What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your web pages and content so that they appear higher in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The goal of SEO is to increase organic search traffic or unpaid traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs). By optimizing for relevant keywords and phrases, you can ensure that potential customers are more likely to find your website when they search for related terms.

Why is SEO important for businesses?

Search engine optimization is essential for businesses because it helps you to reach potential customers and generate organic traffic from people who are actively looking for products or services like yours. SEO can also bring more qualified visitors to your website and help build brand awareness. With a well-optimized website, you can attract more visitors and leads, which in turn can help increase your sales.

The Basics of How SEO Works

When it comes to an SEO strategy and increasing your search rankings and traffic, several factors need to be addressed in order to make sure your pages are optimized for search engines. Here is a quick guide:

• Keywords – Identify relevant keywords that people are searching for, and incorporate them into the content on your pages.
• Content Quality – Make sure that the content on your pages is unique and is high quality content. Essentially, does your content provide the best answer to search queries?
• Page Speed – Ensure your site loads quickly to boost user experience.
• Mobile Responsiveness – Optimize your website so it looks great and functions properly on mobile devices.
• Metadata – Add tags and descriptions to your pages to help search engines understand them better.
• Links – Acquire quality links from other websites that point back to yours.
• Local SEO – Optimize your website for local searches in order to reach local customers.

Overall - to keep things as simple as possible - googles job is to serve up the most relevant links to help answer what the person is typing in the search bar.  For example - lets say someone types in how much is the average bathroom remodeling project.  If you happen to be a bathroom remodeler in that person's location - this could be beneficial to you.  So you would want to answer potentially this question and other questions people may have related to the cost of remodeling their bathroom.  For example - overall average price, average prices of specific square foot projects, new bathroom installation in basement, master bedroom remodeling costs, how to hire a local bathroom remodeling contractor, etc...   If you serve up the most relevant content that's most helpful for the person searching, there's a big chance that your content / page will rank. 

*TIP - in an incognito window, do the search and see what the first 3 organic search results show - what questions do they answer?  Do they include images?   What's the average content length etc... Again, your job is to provide a better resource than what is currently ranking.  This is a great starting point to ranking higher.

Tips on How to Get Started With SEO

If you're looking for a beginners guide to effective SEO and you need a step by step checklist,  we have compiled 8 steps to follow in order to help you begin ranking higher in search engine result pages. 

Research Keywords

Use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to identify relevant keywords that you should target with your content. Depending on how detailed you get, you can start simple with searching on google and seeing the drop down suggestions that come up - those are excellent place to get ideas.  Start basic with this and identify some simple search terms you can make a priority to target in your SEO efforts. 

If you search for an SEO company near me, you can inquire about hiring them to do the research for you and create a detailed list of what they find, as well as narrowing down the top 20-30 phrases you should target. 

Create a site map

This is something we do with our agency.  This can be simple as an excel spreadsheet, google doc of even paper - just have a column that has the page URL list and then a column that has the target keywords.  This way you can add to this list over time, expand the keywords you rank for, know the correct page you should be targeting for specific keywords and you can keep track of your efforts. 

Track your work - stay organized - and improve over time.  This site map will prove to be very valuable.  TIP - be sure to add the new pages or blogs you write to this and grow it!

Optimize Your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Make sure your page titles and meta descriptions accurately describe the content on the page, contain keywords you’re targeting and are compelling. You want to make sure your title includes the main keyword you want to target if possible and the first sentence in the meta description includes the main phrase as well.  Also, its recommended that your title is no more than 65 characters and the meta description is around 150 characters.

Optimize Page Content

Once you have the specific terms you want to rank for, it's important to make sure you write content that is related to those search terms. You need to make sure that you include the main search term in your content, but also use related terms throughout your article.  It's necessary to keep these terms natural and not stuff them throughout the article as it can be a turnoff for readers. 

Pro Tip - Make sure you utilize H1-H6 headers.  H1 should be the main title of your page and include the main focus keywords.

Build Topical Authority

If you focus on writing content that is high quality, relevant, helpful and contains useful information - people will start to share your page/content as a resource.  When this starts happening, you’ll slowly gain authority in the eyes of google.  Most websites do this by adding new page content or utilizing blog articles. Search engines tend to recommend websites that have a hierarchy of topics they cover ad services they offer.  A great example of this is Home Depot.  Home Depot sells primarily home improvement products, but they write articles related to those products and services, things like what are the top trending colors to use when painting your home in 2023 or how to hire a local contractor near you.  Building authority will help search engines to recommend your site pages more frequently and increase your overall search engine rankings.

Site Health and Performance

It’s critical to make sure your website is fast, secure and not over-indexed.  This means that you should do an analysis of your site performance, check for any security issues or malware, and reduce the amount of pages being indexed by search engines.  You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, google search console, and other SEO tools to audit your site and make sure everything is running smoothly.  Some SEO agencies offer free site audits or even provide a site audit dashboard that will highlight all elements that you need to improve so you can get your site health to range 90-100%.

Create Quality Backlinks

Building back links (or inbound links) is key to getting higher search engine rankings.  These are the links from external websites that point back to your website and tell search engines that other sites believe in your content.

Backlinks tend to be a very challenging and overly complicated part of SEO.  Why? The idea behind this is similar to referrals.  Ever see a post on social media with someone looking for services?  Need a new roof - anyone have any suggestions for the top local roofing companies in our area?  Then you see dozens of recommendations.  That shows trust that others used the service and had a positive experience.  Backlinks are similar to this.  If you have a trusted business, people will refer you more often.  If you have useful content on your site, people will share that content. 

SEO's tend to say they will get you tons of backlinks - but how do you do that if it's supposed to be trusted recommendations or links?  Some agencies pay for these links and others have 100's of blogs they own and use those to create these links.  The issue with both those approaches is that it's not genuine and we don't recommend them.  Instead, focus first on your business, your content quality, communicate with your community and customers, ask for reviews and take a grass roots effort to give people and websites a reason to want to share and link to your site.

Track Your Search Engine Rankings

Once you’ve taken the steps to optimize your website and start building quality backlinks, you’ll want to track your progress.  Tracking results helps you understand how well all of your SEO efforts are doing and serves as a benchmark for what needs optimization or improvement.  There are several SEO tracking tools available such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs and Moz.  These tools will help you monitor your SEO progress over time to ensure that all of your hard work is paying off. Contact us if you would like us to create a custom dashboard and reporting to track all of your rankings.

By following these steps and optimizing your website for search engines, you’ll increase the visibility of your site in organic search engine results and rank higher for relevant search queries.

What are the main search engine ranking factors?

Search engine ranking factors are the elements that determine where you rank in search engine results. While google itself has 100's of factors it's explained play a overall roll in ranking, here are the main top 5 we suggest you keep in mind:

1. Relevancy: Google looks for websites that contain content related to the user's search query. For example, if someone searches for "running shoes", a website about running shoes will be ranked higher than one about bicycles.
2. Keywords: Search engine algorithms look at how often keywords appear on a webpage and how relevant they are to what the user is looking for. Sites that appear to match the user's query with specific words used on the page will have an advantage over other websites.
3. Content Quality: Quality content is essential for getting good rankings in search results; Google looks for webpages with original, well-written and informative content that provides value to the reader.
4. Backlinks: Backlinks from other quality websites can help increase rankings; these links signify that other people find your website useful, boosting its credibility with search engines.
5. User Experience: Websites tailored with a good user experience can help boost rankings as well; this includes design elements like site navigation and loading speed as well as how easy it is to find information on a particular website.

Focus 90% of your effort on these 5 factors and you should see the desired results. But keep in mind that SEO is a long-term process and can take several months of effort before you can begin seeing tangible results.

Common SEO questions and answers