What is search engine optimisation?
The aim of SEO, is to ultimately increase conversions and revenue for your business, through organic search. This approach focuses on driving highly relevant traffic to your company website. As a result, the traffic that you receive, will be more likely to convert into sales or qualified leads.
The 3 Pillars
To achieve success with any SEO campaign, there are 3 main areas that you must succeed in, to be able to achieve successful results. These 3 areas are often referred to as the 3 pillars of SEO. These include:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO and Content
- Link Building and PR
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of making your website friendly for search engine crawlers; so that it can be easily crawled and indexed. Search engines like Google, Bing and others, need to crawl your website to be able to understand it. After crawling, your website’s pages should then be Indexed in search results for the respective search engine. It’s important to realise that when you search on Google for a particular topic or website, you’re not actually searching the internet. Instead, you are searching Google’s Index of the internet. Similarly, this is the same process with Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine.
The goal with technical SEO, is to ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index your website’s pages. This means that a search engine must be able to access, crawl, correctly interpret and index your website’s pages without any technical difficulties. Therefore, technical SEO focuses purely on the technical elements of your website and has nothing to do with content or backlinks. The aim with Technical SEO is to optimise the infrastructure of your website. Commissioning an SEO consultant or agency, will allow them to assess and fix where necessary, the following technical aspects within your website;
- Optimising URL Structures and Site Directories
- Canonical URLs
- Navigation, Breadcrumbs & Menus
- Pagination
- Specifying Preferred Domains
- SSL and HTTPS Secure Websites
- Checking Robots.txt files
- Checking XML Sitemap files
- Implementing Schema Structured Data Markup
- Optimising 404 Pages
- Website and Page Speed
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Mobile Friendliness and Responsiveness
On-page SEO and Content
On-page SEO requires you to optimise your website pages so as to rank higher for particular search terms and topics. Ultimately, this helps you achieve more relevant traffic to your website via search engine users. The work involves you optimising your on-page content and HTML source code. Unlike off-page SEO, which involves building links and other external SEO tasks.
On page SEO includes:
- Creating topically Relevant Content
- Creating Content That Has Great Link-ability
- Using Title Tags Correctly
- Properly Formatting URLs
- Include Relevant Image Alt Tags
Link Building and PR
Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites. i.e another website’s content, will link back to your content on your website. Hence the term “backlinks”. Your backlink profile is probably one of the most important factors for successful SEO. In fact, this is the area that most SEO professionals will spend most of their time, during an SEO campaign.
Once the Technical SEO and Onpage SEO is done, it’s vital to acquire backlinks from other websites. This tells Google that your website is great because so many other ‘quality’ websites are linking to it. Google’s algorithms are very complex and they are always evolving. However, backlinks remain one of the most important factors for any SEO campaigns and it is a huge signal for search engines to determine the position of a webpage in a Search Engines Results Page (SERP).
Therefore, without a doubt, link building is one of the most important factors for SEO. While backlinks or link building remains vital to an SEO campaign, it’s equally important to recognise that not all links are equal. When building backlinks to your website, it’s important to remember the following:
- The trustworthiness and authority of the website linking to you.
- The topic and relevance of the website linking to you.
- The anchor text used for incoming links.
UX/UI
Although often not seen as part of the 3 pillars of SEO, User Experience Design (UX) and User Interface Design (UI), also form an integral part of the work on your website for a successful SEO campaign. This is because UX/UI involves creating the best experience for your users. Ultimately, the better the experience and the easier it is to navigate your website, the higher your conversions will be and the more business you will acquire.
This is why UX/UI is an important consideration for your SEO campaign. You can send plenty of qualified traffic to your website, with a great SEO campaign. However, if your potential customers arrive on your website and your website has not been optimised for great UX/UI, then the likelihood is, that they will leave before making a sale, or generating a lead for your business.
Here are some important consideration for UX and UI:
- Understand your users and their needs
- Ensure your website is easy to use and consistent
- Create a fast and responsive website
- Create a user friendly navigation and site structure
- Use visual graphics and icons to represent information and data
- Ensure that your website has easy to read typography
- Simplify forms and other interactive elements
- Continue to test and improve your site using informed data and analytics
Other Considerations
A truly comprehensive SEO campaign, requires a lot of work, planning, executing and continuously re-assessing. Below are some more important areas, for a successful campaign.
Audits
SEO audits are important steps to take at the beginning of your SEO campaign. To carry out a comprehensive SEO audit, it’s important to cover the following:
- Ensure that only 1 version of your url is being indexed by Google
- Carry out a full website crawl to check for broken links and resources, as well as HTTP status of external links
- Check that Google is correctly indexing your website’s pages, using Google Search Console.
- Check if your website is number 1 in search engines for your branded search term
- Do some basic on-page SEO checks, including title tags, meta data, content and social tags
- Check for duplicate content or low word count
- Check that your website and pages load quickly. Google page speed insights is a great tool for this.
- Check schema structured data markup is implemented correctly, using Google’s structured data testing tool.
- Assess your current organic traffic and best performing pages, using Google Analytics. Check the rate at which your rankings are improving or getting worse and why.
- Analyze your backlink profile and assess the quality and authority, of your backlinks. Also, have the aim of finding and fixing, any lost or broken links.
- Find content gaps on your website and in the market, with a plan to target keyword terms and topics, that are commercially valuable to your business and useful for your customers.
- Fully audit your content and delete all unnecessary pages and improve existing pages
Analytics and Data
To properly assess SEO work, it’s vital to continuously track and assess the steps that are taken. This ensures that progress is being made and that you are maximising your efforts. That’s why SEO professionals use a variety of software tools to track the success of your SEO campaign. Furthermore, they should also teach you the basics, so that you can make informed decisions about your SEO too.
This approach gives you access to research, analysis and insight. Which in turn, gives you the edge that you need, to stay ahead of your competitors. Here are some of the tools that SEO experts use, to track your progress:
- Search ConsoleThis is used to track data in Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Ultimately, this allows you to see how your website is doing in search results, before users come to your website
- Google AnalyticsGoogle analytics provides you with data, on how users interact with your website. i.e, once they have arrived onto your webpage. This includes data such as, user acquisition, user behaviour, audience demographics, conversions and it also, gives data in realtime.
- Keyword/Rank TrackingKeyword or rank tracking tools, such as RankWatch, SEranking and other tools, allow you to track your rank for particular keywords and search terms. This helps you keep a close eye on your position and competitors
- BacklinksUnderstanding both yours and your competitors backlink profile, is essential to a successful SEO campaign. That’s why, gathering backlink data is vital to formulate a backlink strategy. Tools like, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic and others, are perfect tools for gathering insight into your own backlink profile, as well as your competitors.
Local SEO
Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to customers in their area. Search engines such as Google, rely on local geographical content, social profiles, citations and local backlinks, as signals of relevant content for users.
Here are some of the main considerations for your local SEO:
- Google My Business (GMB)Well optimised GMB pages are vital to local search success. You can create a GMB page for free.
- Add Location Pages For local search, it helps greatly to list you NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) details of every location you have on your website. This shows search engines that you are a real business, with local presence.
- Citation ListingsMake sure that your NAP details are listed correctly on local and industry specific directory websites
- Create Local ContentEnsure that you create local content for your website pages, this is the best way to produce content that meets local search intent.
International SEO
If your intent is to promote your website and brand globally, then International SEO must form part of your campaign. Here are some areas that SEO professionals will consider, when managing your international SEO:
- Choose your language and country targeting
- Understand your target audience
- Use localised language and carry out keyword research considering local terminology
- Identify and analyse your competitors in your target country
- Choose your preferred international site structure; either ccTLD (top level domains), sub directories or subdomains, allow you to structure your site for different languages and countries
- Use simple navigation, for users to navigate between their desired language or location
- Use html hreflang tags to signal to search engines the region or language of a particular page. This helps avoid duplicate content issues that can arise between similar content, aimed at different regions
- Use appropriate meta data to signal target country and language
- Where possible, use local IP addresses or hosting
Conclusion
As you can now hopefully understand, SEO is so much more than just picking a few select keywords. A comprehensive campaign consists of many areas and has many considerations. Furthermore, not all SEO campaigns are the same. Each campaign should be optimised to your specific business needs, your industry and of course, your budget and other marketing activities.
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