SEO – The Underrated Driver in Your Marketing Initiatives

In simple terminology, SEO refers to the process of upgrading your website to boost its exposure on the major search engines like Google, Bing, and others. It helps to rank your webpage high on the search page results when an online user searches products or services linked to your business. Hence, the higher your webpage visibility in search rankings, the more likely you will attract the attention of potential and existing customers to your company.

What is the significance of SEO?

Search engine optimization holds a major say in enthralling the attention of organic visitors to your website. High-quality pages that fulfill a user’s requests will appear at the top of the SERPs if you publish them. It is a significant area for searchers to learn more about your website and company.

How does SEO work?

Search engines utilize bots to crawl pages on the web, heading from site to site, accumulating data about those pages, and arranging them in an index. You can consider the index to be a library where a librarian can draw a book (or a web page) to assist you in finding what you are seeking. Then, using dozens of ranking criteria or signals, algorithms examine sites in the index to decide the order in which they should show in search results for a given query. You can expect a librarian to have read every book in the library and therefore can advise you, which one will provide the solution to your inquiries. The same holds with search engine indexing as well.

How Does Google Work?

Several search engines are accessible to users on the web. To keep things easy, let us discuss Google, the most popular search engine on the market.

Google operates in three stages:

1. Crawling

Google uses its bots (which we formerly referred to as spiders) to crawl the web in search of new or updated web pages. Generally, the more links pointing to a page, the easier it is for Google to find that page.

2. Indexing

Next, Google examines the URLs that the bots discover, and tries to make sense out of the targeted web page. Among the multiple influencing elements that come into play in this regard, the most important ones include content, photos, and other media assets. Google index saves the information thus extracted.

3. Serving

It is where the magic happens. After evaluating URLs, Google decides the pages that are most relevant to users’ search queries and organizes them in the SERPs accordingly.

After having an idea of how Google works, it would be important to know how SEO practices leverage Google to rank the web pages.

Usually, SEO professionals categorize the entire SEO activities in off-page and on-page SEO. Both these practices work collectively to give a boost to your website on the search engines. Let’s know more about them.

On-Page SEO

It is the method of optimizing content and HTML source code to clearly explain the purpose of a particular webpage. On-page ranking signals are hence the ones that Google detects on your webpage, as the term suggests. You have direct control over these signals, making them simpler to change and optimize.

On-page SEO variables include the following:

• Title tags 
• Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) 
• Internal linking
• Duplicate content 
• Content length
• Meta descriptions 
• Keywords and semantically related keywords 
• Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)  
• Readability
• Videos
• Images 
• Crawlability 
• Page loading speed 
• Mobile user experience
• Social media share buttons 
• Markups 

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO explains all of the optimization tactics related to your website that take place online, but not on your website. These off-page strategies help search engines and users in determining if the website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy or not.

Here are a few examples of off-page strategies used by marketers:

• Creating connections (more on this later)
• Content marketing
• Public relations (PR)
• Guest posting
• Influencer marketing
• Frequenting forums

When executed effectively, off-page SEO can be an art form. Use a multi-pronged strategy to affect how other sources evaluate your site and content.

Notably, both Of-page and Off-page SEO practices leave a major impact on the web page ranking.

Major Ranking Factors

Several factors that contribute to ensuring foremost search engine rankings are as follows:  

1. Intent

Is your content/webpage satisfying the searcher’s intent for coming to your site? Language, originality, and synonyms all make a difference in this situation.

2. Relevance

Once the algorithm of Google has determined that your content satisfies the search intent of the query, it will search its Google Index to establish where your content fits in terms of relevance. On-page SEO is highly essential here. If you provide clear and most relevant content to searchers, you will most certainly rank better in the SERPs.

3. Quality

Information with a high level of search intent and relevance may appear to be already of high quality. However, the truth is that the Google Algorithm considers quality. E-A-T — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — is how many people refer to this evaluation.

How can you harness the power of SEO for your business?

There are six stages of the SEO process:

1. Research: It includes business research, competitor analysis, current state assessment, and keyword searching.
2. Strategy and planning: It refers to deciding on how to manage content, build backlinks, maintain social media presence, and technical implementation strategies.
3. Implementation:  It indicates the implementation of optimization choices on a webpage and the website as a whole.
4. Tracking: It refers to observing the interaction of web spiders, traffic, search engine rankings, and other measures for producing SEO reports.
5. Assessment: It involves reviewing the compiled effects of the strategy (and its execution) against the stated objectives of the SEO process.
6. Maintenance: It is where you address both major or minor issues with the website’s operation as they arise (e.g., new content that demands optimization as per the strategy)

3 Ways to Improve Your SEO Content

Finally, now that you are well aware about everything related to SEO, knowledge about SEO content is equally important. Here is how you can improve it.

1. Do proper research

Starting with some in-depth competitor research is always a good idea. What do your immediate competitors have to say about you on their blogs? What are the aimed keywords? Look for ways to go into deeper information concerning those topics, as well as content gaps so that you can differentiate yourself from the competition.

2. Write to-the-point content

The length is not the be-all and end-all. Have you noticed how blogs that target a specific term are shorter? Use as many words as you need to get your message through if you believe longer content will benefit your audience. However, keep in mind that many readers spend less and less time reading online posts.

3. Make the content readable

When writing, keep accessibility in mind. You can use several tools l to assist you in deciding the tone and readability of the content.

Takeaway

Summing up, SEO holds high essence when it comes to optimizing your website or blog to fetch the intended deliverables. You need to consider several aspects when ranking your website. For best results, it would be a wise decision to hire the services of a consummate SEO services provider.