What is SEO?
When you build a website for your business, you might expect that your ideal customers will find you online – because that’s how the Internet works, right?
Well, to some extent that’s true. But with so many websites of all different sizes online, it can be hard for any website, especially a new one, to make their mark in order to attract customers.
This is where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a helpful strategy. SEO is a digital marketing strategy used to improve a website's visibility in search engine results so that the site is more likely to be seen online by users.
Note: there might be some unfamiliar vocab in this blog post. If this is the case for you, I'd recommend pulling up my SEO Terms post in another window to refer to.
I like to think of SEO as speaking a search engine’s language. Just like many small business owners, search engines, like Google, want to give the best “referral” possible. In fact, it’s Google’s entire job to give the best referral possible to users. But unlike business owners, Google isn’t a human. So, in order to tell Google that you’re worthy of a referral, meaning, you’re worthy of being ranked high on SERPs, or search engine results pages, you have to speak a language it understands. Which in this case, is the many different elements that comprise an effective SEO strategy.
Below, we’ll dive into what SEO is, why it’s a useful tool, and how you can get started.
Understanding SEO
At its core, SEO is about improving both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.
Despite its acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It's about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they’re looking for, the words they're using, and the type of content they want to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions allows you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
In other words, Google is playing matchmaker between you (the business) and its users (your potential customers).
How Search Engines Work
To understand SEO, it's essential to grasp how search engines work. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages, and putting them in an index. Each search engine’s algorithm then analyzes pages in its index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors to determine the order that pages should appear in the search results for a given query.
These algorithms are designed to rank relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind helps your pages rank higher in the search results.
Key SEO Strategies
As an SEO specialist, I’m all too aware of SEO’s complexity. With changing algorithms, shifting market trends, and evolving search engine policies, even SEO experts are still learning new strategies all the time. However, here are some basic strategies every SEO expert uses to get started on improving a website’s SEO:
1. Keyword Research
Keywords, or the words and phrases that users type into search engines to find what they’re looking for, is, some would say, the basis of SEO. After all, every search starts with the user typing a query, or a string of keywords, into a search engine’s search bar. Understanding the language your potential customers use when searching for your products, services, or content is the first place I direct folks looking to learn about SEO.
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Search Console can help you find keywords related to your business and give you data, such as search volume and keyword difficulty, surrounding them.
2. Content Quality
Content is king (or queen) when it comes to SEO. The quality of your content influences your site's relevance, which is a significant factor in ranking. That’s why it's important to produce useful, informative content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. For more on what Google is looking for, refer to its E-E-A-T Guidelines.
3. On-Page SEO
I like to describe on-page SEO as what you see when you look at a website. It involves optimizing individual pages of your website to rank higher in search engines, including proper tags, meta descriptions, and URLs that make sense.
4. Off-Page SEO
If on-site SEO is what you see when you look at a website, off-Page SEO is what you don’t, instead including all of the external factors that impact your site's ranking. This includes backlinks, which are links to your website from other sites, and strategies like social media marketing or email marketing.
5. Technical SEO
At its core, technical SEO is all of the backend stuff, such as improving the technical aspects of your website to increase the ranking of its pages in search engines. Google’s overall goal in rewarding sites with good technical SEO is to make the site faster, easier to crawl, and understandable for both search engines and users.
If I’ve done my job correctly, you now know a bit more about SEO and how to start implementing it. If SEO has piqued your interest and you’re looking to learn more, I do offer a one hour webinar that dives a bit more into the nitty-gritty, which you can find here. For information about how I can help build SEO on your site, refer to my services page.
