If you find yourself struggling with all the different ways to improve SEO, you’re not alone.
What seemed like a few short years ago, people were simply putting their businesses in the yellow pages or in magazines. Now, in order to keep up with the Joneses, it feels like an entire team must be dedicated to maintaining relevance for a business. But don’t fret! While SEO is by nature a tedious and complex effort, there are easy ways to begin improving your search engine rankings immediately. This article goes over the basic concepts of SEO and provides 5 effective options for you to try.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice (and skill) of increasing both the quantity of online traffic to a website through organic search engine results, as well as the quality of that traffic. Its goal is to improve the usefulness, position, and appearance of content within the search results.
One way to think about how SEO works is to imagine the internet as a grocery store. All of the products sold at the store would, in this analogy, be websites. If you know what you’re looking for, you can simply walk to the appropriate aisle, find the brand you want, and pick out your item. However, if you know what you need but don’t know where to find it or who makes the best one, this is where the direction comes in. Search engines act like the stockers of the grocery store. They organize, categorize, and prioritze the products based on the product type, popularity, differentiators, etc.
There are actually a ton of search engines out there including Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and many others. However for the sake of practicality, we’ll go over the number one used search engine – Google.
How does SEO work?
It benefits Google to show the most relevant information based upon a search. Otherwise, users would find the service ineffective. Therefore it uses a systematic method of finding and ranking content. But before we get into how it places content, we can start by going over Google’s content preferences.
E-A-T
No Google does not eat your content! However this a helpful way to remember the search engine’s preferences when creating your own content. E-A-T stands for:
Expertise – Google wants to know how competent you are in your field. Having informative, factual, and beneficial content will dramatically improve your rankings.
Authoritativeness – Authority means that others are using your content. It adds a layer of credibility because it shows that other users, brands, and organizations are referencing your work.
Trustworthiness – Security is crucial for improving your search rankings. Google wants to know that your site can be trusted. Having a secure website and healthy business practices will gain confidence in the search engine.
Now that we’ve touched on what type of content Google likes, we can move on to how it finds and categorizes that content.
Crawling
Crawling is the initial step Google takes to learn about your content. This can also be referred to as the Discovery phase. It uses bots (aka spiders) to comb through your content in order to discover what you’re offering.
Indexing
Indexing, or the Relevance phase, is the part where the search engine begins to organize your content based on elements such as keywords. The more keyword specific your work is, the easier it is for the bots to index it into the proper categories.
Ranking
Ranking is the search engine’s way of determining authority for content. Authority is determined by how much your content is talked about, how much it is used, and how much it is cited.
5 Ways To Begin Improving Your SEO Immediately
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Keywords are one of the primary indicators search engines use to index and rank website content. This is because specific keywords and phrases are used by audiences to find particular information. By researching the top keywords for your industry and the services you offer you will not only gain insight as to what people are searching, but you will also be able to use those keywords within your content, thus improving your SEO.
2. Create High-Quality Content
As mentioned previously, Google loves content that is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. Creating informative content in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, and others will strengthen your brand in these arenas, allowing Google to index your work and begin ranking it. By incorporating your keywords naturally, it will reinforce the revelance and authority your content carries.
3. Mobile Optimization
Over 50% of website viewers are searching on the web solely on mobile devices. And that number is likely to increase. If your website looks great on a laptop, but is scrambled from a mobile view, this will hurt your SEO rankings. Optimizing your website for mobile is a proven way to bump up your standings with Google.
4. Improve Website Navigation
Just as search engines make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for, having a website that is easy to navigate will do wonders for your SEO. This means having a clear navigation menu on your header, that links to your other website pages. It also means organizing your copy in an intuitive manner, so that viewers can easily find what they are looking for. Finally, having CTA’s (call-to-actions) where users can take the intended next step, such as “read our story” or “visit our shop”, will also improve your SEO.
5. Use Descriptive URLs
Uniform Resource Locators aka URLs are the actual addresses that link to a specific web page. Search engines love URLs that are clean and descriptive. This is also another great place to imbed keywords specific to your niche. By doing so, you strengthen your rankings while simultaneously making it easier for your audience to find you.
Keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process. It takes continuous effort to maintain your brand’s level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness on the web. Don’t be discouraged if you’re not skyrocketing up the rankings in the beginning of your SEO endeavors. Trust the process and work diligently to slowly but surely boost your rankings.