Want to learn more about SEO? Want to find a way to rise in a search result?
When it comes to your business’s marketing strategies, SEO should be at the top of your list. Although you won’t expect to see immediate results overnight, once you understand the basics of SEO (processes, strategies, terms…), you can put your business in a better position for long-term success.
The secret is already out there. Businesses that expend time and effort in their SEO strategies achieve a higher return on investment (ROI), making SEO optimization an everyday commitment. After all, you’re not the only one trying to convince search engines to display your landing pages at the top of a search result.
If you’re new to the world of SEO, don’t lose hope just because your business is in its early stages or you’ve heard how enervating the work can be. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, meaning those tried and tested strategies that worked in the past may be ineffective tomorrow.
This gives you enough time to learn the fundamentals. You can even be one step ahead of your competition as you save time and brainpower by avoiding all the old, bootless strategies.
This article aims to educate readers on the basics of SEO, starting with its components.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing the front and back end web pages on your site to improve your ranking in a search engine results page (SERP). On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines have a better understanding of what your business provides to your customers and visitors. On-page SEO has many aspects, but make sure to keep tabs on the following:
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Page titles
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Headings
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Meta descriptions
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Image alt-text
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Site speed
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Internal linking
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URL structure
When you’re thinking about what type of content you should write, consider the different stages of your customer’s buyer’s journey. Here are some examples:
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To increase awareness
In this stage of the buyer’s journey, your audience may not know much about your brand or even niche. Say your business is along the lines of a coworking space, a sample title for your content could be: “How To Find a Coworking Space To Improve Work Efficiency.”
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To increase consideration of choosing your brand
In this stage of the buyer’s journey, your potential customer is doing more in-depth research related to your brand, trying to justify the need to engage with your business. Staying in line with our earlier example, a possible blog title for this stage could be: “Interesting Statistics About Coworking Spaces Every Business Needs To Know.”
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To help them come to a decision
For the final stage of the buyer’s journey (help them come to a decision), you’ll want to add relevant calls-to-action to your blog posts. These could be in the form of a discount, free trial, or ‘Contact Us’ link.
However, once you tailor your content to match your audience’s search intent, the job is not done. Remember, don’t just write content so that you have something to publish on your website. Make sure to conduct careful keyword research and follow some of these on-page SEO practices:
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Add calls-to-action on posts with offers and products
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Incorporate related keywords naturally into your posts
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Add engaging, relevant visuals to your posts
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Optimize your website for both desktop and mobile use
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Avoid stuffing keywords
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Optimize your images
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Add internal links to your posts
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Analyze what the top search results are doing in their blog posts.
Off-page SEO
No SEO strategy will be effective without off-page SEO. Simply put, these are the practices that encompass what goes on behind your website.
This could be in the form of generating backlinks, outreach to sites related to your niche, or marketing your brand on social media. These strategies send signals to search engines that your website is trusted and credible.
Why is off-page SEO important?
As much as Google changes its algorithms every day, one of off-page SE0’s main tasks – link building – continues to be a leading factor Google considers to increase your website’s ranking. Here are some methods you can use to increase backlinks to your website:
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Become a data source
For someone’s statement to be credible, it would help to gather data to back up his/her claims. Why not let that source of data be from you? Here are some sample blog titles you can use for this method: “X Off-page SEO stats for 2022” or “X SEO Statistics Your Business Needs To Know.”
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Broken link building
Broken link building is the practice of finding dead links on another website’s blog post and convincing the host site to link one of your related web pages to the link instead. However, there is one drawback when it comes to this off-page SEO strategy… it’s near impossible to achieve organically. Luckily, the Ahrefs site explorer tool makes it easier to find broken links. All you need is to type in a keyword, apply filters to your search, and let the data speak to you.
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Strategic guest posting
When you create blog posts for other websites, you instantly increase visibility to a new audience, helping increase your brand awareness. When guest posting, make sure to add a link or two to your website and only guest post with businesses related to your niche.
Technical SEO
This aspect of SEO focuses on optimizing your website to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your web pages. Search engines like Google want to provide their users with the best user experience. If you neglect optimizing your technical SEO, your website will never land on page one of a SERP.
How can you optimize your website for technical SEO? Here are a couple of things to be wary of:
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Optimize loading speed of web pages
As we’ve mentioned earlier, Google wants to provide users with user-friendly websites. How will you gain visitors to your website if it takes a while to load? This ends with users becoming frustrated, resulting in them closing your web page to look for alternatives.
It is recommended to optimize your web pages to load within three seconds. Studies have shown that 53% of mobile visitors leave if web pages load beyond three seconds.
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Prevent having any broken (dead) links
Nobody wants to be redirected to a link that only shows a 404 error. Aside from frustrating your potential customers, search engines themselves hate broken links. It can be easy to miss broken links, especially if you’re publishing content regularly. To help you solve this problem, seek assistance from different SEO tools to ensure that your external links are free from any 404 errors.
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Don’t duplicate your content
Having multiple pieces of content on the same subject can confuse search engines, making them rank all the pages in an unfavorable position. When faced with this type of technical SEO issue, you can set up canonical URLs — these are URLs that tell search engines which is the preferred URL for a particular page.
Bonus Tip: The SEO platform Sitechecker helps you find all the technical problems that your site have. For example, Page Counter is one of the tools of this platform. It will help you find all the pages on your site and show you which of those pages are indexed in search engines.
Final thoughts
SEO will continue to be an evolving field. While this post only scratches the surface of what SEO truly is, this article will give you a better jumping-off point for when you start or continue to improve your SEO strategies.
It’s important to know that all of these strategies (on-page, off-page, and technical SEO) are only effective when done in unison. When you take the time to learn all there is to know about the different components, you’ll help steer your business ever closer to the success it deserves to achieve.
