Google has come to be known mostly as a Google Search . But we also know a thing or two about SEO, and people ask us all the time for a primer on SEO basics. So we're delivering: This article will be an introduction and overview of search engine optimization (SEO), a mandatory marketing tactic if you want your website to be found through search engines like Google.
1. What is SEO & Why is it Important?
You've likely heard of SEO, and if you haven't already, you could obtain a quick Wikipedia definition of the term, but understanding that SEO is "the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's. unpaid results ”doesn't really help you answer important questions for your business and your website, such as:
- How do you, for your site or your company's site, "optimize" for search engines?
- How do you increase your site's organic search visibility, so it's easy for your content to be found?
- How do you know how much time to spend on SEO?
- How can you differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or harmful SEO advice?
What's likely interesting to you as a business owner or employee is how you can actually leverage SEO to help drive more relevant traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately revenue and profit for your business. That's what we'll focus on in this guide
Why Should You Care About SEO?
Lots and lots of people search for things. That traffic can be extremely powerful for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of very specific, high-intent traffic .
If you sell blue widgets, would you rather buy a billboard so anyone with a car in your area sees your ad (whether they will ever have any interest in blue widgets or not), or show up every time anyone in the world types “buy blue widgets ”into a search engine? Probably the latter, because those people have commercial intent , meaning they are standing up and saying that they want to buy something you offer .
People are searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.
Are you more likely to get your widgets from a trusted resource who offered great information each of the last four times you turned to Google for help with a problem, or someone you've never heard of?
What Actually Works for Driving Traffic from Search Engines?
First it's important to note that Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic in the world (though there is always some flux in the actual numbers). This may vary from niche to niche, but it's likely that Google is the dominant player in the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, and the best practices outlined in this guide will help position your site and its content to rank in other search engines, as well.
Regardless of what search engine you use, search results are constantly changing. Google has particularly updated lots of things surrounding how they rank websites by way of lots of different animal names recently, and a lot of the easiest and cheapest ways to get your pages to rank in search results have become extremely risky in recent years.
So what works? How does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How do you get all of this valuable traffic to your site?
Google's algorithm is extremely complex, and I'll share some links for anyone looking to dive deeper into how Google ranks sites at the end of this section, but at an extremely high level:
- Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher's query.
- They determine relevance by "crawling" (or reading) your website's content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly based on the keywords it contains.
- They determine "quality" by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site as a whole. To put it extremely simply: If the only sites that link to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else on the Web has linked to, and my blue widget site gets links from trusted places that are linked to frequently, like CNN.com , my site will be more trusted (and assumed to be higher quality) than yours.
Increasingly, additional elements are being weighed by Google's algorithm to determine where your site will rank, such as:
- How do people engage with your site (Do they find the information they need and stay on your site, or bounce back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they just ignore your listing in search results altogether and never click-through? )
- Your site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”
- How much unique content you have (versus very “thin” low-value content or duplicate content )
There are hundreds of ranking factors Google's algorithm considers in response to searches, and they are constantly updating and refining their process.
The good news is, you don't have to be a search engine scholar to rank for valuable terms in search results. We'll walk through proven, repeatable best practices for optimizing websites for search that can help you drive targeted traffic through search without having to reverse-engineer the core competency of one of the world's most valuable companies.
If you're interested in learning more about how search engines work, there are a ton of great resources available, including:
Now, back to SEO basics! Let's get into the actual SEO tactics and strategies that will help you get more traffic from search engines.
2. Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
The first step in search engine optimization is really to determine what it is you're actually optimizing for. This means identifying the terms people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.
Sounds simple enough, right? I want my widget company to show up when people look for “widgets,” and maybe when they type in things like “buy widgets.” Onto step three!
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. There are a few key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:
- Search Volume - The first factor to consider is how many people (if any) are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search.
- Relevance - If a term is frequently searched for that's great: but what if it's not completely relevant to your prospects ? Relevance seems straight-forward at first: if you're selling enterprise email marketing automation software you don't want to show up for searches that don't have anything to do with your business, like "pet supplies." But what about terms like “email marketing software”? This might intuitively seem like a great description of what you do, but if you're selling to Fortune 100 companies, most of the traffic for this very competitive term will be searchers who don't have any interest in buying your software (and the folks you want to reach might never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple google search). Conversely, you might think a tangential keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing solutions” is totally irrelevant to your business since you don't sell PPC marketing software.
- Competition - As with any business opportunity, in SEO you want to consider the potential costs and likelihood of success. For SEO, this means understanding the relative competition (and likelihood to rank) for specific terms.
First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they're likely to search for. If you don't already understand who your prospects are, thinking about that is a good place to start , for your business in general but also for SEO.