Digital Playbook

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most popular inbound digital marketing strategies. SEO marketing is the process of improving or optimizing your website for search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Google holds the market share by a long shot, so we’ll focus on them.

The way search engines work is by crawling your site. First, Google sends a crawler bot to your site, and this bot looks at many different aspects and indexes this information. Then the next time someone searches for a query or keyword on the search engine, Google uses an algorithm to go through all the sites within its index to find the best ones to return as a result for that specific search.

Di erent Types of SEO

SEO breaks down into three main types: Technical SEO, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. Technical SEO refers to the nuts and bolts of your website. It’s all the bits you can’t see happening like meta tags, site maps, HTTPS, and more. All these things signal to Google what the overall health of your website is.

On-page SEO, as the name suggests, refers to everything you can see on a page. This includes images, copy, header tags, and more. Google “reads” all this to figure out what a page is about.

Off-page SEO is everything that happens away from your website that affects how Google views it. The biggest factor of off-page SEO is when other sites link to your own. These links – when they come from authoritative sources – signal to Google that other sites think you’re trustworthy. A site with lots of quality links is more likely to be ranked higher than a site without.

Technical SEO Best Practices

For technical SEO, you should, as a minimum: • Use HTTPS

• Only allow Google to index one version of your site • Find and fix crawl errors

• Improve your site speed • Fix broken internal links

• Use permanent redirects • Make sure your site is mobile-friendly • Use an SEO friendly URL structure • Add structured data

There are so many great tools to help with technical SEO. Google provides many of them completely free of charge. That includes Google Search Console and the Google Mobile Friendly test. You can use Search Console to find and fix crawl errors on your site. This ensures Google can crawl and index the parts of your site you want it to, so it can later serve them up in the search engine results pages. Google also took a mobile-first approach to indexing way back in 2018, so you should be doing the same. The mobile version of your site should get just as much attention as the desktop version. This includes ensuring a good user experience with load times, usability, and functionality.

On-Page SEO Best Practices

As I mentioned above, Google serves up a page of your website within the search engine results page whenever it matches that page to a user’s search query. These queries are what are known as keywords for marketers. They’re what rule on-page SEO.

Optimize your on-page SEO for keywords potential customers will be searching. You can conduct keyword research by using free tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner. As a best practice, each page should have a primary target keyword. This is often the most obvious phrase, like a product or service name.

To target keywords on-page and optimize for search engines, you’ll want to add your primary keyword to your metadata, header tags (where appropriate), and throughout your copy. A word to the wise, though; this should read well for users, not just Google. Keyword-stuffing won’t help you rank higher. Google’s algorithm is smart enough to figure out when it’s being done and will rank sites lower for lowquality content, written for search engines instead of humans. You’ll also want to use high-quality images that are as small as possible in file size for load speeds. Your file names and alt tags should also be optimized with your keyword and readability in mind.

O -Page SEO Best Practices

A huge amount of off-page SEO revolves around links. But there’s good and bad link building. Google will penalize you for the latter. To ensure you follow best practice link building, you should never pay for links. You can – and should – reach out to other authoritative, relevant sites with guest blogging opportunities and great content (more on this shortly) to build organic links. Other off-page SEO ranking factors include social media marketing, brand mentions, influencer marketing, and reviews. You should be monitoring brand mentions. You can do this by using Google alerts and setting it up to alert you whenever your brand is mentioned. These represent great opportunities to build natural links if the brand mention is unlinked.

You should also have a review-building strategy in place. This means asking customers for reviews through email, social media, in-person, and on your site. Often companies incentivize customers to leave reviews with discounts on future purchases.

I hope this was a helpful overview, giving you additional insight into the big world of SEO. If you would like to learn more and see how your SEO is stacking up against your competitors, feel free to reach out for a free digital consult at: DIGITAL@TOPSMARKETING.COM