What is SEO? For those of us who aren’t website developers or techies it can seem like something really complicated that we may never quite fully understand.
But we know it’s important, and we can’t avoid it if we want to compete in a world where how our brand’s site shows up online in search engine results can make a massive difference to our business.
So what does it mean when someone says you need to ‘optimize your site for SEO’?
It means that you need to optimize your site for search engines.
In other words, you need to optimize your site for Google since 90% of searches on desktops and 95% of searches done on mobile phones are done via Google.
O.K. Some of us already know this. We know we need to optimize our sites and content for Google. The question, is how?
Maybe you’ve heard people say ‘it’s all about keywords!’ or ‘we need to write for search engines’ but how does this translate to what you should do for your specific business?
What tools should you be using to assess your website’s current ‘value’ or how it ranks and what terms it ranks for on Google?
What can or should you be doing when you publish content on your site?
Is this something you should do yourself? Or does it warrant investing in hiring a professional who specializes in SEO strategy to help you?
First of all, YES SEO is as important as everyone says it is. Don’t let confusion or fear of asking questions and admitting you don’t understand it stop you from figuring out how to SEO optimize your business or brand’s site.
I struggled with truly understanding SEO for years, until I had a lightbulb moment in which I realized that all of the research and trial and error work I’d been doing for years, and the SEO blogger groups I’d be hanging out in and gleaning tips from was finally paying off. It wouldn’t have taken me that long, had I hired a professional to optimize my site, but as my travel blog (the testing ground I used for the first couple of years) was just a hobby, and I wanted to teach myself how this all worked from the inside out, I took the slow route.
Once SEO is fully understood, it’s possible to assess a website, do keyword research, and understand with relative certainty, which terms that site will be able to rank for, and what type of content will be most beneficial (from an SEO perspective) to publish.
It’s also possible to ascertain whether it’s realistic to expect to rank highly at all for a certain term or topic, and when a business should expect results to take much longer.
Once the opportunities have been assessed, it’s then a matter of deciding what content also makes sense from a brand/business perspective. Not all content that could rank highly on Google, makes sense for a brand to publish. And despite the temptation to ‘write for search engines’, it’s actually almost always better to write for people first, and then to see how well you can optimize that content for search engines without sacrificing quality or user experience.
Outlining a group of topics and sub-topics, appropriate key terms, and related key terms and then laying out a content and publishing plan is a good way to effectively get started on creating content for your business’s site that you can then optimize.
The more regularly you publish, and the better optimized your content is, the faster you’ll rank in search engine results.
Other factors that affect how quickly your SEO efforts will pay off:
- How long your site has been around.
If you’re a brand new brand/site, it will normally take you much longer to rank than an established site that has been around for years and has already been recognized as valuable by Google.
*The exception to this is for new sites that publish more and better content more quickly and that have a better overall site experience and have optimized their sites for SEO much better than competitors (that may have had sites published for a lot longer). - How good your content is.
If you are posting a lot of content, but the content isn’t very high quality and is stuffed with keywords so that it’s obvious you’re writing for search engines, Google will penalize you for this. They rank sites that publish valuable content (i.e. content that people read and consume versus bounce off of immediately) more highly than those who write low-quality content.
The more questions your content answers (questions that people are asking online) and the more time people spend on your content, helps your site to continue getting ranked more highly by Google.
Long-form content (1200+ words) normally does better than short-form content.
*Note: It’s not only written content that can enhance your site’s SEO, it’s also engaging content such as whitepapers, webinars, videos, etc. Content that keeps people on your site, and shows search engines that searchers find your site and content valuable. - Your existing website traffic volume and sources.
Obviously, a site that’s getting tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors a month is going to be able to get its content noticed and ranked more highly by Google more quickly than a site that is getting only a few hundred visitors per month.
Your off-site efforts to drive traffic to your website (from your social media channels, email campaigns, and via backlinks from other high authority sites) all contribute to your content and site being seen as more valuable, more quickly. - Your site’s overall quality.
This includes your site speed, the number of bad links or 404 error pages you have, your website experience, etc. Google penalizes poor-quality sites. This goes beyond simply not ranking poor quality content, or ranking great quality content more highly. It extends to your website itself, and how good or poor visitors’ experiences are when they visit your site.
If your pages load too slowly, you have pages that return 404 Error messages, you are still running an insecure (http) site, or have pages riddled with bad (outdated/non-existent) links, etc. these are all things that affect your site’s ranking.
So how do you ensure that you are optimizing your site for SEO in the right way?
Two of the most valuable free tools available to any business with a website, are Google Analytics and Google Console. These are the first two places to start when you want to understand how many people are visiting your website, where they are coming from, what terms they are typing into google that lead them to your site and how highly you are ranking for those terms, which pages on your website are getting the most traffic, and where people are spending the most time, etc.
There are many more SEO specific tools that will help you delve deeper into your website’s ranking, keyword research and planning, etc. But these are where you want to start if you are at the beginning of the process.
If you feel that you’re already pretty knowledgeable about how SEO works, and want to delve into advanced keyword research, content strategy, etc. and figure out figure out what areas of your website are hurting/helping, I suggest the following list of tools:
SEO Tools That Will Help You Become an SEO Content Marketing Wizard
PLEASE NOTE: These tools can be overwhelming if you aren’t yet experienced enough with SEO to fully understand how (or when) the actions you take will make an impact and if you don’t understand the information that these tools are giving you.
If you’ve been trying and failing to get your website to rank more highly in Google results for a significant period of time, I recommend hiring or contracting someone who specializes in optimizing website content for SEO, as well as who understands your niche/industry to assess your website and current content and lay out an SEO content strategy for you.
Someone who specializes in overall content strategy and good SEO content strategy will normally be a different person than someone who specializes in fixing the technical back-end issues (speeding up your site, redirecting URLs to get rid of 404 Errors, cleaning up bad links, optimizing a site for user experience, etc.). One is a marketer, the other is a developer who specializes in site optimization, or an SEO (a person called a Search Engine Optimizer). While SEO agencies claim to specialize in everything, the reality is that someone outside of your industry or niche and/or that doesn’t have an intimate understanding of your business, brand, objectives, etc. isn’t going to be nearly as effective or creative in finding opportunities for your business to come up with content that both makes sense for your business as well as provides SEO opportunities.