When done right, SEO is why you can find exactly what you're looking for from Google and other search engines. Yep, even if you turn to Google search for a step-by-step guide to fixing your unfortunately timed flat tire.
Harsh truth time:
When it comes to business, at least in my experience, you face a digital uphill battle without having presence on Google.
It’s no wonder then, that SEO is one of the main areas marketers are investing in this year. In fact, data finds that 32% of marketers plan to leverage websites, blogs, and SEO as part of their overall marketing strategy in 2024.
(For context, that was only beaten by email marketing at 33%.)
In this guide, you'll learn what SEO is, discover a strategy to build your online presence — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — and what you must do to position your site in search engine results.
Even if you’re an SEO whiz kid and have the basics down, it’s worth sticking around. “But why?” I hear you ask.
Well, aside from sharing my knowledge based on seven years of hands-on experience in SEO, I’ve also hand-selected some of the most incredible specialists to share their number one SEO best practices with you.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The goal of SEO is to expand a company’s visibility in organic search results. As a result, these efforts drive more visitors to the company’s website, increasing their chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue.
When asked to explain what SEO is, I often choose to call it a strategy to make sure that when someone Googles your product or service category, they find your website.
But this simplifies the discipline a bit.
In reality, there are a ton of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements, including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.
With all of these factors taken into account, SEO primarily drives two things — rankings and visibility.
But before diving deeper, I want to note that many resources make SEO seem complex: they might even scare you away. I promise this guide isn't like that. I'll break SEO down into its most basic parts and show you how to use all of its elements to create a successful SEO strategy of your own.
SEO works by optimizing a website's content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase that content’s ranking and the website’s visibility. While you can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, SEO efforts can take months to fully materialize.
This is what search engines use to determine where to place a particular web page in the SERP. Rankings start at position number zero through the final number of search engine results for the query, and a web page can rank for one position at a time. As time passes, a web page’s ranking might change due to age, competition in the SERP, or algorithm changes by the search engine itself.
This term describes how prominent a particular domain is in the search engine results. Lower search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries, whereas with higher search visibility, the opposite is true.
Both are responsible for delivering the main SEO objectives – relevant traffic and domain authority.
There’s one more important reason why you should invest in and use SEO: The strategy virtually helps you position your brand throughout the entire buying journey.
In turn, SEO can make sure that your marketing strategies match the new buying behavior.
Because, as Google admitted, customer behavior has changed for good.
As of January 2024, Google holds 81.95% of the worldwide search engine market share.
What's more, customers typically prefer going through the majority of the buying process on their own.
For example, 86% of consumers say search engines are the best way to get information. And, across all generations, people overwhelmingly use search engines to get answers online.
Finally, DemandGen’s 2022 B2B Buyer’s Survey found that 67% of B2B buyers start the buying process with a broad web search.
But how do they use search engines during the process?
Early in the process, they use Google to find information about their problem. Some also inquire about potential solutions.
Then, they evaluate available alternatives based on reviews or social media hype before inquiring with a company directly. But this happens they’ve exhausted all information sources.
And so, the only chance for customers to notice and consider you is by showing up in their search results.
Search engines have a single goal only. They aim to provide users with the most relevant answers or information.
Every time you use them, their algorithms choose pages that are the most relevant to your query. And then rank them, displaying the most authoritative or popular ones first.
To deliver the right information to users, search engines analyze five main factors:
And to analyze all this information they use complex equations called search algorithms.
Search engines keep their algorithms secret. However, over time, SEOs have identified some of the factors they consider when ranking a page. We refer to them as ranking factors, and they are the focus of an SEO strategy.
When determining relevance and authority, following the E-E-A-T framework can help tremendously. E-E-A-T in SEO stands for “expertise,” “experience,” “authoritativeness,“ and ”trustworthiness." Here’s what each one means:
As AI becomes a bigger part of the search mix, expertise and experience will become increasingly important for content writers looking to stand out from AI-generated content. Why? Because algorithms don’t have a) the expertise to develop unique opinions or b) the level of personality that a human expert has.
And although these are not direct ranking factors, they can improve your SEO content, which can impact direct ranking factors. In fact, 65% of SEOs say that Google’s 2023 algorithm update (which included the updated E-E-A-T framework) had a positive impact.
As you’ll shortly see, adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links can affect your rankings and search visibility. And that’s because each of those actions improves a ranking factor.
An SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords, and off-page strategies, which earn inbound links from other websites.
To optimize a site, you need to improve ranking factors in three areas — technical website setup, content, and links. So, let’s go through them in turn.
For your website to rank, three things must happen:
First, a search engine needs to find your pages on the web.
Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and identify their keywords.
And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a database of all the content it has found on the web. This way, its algorithm can consider displaying your website for relevant queries.
Seems simple, doesn’t it? Nothing to see here… After all, since you can visit your site without any problem, so should Google, right?
Well, there’s a catch. A web page looks different for you and the search engine. You see it as a collection of graphics, colors, text with its formatting, and links.
To a search engine, it’s nothing but text.
As a result, any elements it can’t render this way remain invisible to the search engine. And so, despite your website looking fine from your perspective, Google might find its content inaccessible.
Let me show you an example. Here’s how a typical search engine sees one of our articles.
Notice some things about it:
That’s where technical setup, also called on-site optimization, comes in. It makes sure that your website and pages allow Google to scan and index them without any problems. The most important factors affecting it include:
Search engines crawl sites just like you would. They follow links. Search engine crawlers land on a page and use links to find other content to analyze. But as you’ve seen above, they cannot see images. So, set the navigation and links as text-only.
Search engines don’t like reading lengthy strings of words with complex structure. So, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them up to include as little beyond the main keyword (for which you want to optimize the page) as possible.
Search engines use the load time — the time it takes for a user to be able to read the page — as an indicator of quality. Many website elements can affect it. Image size, for example. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool for suggestions on how to improve your pages.
A dead link sends a visitor to a nonexistent page. A broken redirect points to a resource that might no longer be there. Both provide a poor user experience and also prevent search engines from indexing your content.
A sitemap is a simple file that lists all URLs on your site. Search engines use it to identify what pages to crawl and index. A robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines what content not to index (for example, specific policy pages you don’t want to appear in search.) Create both to speed up the crawling and indexing of your content.
Pages containing identical or quite similar content can confuse search engines. They often find it nearly impossible to display any of those pages at all. If search engines do find them, your website could be penalized. But it really depends on the
There are nuances to explore regarding duplicate content (and the myths surrounding it), but Olivian Stoica, Senior SEO Specialist at Wave Live Wallpapers, is here to help.
“In theory, it‘s straightforward by definition, but in practice, it depends on context. Google does not penalize duplicate content but rather has difficulty in determining the best page to rank. For most people, failing to rank because of duplicate content seems like a penalty, but it’s not,”
says Stoica.
Stoica notes that there's a nuance in duplicate content and how much the page content matches another on the same domain.
“In my experience with an SEO agency, we focused on leveraging near duplicate issues where several pages shared similarities by 70-80%. There was a lot of boilerplate content shared on hundreds of pages. We had to come up with more unique content for each page that included several page elements like visuals and text,”
So is boilerplate content bad? According to Stoica, that depends on how much boilerplate content you're using on your page. “If it's over 50-60% of the entire page content, it could damage your growth strategy,” Stoica says.
Stoica explains that he’s never seen a manual action or algorithm penalty applied for having duplicate content. But at the same time, he’s never experienced duplicate content at scale.
Final thoughts: “I think we focus on reducing and eradicating duplicate content not because it's harmful as it might have been several years ago, or because other SEO experts would have us believe it, but because it helps optimize crawl budget ," Stoica notes.
This is essential on large websites with hundreds of thousands of pages, Stoica notes. “It's like in life. People hate it when you repeat the same thing. So, why do it on your website?” says Stoica.
Every time you use a search engine, you’re looking for content— information on a particular issue or problem, for example.
True, this content might come in different formats. It could be text, like a blog post or a web page. But it could also be a video, product recommendation, and even a business listing.
It’s all content.
And for SEO, it’s what helps gain greater search visibility.
Here are two reasons why:
While crawling a page, they determine its topic. Analyzing elements like page length or its structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it.
The process of optimizing content begins with keyword research.
SEO is not about getting any visitors to the site. You want to attract people who need what you sell and can become leads, and later, customers.
However, that’s possible only if you rank for the keywords those people would use when searching. Otherwise, there’s no chance they’d ever find you. And that’s even if your website appeared at the top of the search results.
That’s why SEO work starts with discovering what phrases potential buyers enter into search engines.
The process typically involves identifying terms and topics relevant to your business. Then, you can convert them into initial keywords. And finally, you can conduct extensive research to uncover related terms your audience would use.
With a list of keywords at hand, the next step is to optimize your content. SEOs refer to this process as on-page optimization.
On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, ensures that search engines a.) understand a page’s topic and keywords and b.) can match it to relevant searches.
Note, I said “page,” not content. That’s because, although the bulk of on-page SEO work focuses on the words you use, it extends to optimizing some elements in the code.
You may have heard about some of them — meta-tags like title or description are the two most popular ones. But there are more. So, here’s a list of the most crucial on-page optimization actions to take.
Note: Since blog content prevails on most websites when speaking of those factors, I’ll focus on blog SEO — optimizing blog posts for relevant keywords. However, all this advice is equally valid for other page types, too.
According to web analysts and SEO experts, optimizing your on-page content around target keywords is the most effective SEO strategy for ranking highly on SERPs.
For keyword optimization, you’ll need to ensure that Google understands what keywords you want this page to rank. To achieve that, make sure you include at least the main keyword in the following:
The alt tag, on the other hand, is the text browsers will display instead of an image for visually impaired visitors or if the image doesn't load. However, since ALT tag resides in the image code, search engines use it as a relevancy signal as well.
That said, there’s a delicate balance to be had with ALT tag optimization. And, your main priority should always be to use this element to make your content more accessible for end users rather than more optimized for search.
Also, add semantic keywords — variations or synonyms of your keyword. Google and other search engines use them (and the added context they provide) to better determine a page’s relevancy.
Let me illustrate this with a quick example. Let’s pretend that your main keyword is “Apple.” But do you mean the fruit or the tech giant behind the iPhone?
Now, imagine what happens when Google finds terms like sugar, orchard, or cider in the copy. The choice of what queries to rank it for would immediately become obvious, right?
That’s what semantic keywords do. Add them to make sure your page doesn’t start appearing for irrelevant searches.
In the above example, I’m writing a quick introduction for an e-commerce product category dedicated to cat-themed designs.
Because the text is so heavily focused on why cats are great (I mean they are, of course) rather than placing the theme of ‘cat’ within the context of the actual product (cat-themed designs), Google interprets this as being more about pets than designs. That might work for a pet shop, but it’s not ideal for a design marketplace.
In the second example, I’ve targeted my primary audience (crafters) first and placed the theme of cats in the right context from the get-go. (The ‘right’ context is to use these cat-themed designs to produce home crafts.) As you can see Google has registered words like “crafters,” “designs,” and “Circuit,” more than others. And those words are driving the broader intent of the text.
As a result, Google is now classifying the text in the “Hobbies & Leisure/Crafts/Other categories” rather than so heavily in “Pets & Animals/Pets/Cats.” And that’s all because of the specificity of both the word choices and the context.
On-page SEO is not just about sprinkling keywords across the page. The factors below help confirm a page’s credibility and authority, too:
*Note: I’ve been in marketing and SEO for about seven years. But I’m a writer and editor at heart (and by trade), so here’s my heartfelt addendum regarding content length.
Please don’t write long content just for the sake of it.
That’s how you waste your reader’s time and inevitably decrease the value of your content rather than add to it.
When writing or editing, ask yourself, “Does this [section/paragraph/sentence/word/idea] genuinely add value to the piece?” and if it doesn’t, cut it. The real aim should always be to cover the topic thoroughly without adding filler. Filler is boring to read, and it doesn’t move the piece forward.