You’ve spent countless hours outlining your brand, designing a website to compliment your goals, and producing content for your target audience. You may have come across the term SEO as you get those blog posts uploaded and content added to your site. Seeing this may be overwhelming at first; you just spent all your energy producing high-quality, well-researched content, and now you have to stop and learn what SEO is?
While it may seem unnecessary at first, SEO is the key to getting people to see the content you spent time working on. SEO allows more people to find you and enables you to begin building higher traffic naturally, likely assisting in your mission to be found by your ideal customers and audience online.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Like social media sites, search engines rely on algorithms to prioritize and sort content. Search engines like Google want to instantly deliver the user a list of the most relevant and high-quality content. SEO is a method of ensuring your content reaches the top of the results page.
How do I master SEO?
Utilizing SEO is your opportunity to make your case to the algorithm. By utilizing and mastering SEO, you can discover strategies to get your content to rank higher and higher in search results. It takes consistent, up-to-date, relevant, high-quality content to reach the top of the results page and optimal SEO strategy.
While SEO is focused on terms used in your content, it isn’t about just finding a way to jam in as much technical information as you can or configure your website and content in a specific way to rank higher. Much of SEO is about understanding your target audience. Since search engines’ main goal is to provide the user with relevant information for their search, understanding whom you want your audience to be and what they are searching for is the key to mastering SEO.
A search engine’s primary concern is determining the intent of a user’s search, so using SEO terms directly related to the intention of your target audience is a primary component of SEO strategy. For example, you probably don’t want to optimize your content to rank high when people are looking for free services. Although this would drive traffic and how-to guides would be engaged, it wouldn’t translate to a new customer. So instead, consider what your ideal customer or user would be searching for and target your optimization to those search results.
What about ads?
SEO is the primary method of increasing organic exposure and traffic to your site. SEO is different from paid ads and AdWords, another method of boosting visibility on results pages, but not in an organic way like SEO.
Paid ads and AdWords are still essential to understand when planning your SEO strategy. AdWords and ads tend to be populated for search terms that indicate the user intends to buy something. Therefore, when tailoring your content towards inputs that indicate an intention of buying, you should be aware that you will have more inorganic competition taking up the top spots on the results page.
More Components of SEO
SEO isn’t just about your tags and keywords. Search engines consider hundreds of factors when ranking sites. Let’s review some of these factors.
Site security
The first factor is the overall security of your site. Search engines don’t want to send their users to risky or predatory sites, ranking secure sites higher. Having a secure site can be painless, by enabling SSL security and using HTTPS are simple ways to boost your security for search engines.
Site accessibility
Search engines want to understand your website just from the URLs used. Additionally, search engines need to be able to access and crawl your website via the URL to index your site properly. Therefore, ensuring your website is well-coded and free of bugs or hiccups is a significant component of SEO. Additionally, set up a sitemap so search engines know what your website has to offer.
Page speed
Search engines want to get their user’s the information they need as fast as possible. This includes generating results quickly and ensuring the top-ranked websites are fast. Not only is your standard site speed considered, but specifically mobile site speeds as well. Therefore, your website needs to perform at top speeds and be optimized for mobile users to enhance your SEO success.
Domain age and presence
Young sites, less than a year old, don’t tend to make the top results in search engines. Generally, older sites, around 3 years old, consistently make it to the top of the results page. But hanging on to a domain and doing nothing with it will not improve your results. Instead, continuing to produce in-depth and relevant content over many years will give your domain authority in your industry, making its chances of ranking higher. Your authority can also be improved by connecting with other sites within your industry. When other sites link back to yours, or when you are doing well on social media, this improves your site’s authority, making your site appear stronger and more relevant to search engines.
Keywords and LSI
The first thing many of us learn about SEO is the use of keywords in your content. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing; LSI is a bit complicated, but essentially it is how search engines understand how various words connect with each other or complement each other. For example, when you search ‘windows,’ the top results are likely about the OS Windows. However, if you instead search ‘windows clean,’ the search engine now understands you are looking for windows as a fixture. This is because LSI allows the search engine to see a relationship between these two words.
Loading your site and content up with keywords may seem like the way to go, as you will be using as much of the algorithm to your advantage as possible, right? Wrong. Keyword stuffing will harm your SEO strategy. This is why using LSI is essential. Ideally, you will focus on just a few keywords directly related to your content and business and add additional LSI. This LSI works harder than all the keywords you may have otherwise stuffed in your content.
LSI is another example of why understanding your target audience is important. You must consider not only what they would search for but what words they would use to search for it.
Hopefully, now you understand the depth of the world of SEO. Keeping SEO in mind when making decisions for your site and creating content is essential, as it is the primary means for organic discovery online.
Managing SEO can seem like a full-time job, but Hotwire Networks is here to support you. Check out our resources on utilizing SEO so you can see your website rise in prominence.
