Why is SEO so important?
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is
the practice of improving various on page and off page elements in order to
improve rankings in the algorithmic search engine results and increase the
number and quality of visitors to a website.
As a business owner you’ll have one of three experiences at some
point: You’ll either hear or read that you need SEO in order to grow your
business, you’ll discover SEO on your own while considering marketing services
to grow your business, or you’ll be contacted by a company offering SEO
services to grow your business.
There’s
a theme developing here…
SEO has steadily grown in popularity among marketers and
especially small business owners specifically for the return on the investment.
Why Every Website Needs SEO?
To understand why your business needs SEO, you must
understand how people use the web. Social media is a huge attractor for people:
68% adults use Facebook and more than two-thirds of them access the site
multiple times a day.
And while social media can generate a lot of organic traffic,
that’s not the only place your customers spend their time.
In fact, social media sites accounted for just 2.8% of site
traffic in 2016. The majority of people – like your customers – still turn to
search engines first in order to find information, products, answers, and
details about local businesses just like yours.
A lot of those prospective customers are using Google, which
continues to hold a dominant share of the market against other search engines.
How SEO Works In A Nutshell
Understanding how people use search engines helps you see Google
(and other search engines) for what they are – a business.
As a business, Google’s primary goal is give every user exactly
what they want. The algorithm is designed to serve the most relevant search
results to the user based on their search query.
Here’s what the typical search process looks like for most people:
1.
A person experiences a need for
an answer or information on a product or service
2.
They decide what phrase to use
in order to find that information
3.
The phrase is entered into a
search engine, typically Google
4.
Google instantly returns
hundreds of thousands of results relevant to that search
5.
The person scans the results
for what appears the most relevant solution and clicks on it
6.
If they’re not satisfied, they
return and check other results or modify their search
When a search query from a user occurs, Google instantly pulls the
websites it feels are the closest, most relevant matches to the user’s query.
Fundamental Principles of SEO Today
1. Links Still Rule
Links
have been important from the earliest days of SEO and are still one
of the strongest indicators of a website’s superb performance to Google.
The
more high-quality, relevant links you acquire, the higher your website’s SERPs
will potentially become.
In
short, links are still fundamental to SEO.
It
makes sense to invest in link building as part of your SEO efforts.
2. Relevant, Optimized Content Wins
The
links vs. content problem is somewhat like a chicken-or-egg dilemma.
You
need content to attract links, but your content needs links to boost your
site’s ranking in search results and to help drive traffic to a content piece.
Eventually,
what it comes down to is this: Links and content are the backbone of SEO.
If
you want to crack the first page on Google, you need links to your relevant,
well-optimized content.
Here
are some things to bear in mind when crafting and optimizing your content:
·
Keywords
matter in context. Keywords are still of strong relevance to
Google, but instead of scanning the page for “keyword appearance,” its crawlers
now analyze the context and related secondary keywords that share the
searcher’s intent.
·
Titles, Meta
descriptions, ALT attributes, H1 tags, and URLs are still important. Include
targeted and relevant keywords in these elements.
·
Increase your
expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T). Read Google’s search
quality guidelines for guidance on content quality. Google states, in
part, that “the amount of content necessary for the page to be satisfying
depends on the topic and purpose of the page.”
In
short, establish a process to produce and share high-quality, optimized
content. Ensure that all content is written for humans, yet optimized to feed
data to search engines.
3. UX Signals Have an Impact on SERPs
User
experience (UX) plays
a substantial role in how your website does with the search engines.
Unfortunately,
user experience depends on too many factors (e.g., site infrastructure and
layout, content, etc.), and is often too hard to measure.
Figuring
out where your site lacks from a UX perspective can be a painful experience.
Thus, some SEO pros choose not to deal with it whatsoever.
Yet, if you want to win your SEO game in 2019,
mastering UX is what you need. You can partially outsource the design and
layout parts of the process, but you will still have to:
·
Ensure that dwell time and CTR are high, and bounce rate is low. While these signals have been around for some time, and
Google does not use them as direct ranking factors, optimizing your site for
high engagement can’t hurt and could even help indirectly.
·
Improve site architecture. The key
part here is to improve a website’s navigation and make sure that
search engines can crawl all the pages, and users can easily find a page that
they are looking for. “The simpler, the better” approach works perfectly here.
·
Optimize for speed. Regardless of the platform,
your site has to load in 2 seconds or less. Image compression, code and
structure optimizations, and faster servers will help.
·
Attract a UX professional to optimize customer journey in line
with user intent. Since SEO has evolved to become more user-focused,
you should work together with UX people to provide great experiences at
each stage of a customer’s journey. In other words, your goal is conversions
and sales, not just traffic and leads.
In
short, UX optimization has already become a fundamental part of SEO.
Focusing
on the visitor will likely play even more important role in the future (since
Google becomes smarter and clearly improves for a user’s sake), and you need to
learn at least the basics of it.
4. Mobile SEO Can Make or Break It
As
Google is determined to use its mobile-first index to rank and
display search results on all devices, it is time to finally polish your
website, mobile-wise.
Unfortunately,
although Google’s move makes sense (with more than 50 percent of
traffic worldwide generated on mobile), making your site perform smoothly on
both mobile and desktop is not simple.
To
begin with, you will have to invest in a responsive design, since Google
recommends it.
You
will also have to make your content consistent across desktop and mobile
devices, and ensure your website is fast and easy to use.
What
it all means:
·
Optimize your content for mobile users.
·
Accelerate your page speed.
·
Enhance mobile-friendliness.
In
short, you will need to up your mobile game or you’ll find yourself ranking
poorly on Google.
5. Voice Search Is Already a Thing
Although
I do not believe that voice search will revolutionize SEO in the near future,
customers seem to love it.
Northstar
Research reports that 55 percent of U.S. teens and 41 percent of U.S.
adults use voice search.
According
to Google, more than 20 percent of all mobile searches are voice
searches.
With
that said, it makes sense to start optimizing for voice search now.
Specifically,
you can start with these steps:
·
Optimize content by using natural language (i.e., more
long-tail keywords aligned with searcher intent) and answering questions.
·
Optimize for featured snippets.
·
Create and markup FAQ page (use Question and Answer schemas).
In
short, while voice search optimization is not a must-have right now, related
optimizations make sense and can help you own more Google real estate.
Combine and Experiment
Through Trial-and-Error
SEO
success most often comes from best practices plus some trial and error.
Nowadays,
the fundamental principles described above are for you to combine and
experiment.
Unfortunately,
SEO rules are not carved in stone. The rules and tactics change and evolve
all the time.
There
is no universal SEO formula; only trial and error can help you determine which
SEO methods work and which do not for your particular website in your
particular niche, at a particular moment in time.
The
secret of SEO is simple:
You
must learn how to combine and experiment with multiple methods, and then
analyze the results, bearing in mind that all your work may go to waste due to
Google’s latest algorithm update or what your competitors are doing.
In
the process, you sift out well-performing tactics, while cutting out those that
do not work anymore. Then, rinse and repeat.
In
doing so, you will never end up with a linear SEO strategy which, however
successful for a short period of time, can prove dangerous in a matter of days.
Google is usually pretty quick to figure out when someone discovers a way to
cheat their algorithms.
Conclusion
SEO
is a never-ending, ever-evolving, multidimensional science. Every SEO would
love to find the magic formula that could once and for all explain how SEO
works, with specific rules and concrete equations on the table.
Unfortunately,
SEO is too complex to fit into a template. Although it does evolve around
principles and certain rules, its inner workings are all about analyzing and
applying tactics that work and sifting out tactics that do not.
Bear
this in mind, and keep a close eye on your competitors, and you will definitely
succeed in search results. This is how SEO works, and will continue to work,
until the process is completely outsourced to AI.
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