7 important parts of SEO you need to get right
SEO is fundamental in increasing your online brand visibility and generating more organic traffic to your website. By optimising your content to appear higher in SERP rankings, you can achieve higher conversion rates as your site sees greater interest for your products and services.
You might have a basic understanding of SEO – which involves knowing your keywords from your KPIs, or your CPCs from your CTRs. However, in order to make the most of your optimisation strategy, here are some of the most important parts of SEO you need to get right.
1. Audience should be number one
When it comes to search engine optimisation, who you’re optimising your site for should be at the forefront of your SEO strategy. Who your target audience is will depend on which industry you’re in, but could also be specific to your brand.
When developing an audience specific strategy, you also need to be aware of who your top competitors are and how they’re optimising their site in order to appeal to your customers. This will allow you to develop a strategy on the basis of what your target audience actually want to see.
2. Keywords are key
How Do Keywords Differ?Keyword research is essential as it allows you to identify the type of content you need to produce and what will rank well based on what your target audience (see, we told you they were important) are searching for.
By building content around popular search queries, you can ensure that you’re ranking for relevant content and providing answers to the questions people are really asking. The type and length of keywords, and how you use them in SEO, depends on how specifically you want to rank for search queries.
3. Use user intent
As well as their size mattering, keywords can also be categorised based on user intent. This is especially important in terms of appealing to and maintaining the focus of your desired industry or niche.
User intent indicates the main goal a user has when typing a search query into google. In other words, it’s the intent behind the keywords. This can impact the types of keywords you try to get your content to rank for. For example, if someone is searching on the go, they’re more likely to use a navigational search term such as “marketing agency near me,” so in this case it might be more beneficial for you to use a short-tail keyword.
4. Report, review, revise, and repeat
While building a strategy is an essential part of the optimisation process in the beginning, that doesn’t mean that your work is done once you’ve implemented SEO into your business model. This is where reporting on your SEO campaign becomes important.
When it comes to reporting on analytics, when you attribute keywords and landing pages, it’s easy to see which keywords and landing pages are the biggest drivers of traffic to your products and services.
Carrying out regular keyword reports – and reviewing them to see whether or not they need to be revised – allows you to keep up to date with marketing trends. This, in turn, means you can stay as relevant as possible to your potential customers’ wants and needs. This is especially important if you’re in a rapidly changing industry where the market shifts quickly.
The key to analytics report success is to then repeat the process as many times as you need.
5. Maximising mobile SEO
As mobiles have become increasingly prominent in more than half of online searches, Google’s shift to a predominantly mobile-first index standard for search means that crawlers are prioritising web pages with mobile versions in rankings. This means that if your site isn’t optimised for mobile users, you could find yourself at a massive disadvantage.
To make sure that your website is accessible on a smaller screen, you need to make sure that your visual content is appropriately sized, that you’ve compressed your coding to improve site speed, and that you’ve reduced server response time as much as possible.
6. Crawling to conversions
Search engine spiders, otherwise known as Google crawlers, are used to find information that Google then uses to build search indexes to determine the position of your page in SERP rankings. In order to achieve positive SEO results, you want to make sure that these crawlers can find and navigate your site easily as this will increase your visibility for potential customers and make conversions more likely.
The best way to enhance your website for Google’s crawlers is to build bridges in the online network through both internal and external links. This will allow crawlers to easily find connections between your pages and situate your website well in the wider online network. Its important that you avoid broken or bad links which don’t work, or which direct users to content that is low in either quality or relevance, or both.
7. Indexing
Although related to crawling, indexing is a different part of SEO that it would be worth your time to familiarise yourself with. Indexing is a search engine process that involves organising and storing the information that has been found in the crawl in a central database. In short, indexing involves analysing the data crawlers have discovered.
By organising the data from your website in this way, you can ensure that web pages are included in search engine results and avoid wasting your company time, resources and budget.
SEO and so much more
Although its impossible to cover all of the important aspects of SEO in one blog post, here at Embryo we’re doing our best to make as much of a dent as we can in the expansive world of search engine optimisation. While everything covered here is important to get right when developing a strategy for your website, if you want to know more about SEO, feel free to check out our website for more information.
If you’d rather speak to us, feel free to contact us today!
