At its core, SEO is the process of making your site rank as high as possible in Google when someone types in “burrito blanket”. The higher your site ranks, the more visible your business is, and the more traffic and sales your business is likely to generate.
Relevant, Optimized Content Wins Every Time
There are a ton of technical SEO factors – site structure, anchor text, URL structure, and so forth. Those details matter but the backbone of SEO is high-quality, optimized content. If you get that right, the rest of SEO will be much easier. If you want to crack the first page on Google, you need relevant, well-optimized content that earns links.
- Keywords are still critical, but context matters more. Google crawlers now analyze the context and look for related secondary keywords that share the searcher’s intent.
- Include clear, keyword-rich titles, meta descriptions, alt attributes, H1 tags, and URLs. These factors tell Google that your site is relevant and help it rank.
- Length matters, but relevance matters more. Google says: “The amount of content necessary for the page to be satisfying depends on the topic and purpose of the page.”
Metadata Matters
Metadata is the title and lines of text that show up on the search results page. Optimizing your metadata is pretty simple:
- Include relevant but not repetitive, keywords, and variations in the title and description.
- Keep it short, but not too short. Google cuts off meta descriptions around 160 characters, so aim for less than that.
- Be clear and concise, so users know what to expect.
Links Matter, But
Links have been a critical aspect of SEO as long as Google has existed. Essentially, links work as ‘votes’ telling Google that other sites think your content is useful and relevant. The more high-quality, relevant links you acquire, the higher your site will likely rank for related key terms. In short, links are still fundamental to SEO. But, quality matters more than quantity. If you invest in link building as part of your SEO efforts, target links from high-authority, high-traffic websites.
User Experience (UX) Impacts Rankings
User experience (UX) plays a substantial role in how well your website will rank on Google.
- Ensure time on page and CTR are high, and the bounce rate is low. These signals are not direct ranking factors, but optimizing your site for high engagement can help indirectly. Happy users, happy Google.
- Make your site easy to navigate. Improve your website’s navigation to make sure users quickly Google said Way find a page that they are looking for. “The simpler, the better” approach works perfectly here. Navigation bars, drop-down menus, internal links, and a site search will help.
- Site speed matters a lot. In an ideal world, your site should load in less than 2 seconds. Image compression, code and structure optimizations, and faster servers will help.
Mobile Matters More Than Ever Before
In 2018, Google moved to mobile-first indexing, which means the search engine uses mobile versions of your site to rank your sites in their results. Google’s move makes sense because more than 50% of traffic worldwide is generated from a mobile device. First, Google suggests investing in responsive design. You need to make your content consistent across desktop and mobile devices and ensure your site loads fast on both mobile and desktop. In short, you need to up your mobile game or your site to languish at the bottom of Google search results.
Voice Search
Voice search has been growing in popularity and will likely continue to do so. It shouldn’t be your #1 SEO priority, but it does make sense to start optimizing for voice search.
Here are a few steps to help optimize your site for voice search:
- Use natural language in content and answer questions.
- Optimize for featured snippets.
- Create and markup an FAQ page