This is exactly what SEO is—the practice of optimizing your content to appear higher within search results. In general, we turn to Google to find the answers to pretty much all of our questions. So it’s no wonder that business and website owners everywhere do what they can to make their information findable on Google.
The first step in accomplishing great SEO is creating a website on a platform that facilitates easy customization and content updates, and provides the tools you need to optimize your site elements.
Once you have the foundations of your site ready, you’ll need to pay attention to many small details such as metadata and linking, which can help improve your rankings. This article will cover what it takes to implement those details and make sure that they are meeting SEO standards and eventually SEO ROI.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing websites so that they rank well on search engines through organic (non paid) searches. This is one of the most crucial marketing strategies for any business.
Because Google aims to provide a positive user experience for its searchers, it wants to present the best possible information available. Therefore the focus of SEO efforts should be the process of making sure search engines recognize your content as the leading information on the web for a particular search query.
How does SEO work?
Search engines use robots that crawl webpages across the internet in order to determine what content they contain and, in turn, what the pages are about. These bots scan the code, picking up the written text, images, videos and more that appear on webpages to gather all information possible. Once they’ve gathered enough intel about the type of information available on each page and determined that this content will be useful to their searchers, they add these pages to their index. The index is essentially all possible web results that a search engine stores to provide to a potential searcher.
Search engines assess what the best result is based on what searchers are looking for, as well as what other information already exists online. When someone searches, their algorithm matches the user’s search query to the relevant information in their index, providing searchers with an accurate answer to their query. The platforms then use hundreds of signals to determine the order in which the content will appear for each searcher. These signals are what SEO experts try to master.
It’s important to note that Google does not release specifics about their algorithm or process, so it’s impossible to know exactly what factors impact indexing and rankings. SEO, therefore, isn’t a perfect science and even when it seems that all optimizations have been implemented, it often requires patience and continual tweaking to see results.
On-page vs. off-page SEO
Since there’s no way to know exactly what influences search engine rankings the most, experts recommend that your SEO strategy contain a variety of tactics. Those tactics can largely be broken down into two categories: on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to the strategies that you implement on your webpages themselves, including everything from the design and written content, to your metadata, alt text, sitemap, canonical tags and more. Off-page SEO refers to the steps you take outside of your pages. This includes elements like external links, social posts and other website promotion methods.
Both on-page and off-page SEO are essential in driving traffic to your site and in ultimately signaling to Google that your site is a significant player on the internet. By letting Google know that your pages are important and that people are interested in learning about what you have to offer, you can help your pages rank higher and gain more traffic.
Pros and cons of SEO
Pros of SEO
- Increased website visibility: If you’re consistently appearing at the top of search results, so people are seeing your site and hopefully remembering it too.
- SEO can be a cost effective way to drive users to your website: It’s not totally free, but can cost less than paid advertising.
- The benefits of SEO are often long term: Getting your pages to rank in search can help you generate traffic and conversions over years.
- Ranking high in search can create higher credibility and trustworthiness for your site, and in turn your business.
Cons of SEO
- SEO is rarely a quick win: It takes time to setup and a strategy and implement it. SEO is also a case of constantly optimizing websites and content to rank or maintain search engine rankings.
- SEO results can be unpredictable: Your efforts are at the whim of search engines algorithms which can change and update. This may lead you to need to change strategies.
- Search engine results can be competitive: Depending on the search term and competitors in that space. It can be difficult for smaller brands to compete against larger brands with more brand and product authority.
- Some parts of SEO, like technical SEO, require specific expertise.
How to implement SEO
The first step in implementing SEO best practices is creating an outstanding website. Make sure that your website is easily navigable, provides a great user experience and clearly presents the information you want to convey. This ensures that you’re on the right track to providing an excellent answer to searchers’ queries.
However, SEO is much more than just a great website. Here are some practical steps you can take to get started with SEO:
- Make an SEO plan
- Do keyword research
- Optimize page speed
- Write your title tags and meta descriptions
- Implement alt text
- Create internal links
- Work on external links
- Check that your site is mobile friendly
- Analyze results
01. Make an SEO plan
Search engine optimization requires work and consistency, making it essential that you have a plan in mind before diving into the specifics. Be sure to think about your SEO strategy in line with your larger goals, so that you can understand whether your efforts were successful. For example, if you’re an eCommerce website looking to utilize SEO in order to bring more traffic and make more sales, your SEO plan might look different than if you want to raise brand awareness or get more foot traffic to your brick and mortar store. Be sure to have these goals in mind ahead of time and to optimize your site accordingly.
Specifically, think about details like your site’s URL, as well as larger aspects like if you’ll have a dedicated employee for SEO, or if you plan to optimize your site alone. Also, be sure to plan from the get-go how and when you’ll take stock of your pages’ SEO performance and optimize. Consider how you will check your rankings and what you consider a success.
If you’re unsure what the best route is for various optimizations, consider trying one option and storing the others in a list for potential future use. Take note that SEO success takes time, so be sure to be patient.
02. Do keyword research
Arguably one of the most important parts of understanding and implementing SEO is doing keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding the most relevant words to use on your webpages. By doing some investigating, and using professional keyword research tools, you can understand how people around the world tend to search for things related to your product or service.
We suggest thinking of a number of topics that are related to your brand and using these as driving forces in your keyword research and content creation. In recent years, Google has gotten better at understanding that beyond the specific words that pages can be optimized for, there are overarching topics that pages can provide an answer for. Instead of searching for just one keyword upon which to base your SEO strategy, consider the general group of keywords that your page could rank for based on the given topic. You can still choose a top keyword to use in your page title or URL, but think about your pages as providing complete answers to the topic, rather than focusing solely on that one keyword.
So, let’s say your name is Jenny and you sell flowers. You may think the best route is to optimize your homepage for the keyword “flower shop.” While this may be a fruitful choice, it shouldn’t be the only word that you focus on. Instead, think of the various topics that you specialize in and that someone searching to buy flowers will want to know. Consider subjects like flower delivery, flower freshness or types of flowers. Including information about these topics will ultimately make your site a better resource for someone who wants to buy flowers. By providing a better user experience, you are also signaling to Google that your pages are strong contenders for anyone searching for a complete flower solution.
But keyword research does not end there. Continuing with the flower shop example, you may notice that the search results page for “flower shop” is dominated by big name brands that your small store can’t compete with. In this case, you might want to focus on your geographical location (local SEO) or a niche that you specialize in (utilizing long tail keywords). Including this information on your webpages will let Google know that you are a strong option when people are searching for something that you specifically provide.
03. Optimize page speed
One of the factors that Google takes into consideration is page speed or loading times. How fast your website loads is an important element of user experience. A slow website will turn users away from your site before they even see what it has to offer. It’s therefore essential that you pay close attention to this and make sure to optimize your website speed.
Page speed can be broken down into three main categories that are often referred to as core web vitals. These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time from a click on a URL until a user can view the most prominent content on a webpage.
- First Input Delay (FID): The time between a URL click and when someone can interact with your site elements. In other words, when a user can click on something on your page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable your site elements are while your page loads. This number is ideal when it is low—indicating that as your page loads, the elements are more or less in the place they will be once your page is fully loaded.
Together, these elements make up what Google considers important when it comes to loading times. Some of the easiest ways to ensure that your site loads quickly include not overloading it with media or features, optimizing image sizes and sticking to one or two fonts throughout. These will make your site look cleaner and feel more professional, as well as keep your loading time down.
04. Write your title tags and meta descriptions
Metadata refers to the information that you provide Google to describe what your webpage contains. Important aspects of metadata include title tags and meta descriptions. When you conduct a search on a search engine, each result is presented with a headline and description letting you know what kind of content you’ll find on the page. Providing Google with that information will help both searchers and Google understand the most important parts of your pages.
Many SEO experts consider your meta titles, or title tags, and meta descriptions to be some of the strongest SEO signals that you can send Google. It is therefore critical that you try to include your most important keywords in your title tag.
Title tags and meta descriptions also have an underlying SEO advantage. They give you control over the text that searchers see when they first encounter your website. Including enticing text that clearly answers the searcher’s query can lead to more clicks to your website. The more people that click on your site, the more Google notices that it is a good match for their searches and the higher they might rank you.
It is essential to note, however, that Google does not commit to using the metadata that you provide. They can choose to change your headlines or descriptions as they see fit. In fact, in recent months it seems as though Google is moving increasingly towards a model of not using provided title tags and meta descriptions. That said, the titles and descriptions that you write for your page still have the potential of being used on SERPs (search engine result pages) and are worthwhile to optimize.
05. Implement alt text
Alt text, or alternative text, is the small description that you give to the images on your site. It is embedded into your site’s HTML and is an important SEO asset. Bots that crawl webpages can quickly read alt text to understand what an image contains.
Alt text is also an important accessibility feature, helping blind web browsers get the full picture of your pages, even without seeing them. Tools that read webpages aloud can read alt text to help explain what images contain to those who cannot see them.
This alternative text also makes your images more likely to appear on Google searches, both in the Google images section, but also increasingly at the top of regular search result pages. Images are becoming more and more standard across Google searches, and the better your alt text, the more likely that your image will rank. Of course, if your site is getting exposure both from ranking for images as well as content, you are likely to gain more traffic. Google also perceives webpages that utilize alt text to be more optimized in general. This can help your site appear better in the eyes of search engines.
An important thing to consider is exactly how to write alt text. When you look at an image you can likely think of various ways to describe what you see. For SEO purposes, it’s recommended to think strategically about your alt text and try to include some keywords to give your site an extra push. However, alt text cannot be only keyword focused; it should still accurately explain what the image depicts.
