There are some fundamentals that we believe everyone who makes decisions regarding a company's online presence should know. It doesn't matter if you're in the C-Suite or spend your days in the trenches working digital magic; these tips are for you. In this first blog of this series, we will explain what SEO is, why it's important, and the core pillars of SEO.
The most basic SEO fundamental you need to know is the answer to the question: "What is SEO?" If you don't already know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You'll find a lot of different definitions floating across the internet, but here's the one I use to govern SEO at SERPslice.
SEO is the process of adjusting your website content to better match what search engine users are typing into the search box.
You'll notice I don't mention anything about trying to trick Google's algorithms. That's because SEO is always more successful when it's done for the user. Great SEO will increase visibility, generate more relevant traffic, and generate more sales or leads (depending on your site).
There are, literally, billions of searches today on Google alone. That's billions, with a b. While that doesn't necessarily mean there are billions of searches relating to your company or industry, it's still an overwhelming number.
Most traffic to your website starts with a search query. Yes, there are other channels like social media and paid search, but you don't hear anyone saying, "Oh, let me Facebook that real quick." There's a reason "Google" has become a verb. It's where people go for answers. If you don't show up on the first two pages when someone searches for the search terms related to your business, you basically don't exist on the internet. SEO is how you get to the page one organic results.
Let's do a quick exercise: Go to google and type "SEO audit tool." Depending on how the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has changed since this was written, you should see something similar to the following:
Organic search results never have the word "sponsored" over them.
Depending on the search query and the individual, some search users will click on the first blue link they see (usually a paid ad). Others will skip over the sponsored links and look for the organic results. That's because they know the organic search results are the ones that, according to Almighty Algorithm, are most relevant to their search query.
The SERP is always changing and shifting, but at the time of this writing, you can expect there to be between 8 and 12 organic results on the search engine results page. A core piece of information to remember is you're not the only website optimizing your content to appear in these results. Some of the other sites and businesses competing with you might be companies you genuinely consider to be your competitors while others may be companies you've never heard of. That's the power of SEO.
SEO has the power to take an otherwise unknown business and launch it to the first page of organic search results.
Since this post about SEO fundamentals is aimed at the beginner, I will keep this as layman-friendly as possible and try to avoid too much technical jargon. There are, however, three words you need to understand: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Crawling is how the bots used by search engines discover new websites and new content on existing sites. When the algorithm determines that the content found by the bot is helpful to search terms found on the page, it makes the choice of whether or not to index that page.
Indexing is the process of a search engine, like Google, adding a website and/or its pages to its database. A page has to be indexed to have a chance at ranking. Once a page is indexed, various factors are evaluated to determine where it will rank when a related search term is typed by a search user.
Eventually, every page gets crawled. Not every crawled page gets indexed and not every indexed page will rank in the top of the organic search results.
Once Googlebot, Bingbot, or any of the other crawlers for search engines crawl your site, it can be a while before the crawler visits again. This is why SEO results and improvements take time to implement. One of the ways to attempt to speed up the process is through Bing Webmaster Tools and using the Index Now tool. This tells Bing that you've made updates or published a new page of your website. This doesn't guarantee Google will also recrawl your site, but it's usually not far behind.
Ok, we've covered the most general SEO fundamentals, now, let's dive into something a little more intermediate: the types of SEO. Commonly, SEO is thought to have 3 pillar: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. While it is technically part of On-page SEO, at SERPslice, we break Content and Copy into its own pillar. We'll talk more about why in that specific session. Here's a very brief explanation of each pillar, then we'll dive deeper into each one.
Okay, time to dive deeper into the pillars.
Technical SEO is all about site performance and sending content signals to the search engine algorithm when your site is crawled. Let's talk about site performance first.
Core Web Vitals are metrics Google uses to measure how well your site performs for its users. Your goal should be to have zero failing pages. It's fine to have a few pages that need improvement, but keep in mind that frustrated users are often users who don't buy from you or fill out your lead form. You can find your performance metrics in Google Search Console (GSC). Here's what they mean in simple terms.
Maybe your desktop site looks great. In fact, it's the best website on the whole internet when looking at it from a computer. Now look at it from your phone. Does it still look as good? Mobile search makes up over 50% of all search traffic, so ignoring mobile is going to lead to poor performance.
Structured data is a special markup, usually Schema or Open Graph, that communicates what type of page is being crawled. By communicating to the crawler what type of page is being crawled, the content can be evaluated based on its specific page type. A news article is going to be written differently than a recipe. The algorithms know this and structured data helps them understand your site better.
The final piece is somewhat subjective, the User Experience, or UX. A general rule for UX is that you don't want any important pages within your website to take more than 3 clicks to get to. This applies to informational pages, products, and others. There are great free tools like Microsoft Clarity that help you understand user frustration on your site so you can make improvements.
On-page SEO is page-specific. While technical SEO can be page specific, on-page SEO is always page-specific.
When doing on-page SEO, you're not optimizing your whole site. You're optimizing a specific page on your site for a specific keyword.
As we break out content and copy into its own pillar at SERPslice, this section talks about the more subtle changes you can make to the page. Specifically, we're going to talk about title tags, meta tags, and alt text. We will also talk about internal linking.
Take a quick look at the tabs in your browser and each one will have a name on the tab. The name you see is the title tag for that page. Title tags also show up on the search engine results page and are the first clue to a search user what your site is about. Title tags are ideally 50-60 characters. This helps the entire page title show up in search results. Some search engines will show more characters than others, so it's best to stay within this limit whenever possible. You also want to make sure that your primary keyword for the page is mentioned near the beginning of the title tag.
Just under the page title, the search user will see your meta description. If you don't specifically assign one, Google will pick an excerpt from the page on your behalf. You don't want this. Google isn't going to tailor the language to be enticing to the search user, but you can. A good meta description is 120 to 160 characters and mentions your target keyword in the first sentence, if possible. This lets the search user feel confident your link is the one that's going to take them to a page that can answer their questions.
Once the user is on the page, meta tags, sometimes called header tags, become important. Your page should, at minimum, have an H1 header tag. It should be the biggest topic for the page. Supporting tags, H2 and beyond, are where you can branch into different topics.
You should only have ONE H1 tag, but you can have multiple of the supporting header tags
Having multiple H1 tags won't keep your website from ranking, but it will impact where you rank. Since your H1 topic is understood by the robots to be the most important topic on your page, having multiple risks confusing the algorithm as to what your page is about. When this happens, the algorithm is going to pick whichever H1 your additional content best supports. If that's not what you actually want the page to rank for, that can cause problems.
Once your meta tags are optimized, the next step is to optimize your images. Each image you feature in your content should have a clearly descriptive file name and something called alt-text. Alt-text acts as a placeholder for when images load slowly and it also adds a level of accessibility to your website, allowing users with poor vision to understand what the image is trying to convey. The descriptive file name will make your life easier if you need to reference the image later.
After all these optimizations are complete, evaluate your page for places where it makes sense to add a link to other pages within your site. The algorithm tends to judge the importance of a specific page on a site by how many other internal pages are linking to that page. It recognizes you're trying to drive traffic to these specific pages.
Authority building is the aspect of SEO where you have the least control and, as a result, it often takes the most effort. When building authority, there are two major things to go after: backlinks and user-generated content.
Backlinks are when another website links directly to page on your website. These links tell algorithms that a site outside your domain finds your product or content useful and relevant. Google has specifically said that relevant backlinks matter, but backlinks from sites not relevant to the content on your site carry no weight.
While it's acceptable to reach out to other website owners and request backlinks from their content to yours, purchasing backlinks can get you in trouble with Google and other search engines.
Often, similar sites that are not in competition with you will be willing to exchange backlinks. This is considered an acceptable practice as both sites are finding the other site useful in some way. For example, if you run an ecommerce store that sells guitars it may make sense to reach out to blogs and websites that talk about learning how to play guitar for backlinks. Since these sites are not in competition with you, they are more likely to say yes.
User-generated content is similar to backlinks but it's more specific to your brand. When your customers love you and they create content on their platforms to talk about your company and/or product, that builds substantial authority, especially if they leave reviews on your products or your Google Business Profile. UGC is not a direct ranking factor but it goes a long way to build trust and authority when others are talking about your product.
Remember when I said content and copy deserved to be its own SEO pillar? Here's why. Content refers to the individual pages, the blog posts and blog post schedule, the products you will offer and the categories they will fall in. Copy refers to the actual words on those pages. What's the difference?
Content is deciding what your site should have, what questions it should answer, and if those answers should be blog posts or standard web pages. Copy is the tone of voice you use to talk about those topics and questions. Deciding on what content your site will have is a strategic decision and needs to be carefully thought about. Let's go back to our guitar example.
If you are an ecommerce store with the goal of selling guitars, it might be tempting to add content to your site about great guitarists of the past and present. Does this content help with your site goal of selling more guitars? Does it make more sense to add content to your website that talks about ways to ease yourself into playing and lowers apprehension about buying a guitar for the first time? Ultimately, that's a choice you have to make as a business owner, but content strategy should always align with the overall business strategy.
Having content for the sake of content does not help your website gain relevant traffic. Targeted content will.
Keyword research and competitor research are core parts of your content strategy. Understanding what your competitors are targeting and what your ideal customer is searching is the key to content strategy success.
Copy can be defined as the words on the page that you use to support your content strategy. Each page on your site and each blog post on your site should have a core keyword that it targets. Don't think of keywords as single words. Think of them as the questions or queries someone might type into the search box that, you hope, will lead them to your product.
It's okay to use AI tools like Chat GPT to help you outline what copy to use to support a keyword and which questions relating to the keyword you should answer on your page or post. It's important, however, that you not let AI do the writing for you. Copy needs a human touch. Copy should always be written with the intention of helping the human reading it. This can really only be achieved with a human touch. AI should never do more than your rough draft (at SERPslice, it is never used for more than outline generation).
Remember to keep your copy clean, grammatically correct, and at a reading level that your target audience will enjoy reading.
I often joke with others in the industry that anything we learn tomorrow was obsolete yesterday. Not only do algorithms update, but so do company goals and objectives. That's why it's vital that your SEO strategy remains agile. The SERP is always changing, but SEO fundamentals don't. All that changes for the core pillars of SEO the best practices to execute them.
To keep your SEO strategy agile, plan SEO improvements in 4-6 week sprints and focus that time on a single pillar. Shift to a different pillar for your next sprint to give the crawlers time to find and evaluate your changes.
Companies with large digital marketing teams can sometimes divide the staff and focus on more than one pillar at a time, but make sure you don't overextend your team to the point that the objectives of the sprint aren't accomplished.
The only way to stay ahead in SEO is to maintain a constant state of learning. Listen to podcasts, read references, watch videos, take courses. The deeper your understanding of the fundamentals, and the better you implement those fundamentals on your site, the more resistant your site will be to algorithm updates. Nothing will make your site futureproof, but you can plan ahead if you're staying ahead.
Always optimize with specific intent. Marketing is most effective when it is done with clear intention. Updating and optimizing without specific intent will leave you spinning your wheels, frustrated by a lack of improvement in sales or leads.
If you need help with your SEO or don't want to do it on your own, SERPslice has contract and no-contract services available. To inquire about contract services, email he**@*******ce.com
