SEO is ESSENTIAL to growing your business and pulling organic traffic. Even so, a lot of people cross their fingers and just hope that their website will get more traffic. Here’s everything you need to know to take the guesswork out of your success with effective SEO!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines look at many site elements, such as structure, design, visitor behavior, content, and other external factors to decide how highly your site should rank in the search results. SEO has become the catch-all term for things you can do to make your site more appealing to search engines.
What are the advantages of good SEO?
A big one is that SEO gives your website credibility. It makes it easier for people to find your website when they search for it, and it helps create a smoother user experience.
The other, most important reason for making sure your website’s SEO is up to snuff is that it helps generate organic traffic. 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search. SEO is the main determiner of how easy it is to find your site organically. That’s probably why it’s estimated that agencies and brands spent over $79.27 Billion on SEO services last year.
SEO is also important in driving local searches. When you search for “best pizza place near me,” the results aren’t based on physical distance, but on the pizza places’ SEO keywords.
Where do you need to pay attention to SEO?
Everything “online” can be indexed, meaning that it can be accounted for by search engines. Google indexes websites and apps that they own. So, your YouTube video search optimization is related to your website optimization. However, some companies, like Facebook, categorize videos and posts internally, meaning that those posts don’t boost general search engine SEO.
What can you do to boost your SEO?
We would split SEO into 2 main categories: Content and Categorization. Both are super important, but each requires different things. Let’s dive in to the features of each.
Content
Content is all the stuff that you put out there. Search engines look at your stuff to determine your search rankings. Google likes blog articles and webpages with a lot of content. Pictures, videos, links, and charts show search engines that what you’re creating should be seen. They aren’t going to rank something highly in the search results if they don’t think its valuable.
Search engines also look at user experience. Is your website or blog easy to read? Do you have paragraphs, subheadings, punctuation, and spacing? Is it super short? (Long-form content, over 2,000 words, tends to rank higher.) Do your pictures and video take too long to load? How about accessibility? Do you have alt text for your images?
Search engines want to provide the best possible experience for their users, and they will rank your website accordingly.
Categorization
Categorization is all the “backend” stuff. Keywords, hashtags, blog categories, utm links, excerpts, and featured images all fall into this bucket. The best way to boost this type of SEO is simply to fill in every box provided. If the video you’re uploading to YouTube has a field for title, description, keywords, hashtags, etc, give them that information! Search engines need to know what they’re ranking, and all the backend information is how they know what your stuff is and where it should go.
If you write an article called “How to make good pizza,” the search engine will put it with other information on pizza. However, if your article also has keywords like “good pizza,” “how to,” “cooking,” “dinner for two,” “Italian food,” and so on, the search engine has a lot more places it can show the article.
Another thing you can do to boost SEO is repurpose content. Search engines like to see that a lot of your content revolves around a single topic. It shows that you have a consistent brand message and purpose. A consistent brand message indicates high brand value.
What could more SEO-driven website traffic do for your business?
