Search Engine Optimization is probably the most important thing you can do for your website to help it not only serve the purpose but also succeed at it. So, let’s take baby steps into this river of a topic and sort out everything you need to know about what SEO is and how to do SEO.
As you might have guessed already, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is one of the basic yet most important digital marketing tools used by specialists in the field. Its purpose is to attract traffic to websites and make them generally more visible, more responsive and to give them better chances of converting visitors into customers.
Why do you need to improve your website SEO?
-
Increasing visibility & Building your brand
One of the most essential functions SEO performs is making your website more visible for those surfing the interwebs, looking for goods or services.
Meaning, the better your website SEO is optimized, the higher the site will be on the search engine result page (SERP), the better the chance is that someone looking for what you’re offering will see your website, notice it and actually click on it to check it out.
Knowing how few people even get it onto the second searching page, you REALLY want to get on that first SERP.
With increased visibility comes a stronger brand. It’s natural that getting a higher ranking will get you more attention, hence more recognition. The chain is pretty simple: the better your site’s SEO, the better it reaches the target audience, the larger the recognition, the better conversion, the stronger the brand. You can always rely on logic in how to do SEO.
-
Web Traffic
Traffic comes hand in hand with visibility and rankings. About 67% of all traffic goes to the very first 5 listings on the first searching page. So, if you want people to notice, let alone find your website, you will already need some strong SEO practices implemented for it.
-
Better Visitor Experience
Let’s take Google. As a search engine, its goal is not only to provide the searchers with the most relevant content but also the best user experience.
So a lot of tech aspects of your website need to be optimized to provide the visitors with the best user experience you can give them – the site should be mobile-friendly, the loading speed should be brought down to the minimum, language options are always great, and the site should be easy to navigate or even be searchable.
Even recently these seemed like small things, but today these small things make all the difference for your conversion.
Here are some stats that will show you how important managed SEO is and why your website needs to be on that first search page:
- 90.63%: The percentage of pages that get no organic search traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
- 76%: The percentage of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby and visit a business within a day. (28%of those searches for something nearby result in a purchase.) (Google)
- 90%: The percentage of consumers who used the internet to find a local business in the last year. (BrightLocal)
- 39%: The percentage of purchasers who were influenced by a relevant search. (Google)
- 28%: The percentage of digital marketers who reported having created a campaign that generated no links at all. (Aira)
What is a must-have kit for a well-optimized website?
-
Keywords
SEO keywords are some of the biggest helpers in the process of web page optimizing. What are they? They range from single words to specific and complex word combinations or phrases. They are used to attract more relevant organic traffic to your website and are half the answer to how to do SEO.
When a person searches for something related to your brand or industry, anticipating those well and properly doing your web page optimizing will automatically connect that person and the content of your website and bring it higher in the rankings on the SERP.
To improve your website SEO, however, you need to make sure that you’re using the right keywords and do a proper keyword search. Answer the following questions to help you narrow down the right keywords:
- What is your website about?
- What is the main purpose of your website?
- What exactly can your website offer for those looking?
-
Headlines
A powerful headline is a door, the gateway onto your website, it’s your front porch. We can all agree that there are porches and doors that seem inviting and those we want to cross the road to the other side for.
Headlines are there to hook the searchers and definitely decrease in efficiency going from header 1 to header 6. So shoot your best shot with the first two headlines.
Here are a few tips on how to improve your website SEO of your website with titles:
- Use numbers
- Use formulas that have proven their efficiency (the secret to…; how to… without…; Do… like…; What you need to know about…; etc.)
- Use strong appealing adjectives and call to actions (CTA)
- Keep it to about 8 words
-
Tags
The <title> element is usually placed at the top of your page and acts as a clickable headline when it appears on the search page, and also shows up on social networks and in browsers. Title tags are there to provide the most concise yet clearest idea of what your site is about. This is why the title tags are some of the most important and influential parts of your optimization process.
Meta description tags are also placed in the head of your page and usually (though not always) show up in the snippet under the clickable title tag and the website’s URL in the SERP. Meta tags do not affect the ranking but are an opportunity to increase click-through and clearly explain to the searcher what your site is about and how exactly can it solve their query.
-
URL-friendly policy
While the URLs might not be the single most important thing in your website SEO process, they are the first thing that the search engines check about your website, so in a way, your URLs are the face of your site for the engines.
Choosing the right and strong domain can be essential to the performance of your website in every search. The better the URL showcases the content of your page, the better. Using keywords and phrases also strengthens your URL and hence, your website SEO.
Another thing about URLs and web page optimization to keep in mind is the Top Level Domains (or TDLs) which essentially are the little suffix after the dot in your domain – .com, .bg, .ru, etc.
These help the search engines decide where you’re the most important – so, if you’re selling kids’ bikes in the UK, don’t create a domain URL that goes something like “www.monsterbikes.jp” as the engine will decide that your site is relevant in Japan, but will rank much lower in the UK.
-
Content, on-site and off-site
It’s not without a reason that the phrase coined by Bill Gates in 1996 that reads “Content is King” is still relevant today. Content is what drives your website and helps it reach the proper target audience and engage it to the point of conversion into customers. Content is, mayhaps, the first answer to the question of how to do SEO and how to optimize a website.
In this day and age having a website that offers services or products is not enough. For perpetual and growing customer engagement, trust-building, and brand strengthening, you should always keep your site full of relevant content that is helpful and important for the visitors.
Today the preferences in content consumption are significantly shifted towards visual and multimedia content, so providing your audience with images, videos, infographics or recordings will definitely help engagement.
When it comes to off-site SEO, the main technique here on how to optimize a website will be considered backlink building, simply meaning that you need to make sure that all the links to your website that reside on other external sites are high-quality, working, and relevant.
Having guest blogs, highly shared infographics, and utilizing influencers’ names are also among some of the useful off-page SEO tactics.
So, why is it so important to optimize your website and how to improve the SEO of your site?
When the World Wide Web was just in its budding stage, there weren’t too many websites, there wasn’t much content, there wasn’t yet much competition then. Today the interwebs are a completely different picture and there’s so much content out there any website can easily be buried under pages and pages of better-optimized rivals.
This is why website SEO is so important and needs to be taken seriously. If you and your website want to be seen by those looking for the goods or services you offer, you need to quickly scroll up to the beginning of this page and read all our tips on how to do SEO and how to optimize your website one more time!
