What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. The goal is to get more traffic from organic search results (i.e., those that aren’t paid ads).
Search engine optimization is a complicated topic, but we’ll try our best to explain it simply. First, let’s start with some definitions:
- Organic Search Results – These are the results you see when you type something into Google or another search engine and hit enter. They’re not ads; they’re just websites that have been ranked higher than yours based on how well their content matches what people are searching for at any given moment in time.
- Paid Ads – These are advertisements that appear next to organic results as part of an auction process between advertisers who want their ads shown alongside certain keywords or phrases and publishers who want money from those advertisers so they can keep running their sites without charging users anything extra (like subscriptions).
How to Develop an SEO Strategy
Developing an SEO strategy is not easy. It’s a lot of work, and it takes time to see results. But if you want your website to be found by people searching for keywords related to your business or industry, then developing an SEO strategy is essential.
The first step in developing an effective SEO strategy is researching and analyzing the current state of your website’s search engine rankings. You should also conduct competitor analysis so that you can see how other websites are performing in terms of their organic traffic and conversions (i.e., sales). From there, develop a plan based on what needs improvement on both fronts–and then monitor those changes over time so that they continue improving with each new update made by Google or Bing!
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. It’s what you need to do before you can even start your optimization campaign, and it’s also something that should be done regularly as you continue to grow your site.
Keywords are the words or phrases people use when searching for information online, so understanding them is an important part of keyword research. The first step in this process is finding out which keywords have high search volume (i.e., lots of people are looking for them), but low competition (i.e., there aren’t many other websites competing for those terms). This will help ensure that when people search using these terms, yours will come up as one of their top results–and hopefully keep bringing visitors back again and again!
Optimizing Content
Optimizing content is the most important part of SEO. If you don’t have high quality, relevant content that your audience wants to read, then no amount of backlinks or keyword targeting will help you rank well in search engines.
The first step to optimizing your site’s content is making sure it meets the needs of your users and provides them with value. You can do this by asking yourself questions like:
- What problem do I solve?
- How does my product/service solve it?
- How does my brand stand out from competitors?
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your site for search engines. It involves making sure that your website can be found by search engines, and that it’s running smoothly on the back end.
Technical SEO includes:
- Site Architecture & Indexability–How well does your site’s architecture support crawling? How easily can Google understand what each page is about?
- Page Speed & Mobile-Friendly–Is it fast enough? Does it look good on mobile devices?
- Security & Crawling–Are there any security issues with your site that could be causing problems with crawling or indexing (e.g., robots.txt disallow rules).
Local SEO
Local SEO is a powerful tool for businesses, and it’s easier to implement than you might think. The first step is to optimize your Google My Business listing by adding a photo, address and phone number (NAP). This will help drive more traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
Next, you’ll want to make sure that any citations or reviews are accurate and up-to-date–this means making sure they reflect the correct business name as well as contact information for the company itself. You should also make sure that there aren’t any duplicate listings for your company across multiple directories like Yelp! or Facebook; this can cause confusion among potential customers who may think there are two different companies with similar names operating in their area when really only one exists!
Once these basic steps have been taken care of then comes link building: creating links from other websites back towards yours through content creation on third party sites such as blogs/newsletters etcetera…
Measuring SEO Success
There are several ways to measure the success of your SEO campaign. The most important metric is organic traffic, which is defined as the number of people who visit your website through search engines like Google or Bing. You can also track rankings and keyword performance, conversions and revenue (if applicable).
Best Practices for SEO
The best practices for SEO are:
- Focus on Quality Content – If you want to rank well in search engines, you need to create content that is useful to your audience. This means providing value through high quality information and compelling visuals.
- Optimize for Voice Search – With the rise of voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, Google has been working hard at making sure their algorithms can understand what people are saying when they ask questions or make requests. You can optimize your website or blog posts by adding tags like “how-to” or “step-by-step” so that it will be easier for these devices to pick up on keywords related to your topic when someone asks about it verbally rather than typing them into a search box on their phone screen (which isn’t always easy).
Conclusion
To sum up, SEO is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. It’s a way to get your website ranked higher in search results, which can lead to more traffic and sales for your business.