Views: 0 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-08-30 Origin: Site
1. What is SEO?
2. How Google ranks content
3. How to formulate an SEO strategy
When you need a new marketing idea, what’s the first thing you do? What do you do when you decide to look for new accounting software? Or even what do you do when you notice a flat tire in your car?
My guess is that you would Google it.
But did you know that 82% of B2B buyers also agree that content is important to achieving their marketing goals?
Faced with a problem, challenge, or even achieving a goal, they simply Google it.
So the cold hard truth is that without some presence on Google, your business is facing an uphill battle digitally.
In this guide, you'll discover strategies for building your online presence—search engine optimization (SEO).
You'll learn what SEO is, how it works, and what you must do to position your website in search engine results.
But before we get started, I want to assure you of something.
Many resources make SEO complicated. They scare readers with technical terms, elements, and rarely explain anything beyond theory.
I assure you, this guide is not like that.
I'm going to break SEO down to its most basic parts and show you how to use all of its elements to build a successful SEO strategy. (To stay up to date on SEO strategies and trends, check out HubSpot’s Skill Up podcast.)
Keep reading to learn about SEO, or skip to the section that interests you most.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The goal of SEO is to expand a company's visibility in organic search results. It helps businesses rank more pages higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). As a result, these efforts drive more visitors to the company's website, increasing their chances of getting more conversions, resulting in more customers and more revenue.
When asked to explain what SEO is, we often choose to call it a strategy for ensuring that when someone Googles your product or service category, they find your website.
There are many ways to improve the SEO of your website pages. Elements that search engines look for include title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). Search engines also look at website structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how high your website should rank in their SERPs.
Taking all these factors into consideration, SEO mainly drives two things – ranking and visibility.
How does SEO work?
SEO improves the ranking of that content and the visibility of the website by optimizing website content, conducting keyword research, and obtaining inbound links. Once a web page has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, you can usually see the results live on the SERP, but the SEO work can take several months to fully materialize.
Ranking
This is what search engines use to determine where to place a specific web page in the SERP. Ranking starts from the previous position and continues to the final number of search engine results for the query. A web page can be ranked one position at a time. Over time, a page's ranking may change due to content freshness, competition in the SERPs, or algorithm changes in the search engine itself.
visibility
This term describes the prominence of a specific domain in search engine results. With high visibility, your domain stands out in SERPs. Search visibility is reduced when a domain is not visible to many relevant search queries.
Both are responsible for delivering the main SEO goals – traffic and domain authority.
How does Google know how to rank a page?
Search engines have only one goal. They aim to provide users with the most relevant answers or information.
Every time you use them, their algorithms select the pages that are most relevant to your query. Then, rank them, showing the most authoritative or popular first.
In order to provide the correct information to users, search engines analyze two factors:
One is the correlation between the search query and the page content. Search engines evaluate it through various factors such as topic or keywords.
The second is authority measured by the website's popularity on the Internet. Google assumes that the more popular a page or resource is, the more valuable its content is to readers.
To analyze this information, they use complex equations called search algorithms.
Search engines keep their algorithms secret. But over time, SEOs have identified some of the factors they consider when ranking pages. We call them ranking factors, and they are the focus of your SEO strategy.
You'll quickly see that adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links affects your rankings and search visibility. That’s because each of these actions improves ranking factors.
What is an SEO strategy?
SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO includes an on-page strategy, which is using intent-based keywords, and an off-page strategy, which is getting inbound links from other websites.
Three Core Components of a Powerful SEO Strategy
To optimize your website, you need to improve your ranking factors in three areas – technical website setup, content, and links.
1.Technical settings
Three things you must do in order for your website to rank:
First, search engines need to find your page on the web.
It then has to scan them to understand their themes and determine their keywords.
Next, it needs to add them to its index—the database of everything it finds on the web. This way, its algorithm can consider showing your website for relevant queries.
Seems simple, doesn't it? Of course, there's nothing to worry about. After all, since you can access your website without any problems, Google should too, right?
Unfortunately, there's a problem. Web pages will look different to you and search engines. You think of it as a collection of graphics, colors, text, and their formatting and links.
To search engines, it's just text.
Therefore, any elements it cannot render in this way are invisible to search engines. So although your site looks great, Google may find its content inaccessible.
Note a few things about it:
This page is just text. Despite our careful design, the elements that search engines see are text and links.
As a result, it cannot see the image on the page (note the element marked with an arrow.) It can only recognize its name. If the image contains important keywords for which we want the page to rank, search engines will not see it.
This is where technical setup (also known as field optimization) comes in. It ensures that your website and pages allow Google to scan and index them without any issues. The most important factors affecting it include:
Site navigation and links
Search engines crawl your website just like you do. They follow links. Search engine crawlers land on the page and use links to find other content to analyze. But as you can see above, they can't see the image. Therefore, set navigation and links to plain text.
Simple URL structure
Search engines don't like reading long strings with complex structures. So, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them to contain as few of the main keywords as possible for the page you want to optimize.
page speed
Search engines use load time (the time it takes for a user to be able to read a page) as a quality metric. Many website elements affect it. For example, image size. Use Google's Page Speed Insights Tool to get suggestions on how to improve your pages.
Dead links or broken redirects
Dead links send visitors to non-existent pages. A broken redirect points to a resource that may no longer exist. Both provide a poor user experience but also prevent search engines from indexing your content.
Sitemap and Robots.txt file
A sitemap is a simple file that lists all the URLs on your site. Search engines use it to identify pages to crawl and index. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines what content not to index (for example, a specific policy page that you don't want to appear in searches.) Both are created to speed up crawling and indexing of content.
Duplicate content
Pages that contain the same or very similar content can confuse search engines. They often find it nearly impossible to determine what content they should show in search results. Therefore, search engines view duplicate content as a negative factor. Once you find it, you can penalize the site by not showing any of these pages at all.
2.Content
Every time you use a search engine, you are looking for content—for example, information about a specific issue or problem.
Granted, this content may come in different formats. It can be text, such as a blog post or a web page. But it could also be a video, product recommendations, or even a business listing.
For SEO, it helps gain greater search visibility. There are two reasons here:
On the one hand, content is what customers want when they search. No matter what they’re looking for, it’s content that delivers it. The more content you publish, the greater your chances of gaining greater search visibility.
Additionally, search engines use content to determine how to rank pages. This is the idea of correlation between pages and people’s search queries that we discussed earlier.
When crawling a page, they determine its topic. Analyzing elements such as the length of a page or its structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person's query to the pages they believe are most relevant to them.
The process of optimizing your content begins with keyword research.
keyword research
Search engine optimization is not about getting any visitors to the website. You want to attract people, and then customers, who need what you’re selling and can become prospects.
However, this is only possible if it ranks for the keywords people use when searching. Otherwise, they won't be able to find you. This is true even if your website appears at the top of search results.
That’s why SEO efforts start with discovering the phrases that potential buyers enter into search engines.
This process usually involves identifying terms and topics that are relevant to your business. Then, convert them into initial keywords. Then, conduct extensive research to discover relevant terms that your audience will use.
We’ve published a thorough guide on keyword research for beginners. It lays out the keyword research process in detail. Use this to identify the search terms you should target.
With your keyword list in hand, the next step is to optimize your content. SEO calls this process on-page optimization.
Page optimization
On-page optimization, also known as on-page SEO, ensures that search engines understand the topic and keywords of the page and can match it to relevant searches.
Note, I said 'page' not content. This is because, while most on-page SEO efforts focus on the words you use, it extends to optimizing certain elements in your code.
You may have heard of some of these – meta tags like title or description are two popular ones. But there's more. So, here is a list of the most critical on-page optimization actions to take.
Note: Since blog content dominates most websites, when it comes to these factors, I will focus on blog SEO – optimizing blog posts for relevant keywords. However, all of these suggestions apply to other page types as well.
On-page SEO Strategy Guide
a) Keyword optimization
First, make sure Google knows the keywords you want this page to rank for. To do this, make sure you include at least your primary keywords in the following content:
Title of the post: Ideally, place this near the beginning of the title. We all know that Google pays more attention to the text at the beginning of the title.
URL: The URL of your page should also contain keywords. Ideally, nothing else is included. Also, remove any stop words.
H1 tag: In most content management systems, this tag displays the title of the page by default. However, make sure your platform is not using other settings.
The first 100 words of your content: Finding keywords at the beginning of your blog post will convince Google that this is actually what the page is about.
Meta title and meta description tags: Search engines use these two code elements to display their listings. They display the meta title as the title of the search listing. The meta description provides content for the small promotion below it. But beyond that, they use both to further understand the topic of the page.
Image Filenames and ALT Tags: Remember how search engines see graphics on a page? They can only see their file names. Therefore, make sure that at least one image contains the keyword in the file name.
ALT tags, on the other hand, are text browser displays rather than images (for visually impaired visitors). However, because the ALT tag resides in the image code, search engines also use it as a relevancy signal.
Additionally, add semantic keywords – variations or synonyms of your keywords. Google and other search engines use them to better determine a page's relevance.
Let me illustrate this with a simple example. Let's say your main keyword is 'Apple'. But do you mean the fruit behind the iPhone or the tech giant?
Now, imagine what happens when Google discovers terms like sugar, orchard, or cider in the copy? Which queries to choose to rank it will be immediately obvious, right?
This is what semantic keywords do. Add them to ensure your pages don't start showing irrelevant searches.
b) Non-keyword related page optimization factors
On-page SEO is more than just sprinkling keywords on a page. The following factors also help confirm a page's trustworthiness and authority:
External links: Links to other related pages on the topic help Google further define its topic. Plus, it provides a good user experience. how? By positioning your content as a valuable resource.
Internal links: These links can help you rank higher in two ways. One, they allow search engines to find and crawl other pages on the site. Second, they show semantic relationships between individual pages, helping to better determine their relevance to search queries. Typically, each blog post should contain at least 2-4 internal links
Length of content: Long content usually ranks better. This is because, if done well, longer blog posts will always contain more detailed information about the topic, thus keeping readers on your site longer. This is called dwell time and it is an important ranking factor for search engines
Multimedia: Although not required, multimedia elements such as videos, graphics, audio players, etc. can indicate the quality of the page. It keeps readers on the page longer, just like longer content. In turn, this shows that they found the content valuable and worth perusing.
3. Links
From what you’ve read so far in this guide, you know that no page will rank without two factors – relevance and authority.
In order to provide users with the most accurate answers, Google and other search engines prioritize pages they believe are most relevant to their queries but are also popular.
The first two areas—technical setup and content—focus on increasing relevancy (although I admit that some elements of them also serve to highlight authority.)
However, links are the reason for popularity.
But before we talk more about how they work, here’s what SEO means when talking about links.
What are backlinks?
A link, also known as a backlink, is a reference to your content on another website. Every time another website mentions and points their readers to your content, you will get a backlink to your website.
For example, this article from Entrepreneur.co mentions our Not Another State of Marketing Report page. It also links to it, allowing their readers to view statistics other than those cited.
Example backlink from entrepreneur.com to HubSpot's 'Not Another Marketing Status' report.
Google uses the quantity and quality of such links as a signal of a website's authority. The logic behind this is that webmasters will cite popular and high-quality websites more often than mediocre ones.
But note that I also mentioned link quality. That's because not all links are the same. Some low-quality links can negatively impact your rankings.
Link quality factors
Low-quality or questionable links—for example, links that Google would consider to be intentionally constructed to make it consider the site more authoritative—can lower your rankings.
That’s why when it comes to link building, SEO doesn’t focus on building any links. Their goal is to produce the highest quality references possible.
Naturally, like search algorithms, we don’t know exactly what determines link quality. However, over time SEO discovered some of them:
1Popularity of the linking site: Any link from a domain that search engines consider authoritative will naturally be of high quality. In other words, links from sites that have high-quality links pointing to them perform better.
2 Topic Relevance: Links from domains similar to your topic will have greater authority than links from random websites.
3. Trust in the domain: Just like popularity, search engines also evaluate the trust of a website. Links from more trustworthy websites will always impact rankings better.
link building
In SEO, we call the process of acquiring new backlinks link building. As many practitioners acknowledge, this can be a challenging activity.
Link building, if you want to do it well, requires creativity, strategic thinking, and patience. To generate high-quality links, you need to develop a link building strategy. This is no small thing.
Remember, your links must pass various quality standards. Plus, it's not obvious to search engines that you constructed them intentionally.
Here are some strategies to do this:
Editorial, Organic Links: These backlinks come from websites that reference your content alone.
Outreach: In this strategy, you contact other websites to get links. This can happen in a number of ways. You can create an amazing content and tell them about it via email. In turn, if they find it valuable, they will refer to it. You can also suggest locations where they can link to it.
Guest Posting: A guest post is a blog post that you publish on a third-party website. In turn, these companies often allow one or two links to your website to be included in the content and author bio.
Profile Links: Many websites offer the opportunity to create links. Online profiles are a good example. Typically, when setting up a profile like this, you can list your website there as well. Not all such links are highly authoritative, but some may be. Given the ease of creating them, they are worth pursuing.
