Do you have any idea how many websites are out there? Almost two billion. How do you stand out in a sea of that many sites? An air-tight marketing strategy that leans heavily on SEO.
What is SEO?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard the term ‘SEO’ thrown around. It stands for search engine optimization, and it is a process of getting traffic from free, organic web searches. SEO helps improve your positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs).
A solid SEO strategy includes:
Identifying relevant keywords
Creating informative and useful content
Optimizing content for search engines and users
Including relevant links to high-quality sites and backlinks
Search engine algorithms weigh your value for a specific search term, and if it deems you a trustworthy resource, it improves your search ranking, so even more people can find you.
Does SEO Work?
When you’re searching for something – information, a product, advice, anything else – one of the first places you’re likely to go is the internet. A vast majority of others do the same. If your organization provides quality responses to search queries, visitors who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer will find you and visit your site, making them far more likely to convert.
Organic search like this is the most prominent way for people to find you. If you’re producing awesome content that gives the user everything they need (and more!), Google and the other search engines reward you with better positioning. Let’s face it, how often do you go beyond the first SERP? Exactly. That’s where you need to show up.
Three Types of SEO Authority
Every SEO strategy needs to rest on a foundation of trust, authority, and relevance. Search engine algorithms rank you higher if they consider you an honest and apt resource. You gain trusted status by linking to relevant social accounts, high-quality links, and producing good quality content.
Authority strengthens the overall visibility and ranking of a website, and there are three types to be aware of:
Domain authority indicates a domain’s ability to rank and is primarily based on the domain’s age, trust, and popularity.
Page authority indicates a specific page’s ability to rank, largely based on age, trust, the amount of value received from links, and the freshness of the last update.
Link authority indicates the ranking power a link carries over. It’s influenced by Nofollow attribute and the page authority, number of links, and the location of the link on the page linking out.
How Your Brand Impacts SEO
Your brand is the promise and personality that shapes the perception of your company held by those outside of your organization. Stronger brands increase brand awareness and prompt consumers to search specifically for your offerings. Online conversations about your brand work their way into search engines, signaling them that you are relevant for your market.
Think about how that influences search. Any reviews, social media mentions, backlinks to your site, and more, all strengthen your SEO. Additionally, it’s super easy to rank for branded keywords…as long as your potential customers know which keywords to use.
Choose Your Keywords Wisely
The point of keywords is to help drive more targeted traffic to your site. These words must be relevant and fit in organically with your content. If you’re heavy-handed with the keywords, it’s not going to be a very compelling read, visitors will bounce, and search engines may rank you extremely low. Keywords are vital, but they’re only valuable if you implement the right ones well.
There are many ways to choose the right keywords for your page or site:
Know whether your consumer is searching for another web page, information, or looking to buy
Learn if head, body, or long-tail keywords are the most advantageous for you
Use a tool, like Google’s Keyword Planner on the Google Ads platform
Refine the keywords with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), to produce related search results based on word association
Optimize your landing pages to link with your keywords and phrases
Analyze your competitors’ websites
What’s the Deal with Backlinks?
Backlinks are a search ranking factor, making them important for your website. You need to position yourself as a reliable, go-to resource and create informative and valuable content that others will want to include on their sites.
Your content should be:
Relevant for your industry
Detailed and comprehensive
Well-written
It also doesn’t hurt if you have data or a fresh perspective that others haven’t shared before
A good number of high-quality backlinks increase trust. SEO benefits from backlinks because they essentially wave a flag at the search engines, saying, “My content is so valuable that others link to it!” The more backlinks you get, the more search engines infer that your website offers valuable info.
SEO is a Long Game, Are You Ready for It?
Will SEO implementation give you results tomorrow? Likely not. If you want an SEO strategy that performs, you’re in it for the long haul, friend. Around six months is when you’ll see notable results, and you can adjust your SEO strategy based on your findings. SEO requires ongoing maintenance and effort, so you need to stay on top of it.
At Good Digital, we love a marketing deep dive and figuring out where our clients can make a bigger splash in their SEO campaigns.