Why Is SEO Important?
In today’s digital landscape, getting found online is more important than ever.
With almost as many websites as people on Earth, it’s become increasingly difficult to cut through the noise. The climb to get to page one of search engine results is getting tougher. Users are more discerning than ever about the content they read and the websites they choose to interact with.
68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (Source: BrightEdge)
53% of all website traffic comes from organic search (Source: BrightEdge)
93% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps (Source: Sparktoro)
93% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps (Source: Sparktoro)
There are lots of search engines out there like Yahoo and Bing. But we’re only going to focus on Google since it accounts for over 90% of search queries worldwide. (Source: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-enginemarket-share) With the advent of search engines, naturally, came the start of SEO.
How Do Search Engines Rank Your Content?
Getting your content to rank highly in search results depends predominantly on two things: One, improving discovery and relevance by creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for; and two, building authority by getting lots of high-quality backlinks to your website.
Discovery, relevance, and authority – those are the three stages that cover how search engines work in a nutshell. And each of these three stages correlates with an action the search engine takes: crawling, indexing, and ranking.
First is the DISCOVERY stage. Search engine bots discover your web page by “crawling” it – which really just means it discovers your web page and takes note of all of the content within it.
Next is the RELEVANCE stage. Once a search engine bot discovers your content, it decides how relevant it is to certain search queries by indexing it, based on signals like keywords within the content.
Next is the AUTHORITY stage. This means building enough credibility through backlinks and other factors, that search engines consider your site authoritative enough to rank high in the search results. Authority directly impacts ranking strength.
How to Create an SEO Strategy
According to Simply Psychology, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as levels within a pyramid.
From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging (friendship), self-esteem, and self-actualization. Needs lower on the pyramid must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs at higher levels.
Your SEO strategy will depend on several factors.
• How established is your business online?
• What resources do you have to dedicate to SEO?
• What industry are you in?
A healthy SEO approach balances building relevance and building authority. That means creating high-quality, relevant content while also building high-quality backlinks. Balancing how much time you focus on one versus the other depends on how much authority your website has right now.
An SEO strategy has website goals and established KPIs. The next important piece of creating your SEO strategy is determining goals for your website and establishing KPIs. By setting goals and putting numbers to those goals, you’ll be able to figure out whether your SEO efforts are actually paying off. Many businesses will simply say, “We want to rank #1 for this keyword,” but that isn’t quite enough.
What are SMART goals?
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Make sure that you’re not setting vague or unrealistic goals for your SEO strategy. Goals should be clear and tied to business objectives. They should be achievable and realistic based on your website’s authority and the resources you’re dedicating to SEO. They should also be time-bound — this is especially important because SEO is a long game. It can take a while to start seeing results, so you have to be thoughtful and realistic about what you can achieve within a given timeframe.
How to Measure Your Website’s SEO Authority
There are a number of different factors that add up to the search authority of your website, but the most important are around BACKLINKS. Measuring authority boils down to assessing the VOLUME and QUALITY of the backlinks you have to your website.
To truly measure your website’s authority, you’ll need to analyze your “backlink profile.” What is your “backlink profile”? Your backlink profile is a list of all the sites currently linking back to your site, which also considers HOW they’re linking to your site, and which pages they’re linking to.
Your backlink profile shows the number of inbound links to your website, the number of unique domains that link to your website, and the QUALITY of those links – which depends on things like how authoritative the web pages that link to your site is.
Analyzing your backlink profile isn’t something you can do manually, but there are tools to help that don’t cost much and are well worth the price. There are also free versions of these tools that will give you a pretty good high level view of your backlink profile.
Why Keyword Research Is Important
Keyword research is the guiding force of your SEO efforts.
It helps you better understand your target audience by giving you insight into what they’re actually searching for. If nobody is searching for what you’re writing about, then your site won’t receive any traffic from Google. This is where keyword research comes into play.
Why Are Topic Clusters Important?
Content marketing has seen a lot of changes over the past several years. Many of these changes can be attributed to the rapidly evolving search landscape, as well as a shift in the way people search, discover, and consume content online.
Let me start by telling you that creating more content in the hopes of having your website show up on Google is not the answer. In fact, adding more content to an outdated existing site architecture can make it harder for Google to find and rank your content. That’s not a situation any marketer wants to find themselves in.
The first notable update, which really shook things up, was Google’s “Hummingbird” algorithm update in 2013. This update focused on parsing out phrases rather than focusing on specific search queries. Many search engine optimizers and content marketers viewed this as an initial shift from a keyword to topic focus.
Why Is Link Building Important for SEO?
Google measures primarily through backlinks.
A signal to Google that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference. Backlink quantity and quality lead to higher ranking.
Backlinks are one of the most important factors in how search engines figure out how high they should rank your content. Why? Because backlinks are a signal to Google that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference. That means that sites with more backlinks – and higher quality backlinks – tend to earn higher ranking in search. The folks at Google said it themselves – they said, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
What Are Rich Results?
These were purely organic search results and simply contained links to a web page. But today, SERPs are much more nuanced as Google has become more sophisticated and developed new ways of displaying information to better aid searchers.
SERPs can include:
• Organic results
• Paid ads
• Featured snippets
• Knowledge graphs
• Rich results
The SERP with rich results looks much more dyanamic and visually appealing, and it offers different ways to access information about the product the user is searching for.
Visually enhanced search results that provide supplemental information to the title, URL, and meta description of a web page.
Rich results can only appear for pages with certain types of information. Google generates rich results by pulling information from a page’s structured data, which is only available for certain types of content. There are many different types of rich results, and you can find a full list in the Google search gallery documentation linked in the resources section. Not every type of rich result is going to be relevant to your business, so just focus on the ones that are.
Common rich results to optimize for include:
- Image packs
- Local packs
- Reviews
- Recipes
- Site links
Since site links appear for branded search terms, they’re more likely to show up for large sites with a recognizable brand and higher traffic.