Search Engine Optimization or SEO refers to the process of upgrading your website in order to boost its visibility when consumers use Google, Bing, or other search engines to look for products or services related to your business. If you are visible among the first in search results, it is more likely you are going to attract the attention of new or existing clients to your company.
Because organic search is the most common way for people to find and get online content, an effective SEO plan is critical for increasing the quality and quantity of visitors to your site.
SEO is a crucial component of digital marketing, because individuals make trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Brands’ major source of internet traffic is frequently searching, which is supported by other marketing channels. Higher placement in search results than your competitors can have a significant influence on your end result.
Search results have evolved in recent years to provide users with more specific answers and data, which are much more likely to keep them on the results page rather than sending them to other websites.
The cornerstone of a comprehensive marketing strategy is SEO. When you know what your website visitors want, you can use that information in a variety of ways, including sponsored and organic marketing, your website, and social media.
Why is SEO important?
Organic search results
The search engine has determined that the unpaid listings on a search engine results page (SERP) are the most relevant to the user’s search. PPC (pay-per-click ads) occupy a large section of many SERPs. Organic search results differ from paid results because they are ranked according to the search engine’s organic ranking algorithms rather than by advertiser bids. It is not possible to pay and be higher in organic search results.
Quality of organic traffic
It refers to the user’s and their search query’s relevance to the material on your website. You can attract all the traffic in the world, but if they come to your site because Google tells them that you sell Apple computers when you’re actually a farmer selling apples, those visitors will most likely depart without converting. Only visitors who are really interested in the products or information your site provides are considered high-quality traffic. High-quality SEO is very important for the user’s search experience and ranking for relevant queries.
Quantity of organic traffic
It is the number of users who reach your site via organic search results. Users are considerably more likely to click on search results that appear toward the top of the SERP, which is why it’s crucial to employ your SEO strategy to rank relevant pages as high as you can. The more high-quality visitors you attract to your site, the more likely you are to experience a rise in important conversions.
How Does SEO work?
Crawlers, often known as bots or spiders, are used by search engines such as Google and Bing to collect information on all of the content available on the internet. The crawler begins with browsing an online page and then follows internal and external links to other sites’ pages. The crawler examines the content on those pages, as well as the context of the links it followed, to figure out what each page is about and how it’s semantically connected to all the other pages in the search engine’s huge database or index.
There are many aspects that go into the algorithms of search engines, and those factors are always changing to keep up with changing user behavior and improvements in machine learning.
There are 2 elements of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page SEO
These two paths are equally important. On-page SEO is about creating content to improve your visibility and ranking. This means that you need to incorporate keywords into your pages and content that is of high quality and publish it regularly. Make sure your metatags, meta description, and titles are rich with keywords and well written.
On the other hand, Off-page SEO is a kind of optimization that is happening off your website, and it is usually referred to as earning backlinks. This part means building relationships and creating content that is worth sharing. It is usually considered a more difficult part of SEO, but it is more than worth it for your website’s success.
How to Do SEO Yourself?
Let’s start learning how to do SEO yourself. It is easier to understand than to take action and spend time doing it. SEO is all about making changes constantly and monitoring the analytics. The results are not coming immediately. It is a long process and takes a lot of time. If you are impatient and you expect immediate results, you have to learn that SEO doesn’t function like that. But a very important thing is that SEO gives long-term success which is worth waiting for.
Why is content important?
You have probably heard by now that “content is the king”. Why is it so? Just think of the Google user that searches for the content he needs. There can be a lot of search results, but not all the results have the content they need. So, it is very important for you to have relevant, high-quality content that will make the user visit your page and stay there.
Google wants to present the best possible results that are matching users’ search queries. It is on you to do the best SEO so you can be among the first on the search results page. But, there is no use to do the best SEO, if your content is not worth reading.
There are some important elements of the content you should pay attention to.
Quality of the content
It used to be the norm to post a piece of content with a bunch of keywords in it. You were a standout if you created high-quality material that genuinely answered someone’s problem, which made it simple to rank.
Today’s material is considerably better, and many internet firms maintain blogs to add value to their sites and improve their Google rankings.
It’s not simple to come up with outstanding content, but the good news is that you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. You can build on top of what others have done, but just add additional value and depth to your piece of content.
The bottom line is that your content must solve an issue or offer a solution to whatever drew the reader to your post in the first place. If it doesn’t, they’ll leave your page soon, notifying Google that your material isn’t fixing anyone’s problem.
Intention
Google puts a lot of attention on purpose. When a user types something into the search field, it wants to know what they’re looking for.
- Was there something they’d want to know?
- Are they attempting to purchase something?
- Are they doing any window shopping?
You, as the content developer, must be aware of this as well. You can’t write a piece about the “best ice fishing rods” and include the phrase “bass fishing” as the primary keyword. It doesn’t make sense because most people don’t fish for bass in the cold with ice fishing rods. As a result, you’re not answering the query correctly, and Google will notice.
Up-to-date Content
Google rankings are facilitated by frequent posting. However, uploading new material isn’t the only approach to alert Google to the fact that you’ve updated your site. You can do a lot of things with the information you’ve already published to make it more updated.
Updating your material for accuracy, repairing any broken links, and upgrading old data with new, more relevant information are all ways to demonstrate to Google that your piece of content still deserves to be on page one.
How to Create high-quality Content?
Understand user intention: You must understand what the reader intends to do when they come to your page.
Create a customer avatar: You must also understand who your reader is, what they enjoy, detest, and why they are there.
Break up the text: Because people’s attention spans are short, large walls of text are no longer effective; instead, use plenty of headers and graphics to break up the text.
Make it actionable: Nothing is more frustrating than reading a piece of content and not understanding everything you need to know to complete a task. Your information should be comprehensive, but it must also respond to the questions.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is needed not only to make content but also to create links. You need strategies to choose how you intend to implement them. A very common mistake is that people do the research and implement the keywords once and they stop monitoring them and finding the best solution.
People usually do keyword research when they redesign their website or launch a new marketing campaign. They do it for some time, then cease updating their pages. They believe that is a task you do just once. In reality, the situation is the opposite. The greatest SEOs are always researching keywords.
We do Keyword research for several reasons, the two most important of which are to rank on Google and to develop relevant content. Keywords can often lead to inspiration by revealing exactly what people want to know based on their search terms.
How to make a keyword selection?
There’s a lot more to think about when talking about keyword selection than just running through your keyword research tool and picking the first keyword that comes up. You must comprehend the intention behind the keyword as well as its competition.
For SEO, keyword study includes gathering all potential variations of keywords that are relevant to your present site, content, products, services, and so on, as well as relevant to your ideal customers or users but not immediately related to your current offerings.
Keywords relating to marketing or recruiting for small businesses, for example, could be of interest to a site’s users but not immediately relevant to the site’s products if the site you’re researching sells accounting software for small businesses. Small company marketing keywords may not appear to be relevant to the present site in this situation, but they are for the same people who the site is aiming to attract.
Create the initial list of all potentially relevant keywords. Keep in mind that most tools will generate large lists of keywords that may or may not be relevant for you. Then reduce down to only those terms that are truly relevant for the site you’re researching and its potential users. The terms must then be categorized, ranked, and grouped.
Creating your initial keyword list is the first step in your SEO keyword research. There are a lot of places where you may get keyword lists. You’ll have to figure out which sources are best for you, but the ones listed below should get you most of the way there.
What is it that you need to pay attention to when using a tool for certain keywords: the keyword, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, competitiveness, CPC, and current rank.
Understand the business you are doing SEO for
Understanding the business or site in question should be the first step in starting any new keyword research project or developing keyword lists. If you’re an outside consultant or agency, this is especially vital because you’ll never understand the business or its clients as well as individuals who deal with them on a daily basis.
If you’re an in-house SEO conducting keyword research for a new company or division, it’s critical that you understand the products or services on offer, as well as the needs and pain points of present stakeholders, both users, and internal stakeholders. You may not be able to develop a thorough list of keywords or evaluate if those keywords are relevant and vital, if you lack this information, especially in complex or highly technical businesses.
How to get ideas for keywords?
Spend a couple of hours exploring the website and making a list of keywords that may be useful.
Send a preliminary “SEO keyword discovery questionnaire” to the client, which includes questions and requests for information such as:
- A list of business goals.
- Do you have seasonal offerings or content?
- Make a list of the terms you believe are the most significant to you.
- Are you planning to introduce a new product, service, or content category in the near future?
- Make a list of the audience you want to target.
- Make a list of your competitors.
- In which geo-locations do you work?
Consider interviewing marketing managers, salespeople, product specialists, or even current/potential site users or customers to gain a thorough understanding of the various ways a product or service may be referred to, as well as the problems they are trying to solve by visiting the site.
Keywords Brainstorming
Include team members, clients, your content team, and others in the keyword brainstorming process. It can help you come up with more keywords and more relevant keywords than you could on your own. It will also improve their understanding of the keywords’ significance and the importance of the keyword research itself. Hold brief brainstorming sessions with clients to see what terms they think are useful based on their understanding of their website.
Create a Client Persona/Avatar
You may not have access to pre-built client personas at the beginning, but many businesses have already gone through the process of creating client personas. Looking at these client personas can only help you come up with new keyword suggestions. You can also run the list of keywords you generated through the personas’ filter to check whether they are genuinely relevant to the terms that will drive traffic from the users your site is trying to reach.
Read more about creating avatar in How to create your Online Business
How to use Semrush Tool for Keyword Research?
Simply enter your domain into the domain overview search box in the Semrush tool, scroll down to the Top Organic Keywords area, and select “View complete report” to see all of the terms for which your site is presently ranking. To utilize this, you must first sign up for a free trial or have a Semrush subscription.
How to search for competitors’ keywords
Searching through competitor sites for possible keywords might be just as valuable as searching through your own site for keywords. Searching for terms where your competitors rank high but you don’t, or even where you both rank for the same term, can help you expand your keyword list.
Asking company stakeholders for their ideas on who they believe the competitors are will help you find them. You may also find competitors by looking at the top sites ranking for terms you know are relevant to the site in question in the search engine results pages.
Luckily, Semrush can save your time with “Main Organic Competitors” report. The procedure is similar to keyword mining from your own website. You can get a list of “common keywords” here, which only include those that your site and their site rank for. However, keep in mind that you should collect your competitor’s entire list of search engine terms to capture phrases you might be missing.
You can even limit the download to phrases where your competitor ranks higher than a specific point, such as 20th or 30th, on the assumption that if they rank lower than that, it’s probably not the best term for you to pursue. This is also an excellent area in Semrush to filter out any terms that include the brand names of your competitors. Moz will most certainly rank for a number of terms that include “Moz,” but these terms aren’t really relevant in an organic search plan for Semrush to pursue.
Keyword Gap
Keyword gap analysis is another wonderful approach to uncover phrases where you either overlap with your competition or find terms where they are ranking but you aren’t. This method allows you to enter one or more competitors and locate phrases where there is either common ground or where one or more of them ranks higher than you.
With Semrush, you simply enter your site and the sites you want to examine, choose the keyword type, and get your keyword list back. You may also type in a specific word to see how you compare to your competitors for that term, as well as which sites rank top. You may look at the sites on which your competitors rank higher and see what related keywords they used that you might have overlooked.
Even after you’ve compiled your initial list through brainstorming, site analysis, competitive research, and other methods, you might not have covered the complete universe of keywords that are relevant to your website. You can use any or all of the keywords you’ve uncovered to expand your list using a variety of keyword research tools. Generally, you’d do this with the higher volume “root” keywords, but depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, you can do it with lengthier keywords and long tail keywords as well.
Keep the search using SEO tools that will help you make your keyword research complete. Check up the best SEO tools in 2022
