What is Search Engine Optimization?

According to Search Engine Land, it’s defined as: “The process of getting traffic from the free, organic, editorial or natural search results on search engines”

Organic vs Paid

Paid traffic through search engine advertising can generate near-instant results and often in minutes. You pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost per-click (CPC) keyword basis and ROI is much easier to measure but can stagnate and decline over time. Statistically, a 20-30% of searchers click on paid results.

Organic traffic on the other hand, takes a long time to achieve, most of the time over the course of months, sometimes even years. So whilst traffic is free, it does require time and investment. ROI is hard to measure but tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs and Google Search Console make things much easier. A good SEO strategy will also net you a good portion of the remaining 70-80% of the searchers that click, providing you rank well.

Both organic and paid traffic require a solid keyword research.

The Three Pillars of SEO

Technical SEO includes non-content onsite activities that improve SEO.

On-Page SEO includes content and keyword targeting onsite activities that improve SEO.

Off-Page SEO includes offsite activities, like gaining external links (also referred to as backlinks), to improve SEO.

All the strategies mentioned above helps the search engines crawl, index and rank each website accordingly.

At the end of the day, search engines exist as algorithms that look for clues to give the searcher back exactly what they want.

Keyword Research

All good SEO strategies start with a strong keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of discovering the keywords used by potential customers to find your products and picking the most relevant keywords that are within your reach and that have good search volume.

Keywords can be how to queries, navigational referring to sites or best of all, transactional queries that are most likely to lead to a sale:

Informational Keywords

• Collectively the largest proportion of all keywords
• Earlier stage of the buying cycle
• Harder to convert into sales
• Less competitive to rank for

Navigational Keywords

• Smaller proportion of all keywords
• Often brand related keywords
• Can occur at all stages of the buying cycle

Transactional Keywords

• Smaller proportion of all keywords
• Last stage of the buying cycle
• Easier to convert into sales
• More competitive to rank for

The right types of keywords lead to:

• Get the right kind of visitors to your site
• Identify keywords with high search volume and omit low volume terms
• Identify content gaps on your website
• Target keywords that are within your reach

Keywords can be short tail or long tail. Short-tail keywords are typically one or two words and less specific such as summer holidays. Long-tail Keywords are typically three or more words and more specific such as summer holidays in Rome.

Long tail keywords work better then short tail keywords as accounts for 70% of all search traffic and are easier to convert and rank for. This comes with a caveat though as they harder to research and require more in-depth and a greater amount of content.

A good keyword research can be carried out with the following steps:

Step 1: Pick a topic

• Focus on one topic at a time
• Think of topics closely aligned to your objectives or industry
• Have a webpage in mind
• Think of the needs of your customers

Step 2: Brainstorm keywords

• Think of closely related keywords
• Think synonyms
• Include plural and singular keywords
• Aim for quantity, rather than quality.)

A good idea is to use Google Keyword Planner, you will get the keywords recommended by the search engine and best of all, and it’s free!

SEM Rush and Wordstream are also other great tools to help you look up keywords.

Step 3: Review keyword value

Search Volume and Relevancy are the two main factors to consider with valuing keywords. The ideal keywords have high search volume and relevant to the topic you are developing your SEO strategy around. Remember long tail keywords over short tail keywords to have more specificity around your topic.

Technical SEO

As explained earlier, Technical SEO includes activities completed on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to content. This will allow web crawlers from the search engine to crawl your website effectively.

You can ensure your website crawlability by:

1. Minimizing site errors

2. Using redirects wisely

3. Creating and submitting an up-to-date XML sitemap

4. Minimizing duplicate content

5. Checking for indexed pages

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results and can help greatly with your Technical SEO efforts.

Technical SEO also includes page speed, mobile responsiveness and website security.

Page speed

Page speed can be achieved by:

• Aiming for 3.5 seconds or less
• Making image file sizes smaller
• Compressing text and files
• Minimizing the number of requests made
• Upgrading your web hosting.

Another free tool by Google, PageSpeed Insights, measures your page speed, as well as giving you recommendations on what you can do to improve it.

Mobile Responsiveness

Google announced mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor back in 2015 and mobile usage overtook desktop in the same year.

Website Security

Google announced HTTPs (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) as a ranking factor back in 2014. HTTPs was primarily used to protect pages that collected information like a contact us or a shopping cart page. Implementing HTTPs from HTTP requires careful redirect planning and requires an SSL certificate.

On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization is the process of ensuring your content is both relevant and provides a great user experience. It includes targeting the right keywords within your content and plays a leading role in search engine rankings.

Factors that include on page optimisations are:

• Title Tags
• URLs
• Meta Descriptions
• Headings
• Main Copy
• Images

Of course, the before mentioned keyword strategy applies here.

For title tags, it is key to include as many keywords as possible, although the space is limited to 70 characters, so it is recommended to be as descriptive and engaging as possible.

The same applies for meta descriptions and URLs, although the space is limited to 156 and 70 characters respectively.

Content should be organized properly with headings and subheadings using the conventional H tags (H1, H2, H3 and so on).

There are no strict guidelines with length but keyword stuffing/spamming is to be avoided. The idea is to have content which keeps the reader engaged.

Hyperlinks should be included in the main copy which is called anchor text and pass relevancy to the receiving page. The more internal links a page has the more important it is deemed to be, so it will stand a better chance of ranking.

Any images added should a description in the Alt text. Images must also be optimized in size to avoid weighing down on website speed.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-Page Optimization is the process of enhancing a website’s search engine rankings through activities outside of the website. This is largely driven by building backlinks to your site.

A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one website to another and increasing the number of backlinks to your site is one of the key SEO goals you should definitely implement.

Backlinks are either relevant to your industry, respected and trusted by authority websites or earned on merit.

Ultimately, backlinks lead to improvement in Page Rank.

When a website receives a link from an external website (backlink), some reputation is passed to it. It acts like one webpage is voting that the page it links to is credible. Google has a sub-algorithm called PageRank which calculates how much reputation is passed.

PageRank should be considered more as a concept and not as a metric.

The role of social media in the context of backlinks are also known as social signals. These are different to backlinks because they tend not to pass reputation or PageRank. However, the more views you get from your content, the more likely a person will link to you from their website in the form of a backlink. Therefore social signals are still perceived as important.

Monitoring your SEO Strategy

Traffic can be direct, referral or organic.

Direct traffic can be URLs typed in directly in the browser, links in PDFs and emails.

Referral traffic can be backlinks.

Organic traffic is gauged on how well you rank for keywords on search engines.

Key Metrics

Metrics measuring SEO performance are:

• Keyword Rankings: Keyword rankings for a targeted list of keywords.
• Traffic: Monthly organic traffic and referral traffic year-on-year.
• Conversions: Total number of monthly conversions.
• Links: Number of external links.

SEO can falter for various reasons. You can use Google Search Console to check for any errors in your URLs as well as indexing your pages properly. Check that your keywords are not excessive and following best practices. A lack of backlinks can also be a reason why your website is not ranking well enough.

Monitor organic traffic in Google Analytics. Remember to set up a segment that will allow you to analyze organic traffic only. Where relevant, setup conversions and sales traffic in Google Analytics. If you are selling things online, take this a step further and set up goals to track ecommerce also.

Final Thoughts

SEO can be a long and arduous journey. However it can be one with great rewards when implemented and maintained properly. It can take 2-6 months to rank for a competitive keywords (some hyper competitive keywords, even longer).

If you require an expert in SEO at your side to either implement an SEO strategy for you, or guide you on one, feel free to check out our SEO service here.