All Things: Digital Consultancy
October 1, 2023
Social Media Best Practices in 2023
October 2, 2023
Search Engine Optimization is the road to success, yet a few people fail to discover this path. Let’s make this simple and easy for you to understand how you can use SEO and do wonders for your brand. Attaining the steps of SEO is like building blocks.
So let us first start with understanding what SEO is:
Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as the exposure to your brand, through non-paid or organic search engine results.
Now you must be thinking why is it important for us to optimize our website, right?
Most search engine users are likely to click on the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site it needs to appear in one of the top positions. SEO puts you ahead of the competition meaning if two web sites are selling the same product, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and higher conversion rates. Having your website’s name appear on the top makes the user’s trust your brand. This increases the user’s trust on the website. From audience, to the user, to final sale conversions, SEO involves the right execution of its components in the right manner to get a win-win situation.
We have now understood what SEO means and the importance of SEO, it doesn’t end here! There are a various components of SEO that we need to get right to see the difference.
Don’t worry we’ll take it step by step for you to understand it clearly and achieve the best possible results. Here are the 10 magical mantras that you need to get right in order to facilitate an effective SEO process:
- YOUR AUDIENCE:
For any viable SEO strategy, your primary focus should be on the industry and its audience. You need to ask yourself, what industry are you in? Who are your competitors and their SEO strategy? This will help you to analyze the next steps for your SEO strategy.
- KEYWORD SEARCH:
As we ace the audience and industry norms, keyword search is important to point out the best possible user intent to go after and understand their interests. But what they search is just as important as how they search for it. Shifts in the search can either make or break the SEO strategy. For this it is important for you to have an upper hand on the terms of marketing industry shifts, the buying personas and how they impact the overall SEO strategy.
User intent behind keywords is necessary to the success of any SEO campaign. It is important to alter the keyword search based on marketing shifts in the customer’s search behavior, to find out the important keywords that were worth targeting.
Let us make it simpler by giving you an example. Let us take Zomato for instance. What do you think should be the keyword search for Zomato?
Zomato has paid a lot of attention by optimizing their website through keyword search, if we Google Search – Food Delivery, Best restaurants in your city, Top Five pubs near me or say Chinese. Zomato appears on top. This is what we mean by keyword search – Zomato understood their users’ intent and their interests and accordingly optimized their website to appear on the top and drive traffic to their website.
- ANALYTICS AND REPORTING:
Nothing is more important to an SEO campaign than accurate reporting. It is important to report accurate results that the campaign achieves, to make the accurate adjustments that an SEO campaign requires. In a rapidly changing industry where the market shifts rapidly, it is important to integrate a quarterly or even bi-monthly keyword research task into your SEO process so that you know exactly what audiences are searching for next.
When you attribute keywords and landing pages, it is easy to see exactly what keywords and landing pages primary drivers of your SEO process execution and your overall SEO strategy. By doing this effectively, it is possible to make adjustments properly and eventually find the next big market industry shift.
Therefore, it is so important to get analytics reporting correct.
Let us take Zomato for instance again, Zomato got their analytics and reporting right and understood the market shift in times of the ongoing pandemic. This helped them to make adjustments and scale their business by starting out grocery delivery amidst the three week lockdown in the nation.
- MOBILE SEO:
The next trending thing is Google’s mobile-first index. The mobile-first index is Google’s new de facto standard for search, with a focus on mobile websites.
It is important to note that this does not exclude desktop sites. Although, desktop sites will still perform in search results if they are the best result for the query. This is an important aspect of SEO to get right.
As Google’s mobile index grows beyond the first several waves, we can expect to see algorithm shifts and updates just as we did with the normal index. It gives all versions of your site equal opportunity to get indexed and remain competitive in the coming mobile-first index.
- CRAWLING:
Crawling is when Google or another search engine sends a bot to a web page or web post and “reads” the page. If your website architecture is out-of-order, or your internal linking is off, or if you don’t even have a sitemap.xml file, it will be difficult for search engines to crawl your site.
It is so important to make sure that your site is 100 percent functional, and crawlable from the start.
- INDEXING:
Indexing and crawling are related but are not mutually exclusive. Indexing is completely different from crawling.
Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added to the web search’s index.
A good idea for ranking higher in search engines is to let only important parts of your blog/website be indexed. Do not index unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and all other useless pages.
This is why it is so important to perform an in-depth website audit that takes into account these things. Because when doing so, you can uncover issues that may not have been taken into consideration and these issues can make a big difference in your website’s performance.
Let us understand Crawling and Indexing better with an example. For say Amazon, the website is so well structured with proper internal links and sitemap.xml file, this helps Search Engines to crawl and index their page so easily and access their information allowing them to appear on the top.
- ON-PAGE SEO:
On-page SEO refers to the tricks you use on your website to help it rank better. That includes everything from the technology you rely on to build the website to the way you use the words on the page. These are things you have complete control over and are the single most powerful tools you have for impacting rankings in the SERP.
When you nail on-page SEO, it’s easy to convey the relevancy and quality of your content for both readers and search engines.
- OFF-PAGE SEO:
Off-page SEO refers to ranking factors that are outside of your website itself. A good off-page SEO strategy will grow brand awareness, boost engagement with your content, and highlight how relevant your site is to SERP users. Many of the choices you make in your on-page SEO strategy will also affect how well your off-page SEO is overall.
- CONTENT:
Content continues to be one of the most important elements by which SEO pros acquire links to help increase rankings to help create traffic to a website. It is another example where, if it is not executed properly, content can end up being the torture of a website’s (or author’s) existence.
Not all content is created equal. There’s spammy content, and non-spammy authoritative content. In general, if you manually write your content, you’re in the clear.
There are three major elements you need to consider producing content that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting. Content SEO is important because search engines, such as Google, read your website, so the words you use on your site determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. But without good quality content, your site does not stand a chance in the search engines.
- LINKS BUILDING:
Building links is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings.
Link building is called an anchor tag (hence the “a”), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.
The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download.
The key to a good link profile execution is to ensure that you vary your profile a bit, that you don’t always go after one type of link, and that you keep a healthy ratio of types of links that you do go after.
So, here are the best tried and tested tips on SEO by our experts. We hope this gives you the best results. Contact us at [email protected] for any queries or visit www.thesocialturtle.com.
