If you have a business website and want help in improving your search rank, this article is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing business, the SEO specialist in a web agency or my favorite a DIY SEO expert passionate about the mechanics of Search.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is a process of optimizing your website with the goal of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately increasing traffic. In theory, the term SEO refers to all search engines, but in practice, it’s Google that matters most as they have an 87.35% share of the search market, with Bing being a very distant second at 5.53%, and Yahoo taking third place with 2.83% of the market.
It all starts with your website
Yes. Anything that affects user experience affects SEO. Sites with attractive designs, are likely to have better user behavior metrics. Navigation links, monetization widgets, pop-ups, images, and videos are all part of the structure of a page. If you’re redesigning a site to improve it’s SEO, make sure that it’s mobile-friendly and has good page speed.
It’s important to keep in mind that SEO traffic isn’t free. You will need to either create your website content yourself, in which case you have to consider the cost of your time, or hire someone to create it for you. However, you should see this as an investment, since content that ranks well on Google can generate traffic for years with minimal additional effort on your part (you may want to keep it updated, though).
Areas to improve your SEO
- Render unto Google
- Create High Quality Content
- Match Search Intent / Keywords
- Get Backlinks from Higher Authority Sites
- On Page SEO factors
Render unto Google
“Render unto Cesar” had to due with paying taxes with coins that has his image on it that he made. Which I restate like Cesar – this is Google’s world – give him your data that they will use to control their world.
The bottom line is that Google My Business, Search Console, Analytics, and Ads, will help you appear higher in search engine ranking. Google is responsible for 95% of all search traffic, 90% of people never go past the 1st page of search results the and the top 3 results on the 1st page of Google receive 54.4% of all clicks and to make it all that much more important the first result gets 25% of all clicks. It is important that Google knows all about you, your website quality, and how others engage with it. For website quality E-A-T is one of many guidelines Google uses to determine whether the content is valuable to readers and whether it should rank well. This comes from reviews and referrals – now you know why Yelp charges so much money.
Create High Quality Content
Google has put a lot of effort into ensuring that the best content rises to the top of its search results. This means that, as a rule of thumb, content marketing (which includes SEO) doesn’t work without creating great content.
Quality content is subjective. Some people will want a beginner-level summary while others want more depth and expert insights. Quality content will be better than the content that currently exists and readers will find it useful, memorable and are likely to share the content.
As SEOs, we typically write about things that people are searching for. This makes the content useful, but if you read many top-ranking sites, they often say the same things. Reading the first few results might feel like you’re reading the same content over and over again.
Match Search Intent / Keywords
The most important thing you need to consider is whether your content matches the search intent. In other words, when someone sees a link to your website on the first page of Google’s search results and clicks on it, will they find what they were looking for?
Google wants to rank pages that best fit the search term someone is using, as well as the search intent behind the search query. That’s why you need to make sure that your post or page fits the search intent of your audience.
Keywords and queries aren’t exactly the same thing, although they’re closely related. A keyword is usually the focus point of your content, and it can help Google to identify the main topic of your page. However, users often don’t search for single keywords. They tend to search for phrases and questions instead. Google actually refers to all searches as queries; keywords are just simplified queries that we SEOs try to focus our content around.
Get Backlinks from Authorize Sites
Arguably, the second most important Google’s ranking factor is backlinks as people linking to a web page indicates that the web page provides value. If everybody uses the same keywords – why will one website rank above the other ? Some of the answer lies in Domain and Page Authority . Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and total number of links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time.
That’s why link building is extremely important. You’ll need to put yourself out there and get these links; this is a big area where you should consider outsourcing this area. Your time is money, people who do this can do it quicker, better and it shouldn’t cost that much in correlation to the benefit you receive.
On Page SEO Factors
On-page SEO refers to the things you can do on your website to improve your search rankings. The first step is to use an SEO site checker to crawl the website to identify common SEO issues that could be preventing the site from ranking as well as it could. The best SEO audit tools will identify critical issues and group them by severity so you have a clear understanding of which to fix first.
When it comes to on-page content, the most obvious of them is using your target keywords in your post. But quality content is, in many ways, the foundation of SEO. so unless you optimize that quality content, it likely won’t rank. Fortunately, on-page SEO isn’t rocket science. It’s essentially adding keywords strategically to your page.
When Can I Expect to See Results ?
Now, the important part, how long does it take to see results with SEO?
According to Neil Patel, here’s what you can expect:
1. Within the first 3 months, you should see an increase in impressions in Google Analytics.
2. Within the first 6 months, you should see traffic from Google from keywords outside your brand name.
3. Within the first 12 months, you should see an acceleration in organic search traffic growth.
As you probably know, these assets take time to build, but over time the traffic you generate can often be much less expensive than paid traffic. For example, it takes time to get a blog off the ground, but if you keep at it, the organic traffic can start to grow exponentially. As your SEO traffic grows over time, this means you may be able to reduce your paid advertising budget (or even eliminate it entirely!).
Some people say three months, some say six, some say twelve. There’s no easy answer. Every industry, keyword, and website is different. Assuming your technical SEO is done right, Google will crawl a new or updated page within 48 hours, but it can take a lot of time for Google to detect the user behavior of the page and begin to move it up or down the ranks.
If you would like to do this work on your own, we do offer individual or team SEO training. If you would like us to do the work for you please visit our SEO- Search Page.
this is by Edward Goeters Digital marketing consultant growcomtwo.com
