. Digital marketing conferences like Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz’s MozCon are regularly attended by engineers and representatives from major search engines.
Google assists SEOs and webmasters by providing SEOs and webmasters with assistance through its Webmaster Central Help Forum and live office hour hangouts. (Bing, however, regrettably closed the Webmaster Forums they had in 2014.) Webmaster guidelines can differ between search engines and webmasters; the basic guidelines are: Don’t attempt to fool search engines. Instead, give your visitors an enjoyable online experience. To achieve this, you must follow the guidelines for search engines and satisfy your users’ intent.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Don’t deceive your users.
- Create pages specifically for the user, not engines.
- Beware of tricks designed to boost Google’s rankings. One best practice is determining whether you’re comfortable describing your actions on a website’s SEO to a Google employee. Another test you can use is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist? “
- Consider the things that make your website distinctive, attractive, useful, or valuable.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages that have little (or no) original material (i.e., copied from elsewhere)
- Cloaking is the method of showing crawlers on search engines different content than the visitors.
- Hidden texts and links
- The doorway page is designed to rank well in specific search terms to direct visitors to your site.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make sure you have clear, detailed, and engaging web pages with easy-to-find content.
- Make sure page titles are simple and pertinent.
- Links are thought of as an indicator of popularity. Bing recognizes links that have been growing organically.
- Influence and shares from social media are both positive signals that can affect how you rank organically over time.
- Page loading speed is crucial, and so is a pleasant good users experience.
- Alt attributes are used to explain images so that Bing can better comprehend what’s in the image.
Things to avoid:
- Pages with thin content, many ads or affiliate links, or pages redirecting users away from other websites won’t rank well.
- Link manipulation techniques help to increase the amount and quality of links inbound, like buying links or participating in link schemes. They can be removed from indexing.
- Ensure that clean, simple, concise, keyword-friendly URL structures are in order. Dynamic parameters can contaminate your URLs, causing duplicate content problems.
- Your URLs should be informative, short, Keyword-rich, and do not use other characters that do not have letters.
- Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these.
- Duplicate content
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking is the method of showing crawlers on search engines different content than the visitors.
Guidelines to represent your local company on Google
If your company wants to perform Local SEO through an office or a shopfront, it’s eligible to be in Google My Business listing. Google has given guidelines governing what you can and should not create and maintain the listings for such local businesses.
Basic principles:
- Make sure that you can get listed on the Google My Business index. You’ll need an actual address, even if it’s not your residence address, and you must be able to serve customers face-to-face either at your premises (like an outlet store) or theirs (like plumbers)
- Truthfully and accurately represent all your local business information, including the address, name, phone number, web address, business categories, hours of operation, and more features.
Things to avoid:
- The creation of Google My Business listings for companies that aren’t eligible
- A false representation of any core information about your business, for example, “stuffing” your business name using service or geographic keywords or creating listings for fake addresses.
- Utilization of PO Boxes or Virtual Offices in place of authentic street addresses
- The review section on Google My Business. Google My Business listing via fake positive reviews for your business or fake negative reviews of your competition
- The cost of these mistakes is high, and they are caused by an inability to understand the intricacies of Google’s rules.
Fulfilling user intent
Instead of breaking these guidelines to fool search engines to rank you higher, focus on user intent. Try to understand and satisfy the user’s expectations. When someone searches for a topic, they will get the result they want through desired content. This desired result will be the “user intent. “
If someone performs the search term “shoes,” is their intention to find sports shoes, leather shoes, offers on shoes, or something else? Your task as an SEO is to give users the information they are looking for, and in the form they want it.
Common user intent types:
- Informational: Looking for information. Examples: “What is the best type of shoes for hiking? “
- Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “Microsoft”
- Transactional: Searching for something. For example: “good deals on Apple phones.”
It is possible to get a picture of user intent by simply searching the desired keyword(s) and then looking at the search results. If there’s a carousel of photos, others are searching for the same keyword.
Also, look at your top competitors’ content that you don’t. What are you able to do to increase the value of your site?
Offering relevant, high-quality, and relevant web content can help you achieve higher rankings on the results of searches. Most importantly, it will build trust and credibility with your visitors. Before doing any of this, it is essential to know your site’s goals and implement an effective SEO strategy.
Fix the SEO goals of your client or website
Each website is unique, So take the time to know the site’s objectives for the business. This will assist you in determining the specific areas in SEO you need to focus on, the best places to monitor the results, and how to establish benchmarks. It will also help you develop arguments to discuss SEO projects with your bosses, clients, etc.
What are you using as your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine the ROI on SEO investment? What is your barometer for measuring the results of your organic search strategies? Recording this is very important even if its very basic:
For the website ____________, my core SEO KPI is ____________.
Here are some commonly used KPIs to get to the right place:
- Sales
- Downloads
- Email signups
- Contact form submissions
- Phone calls
If your business is one with an area of operation, You’ll need to determine the KPIs that you will use for your Google My Business listings. This could include:
- Clicks-to-call
- Clicks-to-website
- Clicks-for-driving-directions
You might have noticed that terms like “ranking” and “traffic” were not on the list of KPIs, which is a deliberate decision.
But ranking, traffic, and Domain Authority(DA) are not important goals? Not at all! You’ve heard it right. SEO can aid your site to be more prominent in search results and bring more visitors to your website. It’s not that ranking and traffic are ways to achieve a goal. The ranking isn’t much used when nobody is navigating to your website or visiting your site, and there’s no point in increasing the number of visitors to your site if it doesn’t help you achieve a bigger goal for your business.
For instance, if you operate a lead generation website, Would you prefer:
- 100 monthly visitors and 2 people complete a contact form? Or…
- 50 monthly visits and 15 people who fill out a contact page?
Conclusion
We hope you’ll choose the latter option if you’re employing SEO to bring traffic to your website for conversions! Before you begin to implement SEO, ensure that you’ve outlined your goals for your business and then utilize SEO to aid you in reaching these goals, not the reverse. SEO is more than just vanity metrics, and it can help real companies reach their goals and achieve success if done correctly.
