Competition is fierce out there, whether you are running a blog or an online business. You have to master the art of search engine optimization (SEO) to survive in the online space. But how do you do it?
Do you just create content, post it on your website and hope that Google or other search engines will somehow pick it and rank your store or blog on page one of SERPs? Well, you might be lucky….maybe once or twice. But the reality is, there’s a lot you need to do both on-page and off page to dominate the search engine result pages.
We’ll tell you all about keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building, among others to help you stand out.
SEO Statistics You Can’t Ignore
Firstly, SEO is a game of numbers. It relies on figures and facts. Competent SEOs do not go blind and cast a big net, hoping to catch a lot of fish, no. They analyze your website and work on it using real figures.
So, what should motivate you to get into SEO in the first place? Take a look at the figures below:
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (Source: Search Engine Journal) This highlights the critical role search engines play in driving traffic to websites.
- The first organic search result gets about 32.5% of clicks on desktop and 24.8% on mobile. (Source: Advanced Web Ranking).
- 50% of search queries are four words or longer. (Source: Backlinko) Long-tail keywords have become increasingly important for SEO, as users are becoming more specific in their search queries.
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. (Source: HubSpot
- 57% of B2B marketers say SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. (Source: MarketDive)
- Mobile searches account for over 50% of all web traffic. (Source: Statista) With the rise of mobile device usage, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial for SEO and user experience.
- 40% of website visitors will abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. (Source: Neil Patel) Page speed is a crucial ranking factor, and it significantly impacts user experience and conversion rates.
Why is Organic Traffic and SEO Important?
Organic traffic and SEO are the pillars of online marketing. Organic traffic refers to the web visitors who land on your website from search engines. It’s the most profitable source of web traffic because it’s free. Organic traffic lets you harness the power of search engines and market your products and services without resorting to paid advertising.
Short for Search Engine Optimization, SEO refers to optimizing your website to rank at the top of Google’s search results. Ranking at the top of Google’s search results is the holy grail of online marketing.
It allows you to tap into the unlimited power of the search engine to connect with people actively searching for your products and services on the internet.
SEO can help you dominate the search results and build a highly successful business when done correctly. Unlike paid advertising, the top spot on Google’s search results is earned—you can’t buy your way to it. And your potential customers know it.
Therefore, people are more inclined to trust the sites that rank at the top of the search results. Research shows that the top three websites command almost 70% of the search traffic for any search term. But that’s not all. If your site places first on the organic search results, you will likely get 42.9% of all the search traffic.
But it gets better. The site that tops the search results gets 19x more clicks than the site that tops the paid search results. If you snag the #1 spot on the SERPs, you will get more clicks than 70% of your competitors.
Organic traffic and SEO are significant because they can help you dominate the competition. They power your ability to corner your market and build a successful business.
SEO Tips and Strategies
SEO has become exceptionally competitive as everyone wants a bigger slice of the online pie. Here are some SEO tips to help you stay ahead of the relentless search engine evolution as the race to the top of the search engine results heats up.
1. Proper Keyword Research
The value of proper keyword research can’t be overstated.
A study by Ahref unearthed astonishing insights—over 90% of the published content on the internet is invisible to search engines.
- 2 million pages get 1,000+ visits
- 10 million pages get less than 1,000 visits
- 80 million pages have less than 100 visits
- 848 million pages get 0 visits
Since keywords drive online visibility, these results indicate over 90% of the web admins are doing it wrong. Poor keyword research condemns your website to the deepest and darkest corner of the internet, where your websites go unnoticed and unappreciated.
Proper keyword research powers your ability to target not only the right keywords, but also the right market. It requires exceptional insights into your target audience, their pain points, the problems they seek to solve, and the language they use.
Once you have this covered, you can use keyword tools to get the relevant metrics, including search volume, competitiveness, potential traffic, and identify the competition. You should target low-competition keywords with high search volumes for a fairly new website. Such a strategic approach allows the site to gain momentum before moving to more competitive keywords. Targeting highly competitive keywords right off the bat can prove futile and thwart any chances of getting to the front page.
Besides increasing your chances of topping the SERPs, proper keyword research lets you segment your market. It enables you to target every part of your sales funnel with the right information, which is crucial in generating recurring sales and building brand authority. It also helps define your short, medium, and long-term ranking goals and rank your website for the most lucrative terms for your business.
2. Include Keywords in Alt Text for Your Images
It’s standard practice to pepper posts with images because including relevant images in a blog post or product page helps drive the message home and boost your SERP rankings. Besides providing a proper caption, ensuring each image features a proper alt text is equally important.
Short for alternative text, alt text describes the image or its function on a web page. Alt texts have three primary roles:
- Provide an alternative whenever the image is unavailable or fails to load.
- Provide a description that screen readers can read out loud to visually impaired web users.
- Help search engine spiders understand the image context.
Ultimately, alt text makes the images more accessible to web users and search engines. Failing to provide alt text may ruin the user experience for web visitors using a screen reader and may amount to unfair exclusion. That may harm your brand reputation, conversion rates, and traffic.
Using alt text not only improves accessibility but is great SEO practice. Since search engines use alt text to interpret what an image contains, you can use them to boost your site ranking. Including keywords in your alt text helps with Image SEO and will help your photos rank high in Google Images.
Ranking high on the image results drives valuable traffic to your website. When an image appears on Google Images, it includes a link that users can follow back to your website, increasing your site traffic.
3. Use Keywords in Your Headers
Header tags are a crucial ranking factor as it helps the search engines understand the page topic. Therefore, keywords in your header tags can bolster your search engine rankings and improve user experience. Header tags are HTML tags that help style content on the page to make it more appealing and easier to read.
Typically, header tags are hierarchical and start from H1 to H6.
- H1 tags denote the title of a post
- H2 and H3 denote subheadings
- H4 to H6 provide structure within the subsections
Header tags are useful to web visitors and search engines. They make the content scannable by helping the reader glean the information of the text below the subheading. For search engines, header tags provide context and reveal the content’s hierarchy. Including keywords in the header tags helps the search spiders crawl your page more effectively, resulting in higher rankings. However, you need to be reasonable about this and avoid shoehorning keywords in every header on a page.
Ideally, you should include the main keyword in the H1 and use variations in the H2s. More importantly, you must ensure the keywords are a natural fit in every header to avoid turning off the reader.
4. Make Sure you Have Good UX (User Experience)
At its core, Google helps people find information online and constantly works to improve customer experience. The search engine uses innovative technology such as RankBrain and BERT to understand what people want to see when they enter a search query into the search engine. That allows it to match web users with the answers that best fit their questions.
How does this affect you as a webmaster?
Well, Google rewards websites that satisfy search intent with higher search engine rankings. The search engine will favor your website and show it to more people if you provide a great user experience.
In this context, user experience runs the gamut from high-quality content, proper page styling, relevant images, and fast-loading pages, anything that entices the reader to linger on your page.
In essence, Google uses UX to determine which pages deserve a top spot on the search results. Therefore, ensuring web visitors love your information will earn your website a top spot on the SERPs.
5. Important: Always Use Internal Links
As the name suggests, internal links help you connect different pages within your website. If you wish to dominate the search engines, make internal links a core part of your SEO strategy. For starters, internal links help improve user experience and entice readers to linger and explore your website. These links facilitate seamless internal navigation, allowing web visitors to move between various categories and subcategories—which is great for your dwell time.
Secondly, internal links help search engines crawl and index every site page, which is crucial for online visibility. They provide breadcrumbs that spiders can use to categorize your website and its pages. Due to a limited Crawl Budget, Google may only index a fraction of your website if you have many pages.
Internal linking helps ensure that each page on your website is discoverable. Failing to build internal links creates orphan pages—undiscovered pages that only serve to bloat your website and don’t drive traffic.
6. If You’re Going Local, Focus on Local SEO
If you run a business in a given locality, you can dominate the market by focusing on local SEO. Local SEO helps narrow your audience to those likely to buy your products or services. Local SEO is part of Google’s effort to help local businesses push back against the big brands that dominate the SERPs.
Unlike regular SEO, local SEO is designed to drive offline shopping by helping people find the products and services they need from local vendors. Research shows that 4 in 5 customers use local search to buy from local businesses. In most cases, the prospects are ready to buy because 76% of those who use local search visit the store within a day. And 78% of these visits result in an offline sale.
Dominating local search increases your online visibility, a crucial step in building credibility and brand presence. Done properly, local SEO earns your business on Google’s Map Pack—the crown jewel of the search results. The local map pack lists the three top-ranking businesses in a locality and commands 44% of the local search clicks.
7. Add Podcasts, Infographics and Videos
In short, embrace a multimedia content strategy. The truth is that a content strategy built strictly around written content doesn’t hold as much sway in 2023. And with the rise of AI technology such as Chat GPT, your competition can upload millions of words monthly.
How do you push back against such a wrecking ball? By diversifying your content to include multimedia content. Unlike written content, which the rise of AI has drastically cheapened, multimedia content is anything but low effort.
It takes considerable effort, much more than your competition is likely to invest, to create podcasts, infographics, and videos. But here’s the best part—the effort pays off in droves. Integrating multimedia content into your marketing effort not only boosts online visibility but also bolsters your brand authority.
It enables you to communicate your company’s voice, personality, and values through various mediums, including videos, images, infographics, and podcasts. Instead of becoming another faceless brand, multimedia gives your business a face and a personality. It allows you to differentiate your brand and product from the competition, with an edge that is difficult to replicate and impossible to erode.
8. Keep Users on Your Website Longer
Google is in the business of connecting people with relevant information. To this effect, it uses a series of factors to rank websites in the search results. Naturally, the search engine looks favorably on the websites that complement its concerted efforts to match people with correct information.
To this end, Google uses page dwelling time as a key ranking factor. The logic is simple—web users will linger on a website that provides them with quality information. On the flip side, they will quickly close a website and return to the search results if a page doesn’t answer their question.
Google can distinguish between quality and spammy sites by tracking the dwell time and bounce rates. Structuring your website to meet users’ expectations bolsters your SERP rankings. It entices users to frequently return to your site, linger, share, and link to your content. Google interprets these signals that your website provides valuable information and deserves to be seen by more people, which propels you to a top spot on the SERPs.
9. Focus on Diversifying Your Backlink Profile
A healthy backlink profile is the holy grail for ranking at the top of Google search results. Typically, backlinks fall into two categories—do follow and no follow—with the do-follow being the most rewarding because it passes the link authority. A healthy backlink profile balances the two types of backlinks.
Building a premium, hard-to-replicate backlink profile will propel you to the top and let you dominate your niche for years. That said, Google is acutely aware that web admins will do anything to appear on the first page, as that’s the sweet money spot.
As such, the search engine regularly scrutinizes a site’s backlink to profile to ensure only the worthy websites earn the coveted top spot. It’ll often crack down on sites with spammy backlink profiles and condemn them to the deepest darkest corner of the internet.
But how do you build a healthy backlink profile? Google and other search engines view backlinks as a vote of confidence. Site owners often link to websites they trust to provide credible information to their readers. Therefore, websites with the highest backlinks will usually rank at the top of the SERPs.
However, to prevent rigging, Google expects considerable randomness and diversity in a site’s backlink profile. While the best way to get backlinks is to earn them, you can accelerate the process by contacting webmasters in your niche.
You’ll need different types of backlinks to build a diversified backlink profile. They include contextual links, authority links, niche edits, pillow links, editorial links, social bookmarks, and more.
10. Speed Up Your Website – Try to Pass Your Web Core Vitals
The modern-day web user is highly impatient and incredibly demanding. They prefer websites that load in under three seconds; anything else is too slow. Research shows that 40% of online shoppers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Google noticed this turn of events and made page loading speed a core ranking factor. And so, the race to improve page loading speed began. Today, the sites that top the SERPs load in under two seconds.
Suffice to say; speed can make or break your business in this highly competitive environment.
Besides raising the bar to the stratosphere, Google developed the Core Web Vitals—a trifecta of page speed metrics that impact user experience. They include:
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS): It measures how web page elements move around as the page loads. A CLS score higher than 2.5 hurts the user experience.
- Largest painful content (LCP): Measures how long the largest block of text, image, or video takes to load on the screen. Anything under two seconds is good; 2 to 4 seconds needs work, while anything longer than 4 seconds is poor.
- First Input Delay (FID): It measures how quickly users can interact with your web pages. Per Google standards, it should take less than 100 milliseconds, and anything above 300 milliseconds is poor.
Alongside setting the bar, Google provides various tools to help you improve your site’s Web Core Vitals, including PageSpeed Insights, Chrome User Experience Report (accessible through Google Search Console), and the Core Web Vitals Chrome Extension.
11. Adding Schema Markup
You have a better chance of dominating the search results if you help Google crawl and understand the information on your website. Adding a Schema markup, also known as structured data, can boost your search engine rankings and help you trounce the competition.
Schema markup is a code that helps search engines understand your pages and their contents. Simply put, it lets you speak the language the search engine spiders use to characterize and categorize web page content. Despite the advanced algorithms, search engines need help reading, identifying, and classifying content.
Schema markup provides a standardized format for classifying page content and information. It communicates the meaning of the page, its elements, and what users should see in a language that search engines understand.
With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why Google would appreciate websites with a schema markup and reward them with higher rankings. The structured data increases the chances of the search engine returning relevant results in response to a search query. In turn, Google will reward your website with rich snippets, allowing web visitors to gain insights about your page at a glance.
Rich snippets allow web visitors to decide whether to visit or skip the page. It’s an incredible way to increase dwell time and reduce bounce rate since the web visitor understands they’re opening a page with relevant information. Normally, people are inclined to click on pages that offer extra details such as events, offers, or reviews than those with simple search results. Adding a schema to your website rewards higher ranking and search result features such as size and display style.
A schema markup hands you a trifecta of wins—great online visibility, superior user experience, and higher search rankings.
12. Quality vs quantity in SEO
AI tools have thrown another spanner in the content creation debate. You can generate tens of thousands of words and build a huge website with just a few clicks. But is that enough to help you dominate the SERPs? While the jury is still out on AI-generated content, the chances remain slim.
In line with the evolving capacity to generate content at a massive scale, Google raised the bar yet again. Previously, the search engine introduced EAT—Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—as a ranking factor.
Recently, Google tucked on yet another requirement—Experience. Today, you have a higher chance of ranking at the top of the SERPs if you can demonstrate E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Although E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor, Google is sending a clear message that quality trounces quantity. The search engine values firsthand information from experience because it’s bound to be accurate and factual. The implication is that Google rewards pages with content written by an experienced author with higher rankings.
13. Meta Data – Meta Title and Meta Description
Search engines rely on descriptors or metadata to determine page relevancy. Metadata is structured information that helps use and explain data, i.e., classifies your data and information to give it meaning. Data classification enables web users and search spiders to understand your website’s information.
Search engines use metadata to determine content relevancy, rank your pages, and if the content on the page is relevant to the keywords you’re targeting. Simply put, metadata helps search engines index your pages for the correct results.
Descriptive metadata, such as title tags, appear on the search results. Make them descriptive and compelling to inform the reader about the topic covered on the webpage. Web users are more inclined to click on a header that contains a keyword relevant to their search query.
A meta description is a summary of the information on the page and appears below the header tag. Ideally, you should integrate keywords into the description to ensure search engines establish context while enticing the reader to click and open the link. Besides increasing online visibility, metadata can help drive your click-through rates.
14. Use Short, Descriptive URLs
It’s clear by now that search engines need all the help they can get to understand the content of your website. Providing them with the information they need to rank your website on the search results helps increase your site’s online visibility.
Short for Uniform Resource Locator, URL is the webpage address displayed on your browser’s address bar. Web visitors and search engines use this address to identify and access web pages.
In particular, URLs are a super important source of information for search engines. They contain words and phrases that allow them to establish context and categorize pages by topics. That lets them determine if a page is relevant and valuable to web visitors.
Since every page on your website is unique, it must have a distinct and separate URL. Only then can the search engines crawl and index that content and show it on the search results. Google may only include a web page on the SERPs if it can reliably understand its content and context.
SEO-friendly URLs have two main characteristics—they’re short and include the keyword. Including the keyword in an URL clarifies to the search engine that the page covers a certain topic. It also improves navigation, making your website more user-friendly.
Google recommends including a blurb, a short description, 3 to 5 words, separated by hyphens in your URLs. Using hyphens as separators allows the search engine to understand the words in the URL.
Keeping the URLs short and descriptive avoids confusion and increases your page ranks. Using SEO-friendly URLs across your entire website increases its authority and online visibility because Google can crawl and index every page.
SEO Mistakes and Practices to Avoid
SEO uses a winner takes all philosophy, which is why everyone is angling for a spot on the first page of the search results. While there are numerous ways to secure a coveted spot on the first page of Google, not every technique is effective. In fact, unethical SEO techniques and approaches can and do backfire terribly.
1. Keyword Stuffing
While keywords are an important ranking factor, you should use them judiciously in your content. Stuffing your content with the keywords you wish to rank for is a costly mistake that hurts your site authority and search rankings. In the days of yore, when Google used basic ranking signals, webmasters discovered they could improve their search rankings by mindlessly repeating keywords and their variations throughout the page.
But those days are long gone. Any attempt to overuse keywords in your copy, page titles, and meta descriptions will only earn your site the wrath of Google. The search engine frowns on keyword stuffing because it creates spammy sites with poor user experience. The content isn’t helpful to the reader as it’s primarily written to fool the search engines—going against everything Google stands for.
Google rolled out the Panda update in 2011, followed by the Hummingbird update in 2013, specifically targeting low-quality websites. These changes specially targeted the unnatural use of keywords and helped exclude sites that employ such underhand tactics from the search results. Today, keyword stuffing is an obsolete technique that only harms your chances of ranking on the search results.
2. Exact Match Anchor Text
While search engines require anchor texts to understand page relevance and context when building links, it’s important to diversify your anchor texts. Anchor text is the clickable phrase that appears in a hyperlink. It’s easily distinguishable from the rest of the text because it contains a different color, usually blue.
A relevant descriptive anchor can help improve your site rankings and enhance user experience. Previously, when Google wasn’t too sophisticated, it favored exact match text anchors—but that was only because they were more informative than the more generic anchors like “click here.”
Today, Google can recognize up to 8 types of anchor texts and views the overuse of exact match anchor texts as an attempt to manipulate the search engine results. It’ll flag such links as unnatural or manipulative, penalize your site, and tank your rankings.
Google launched the Penguin update to crack down on websites that use excessive exact match anchor texts and other manipulative techniques. If your site is flagged for such tactics, it’ll rank lower in the search results leading to a drop in web traffic. That also makes it vulnerable to future algorithm updates and penalties, which may further frustrate your SEO efforts.
3. Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is the epitome of poor keyword research. It results when you have multiple pages targeting the same or similar keywords. That creates internal competition that pits your pages against each other for search engine rankings. The resultant confusion confuses the search engines by making it impossible to determine the most relevant and authoritative pages for a particular keyword.
Keyword cannibalization also hurts your search rankings by diluting your page authority and lowering the user experience. It divides the authority, backlinks, and user engagement across multiple competing pages instead of helping you build a single authoritative page. When multiple pages cover the same keyword, chances are none cover it comprehensively. That may lead to poor user experience and a high bounce rate, further hurting your search rankings.
Since keyword cannibalization results from poor keyword and content planning, you may neglect valuable long-tail keywords that could drive targeted traffic and conversions.
4. Spammy Link Building
Although link building is a crown jewel when it comes to building site authority, links aren’t built equal. Building spammy or low-effort links to your website can hurt your SEO efforts and tank your rankings. Worse still, it puts your site on Google’s crosshair for a manual review, which can effectively kill your site.
Typically, spammy link building refers to using unethical means to bolster your site’s backlink profile. It could mean buying links in bulk, participating in link farms, or using automated link-building tools, all of which go against Google’s recommendations. To this end, the search engine actively targets and penalizes websites that engage in spammy link-building tactics.
If Google detects unnatural or manipulative linking patterns, it may subject your website to a manual or algorithmic penalty. Such penalties lead to a significant drop in search rankings or removal from the search results.
If Google deems your site spammy and unhelpful, it can deindex it. If that happens, the site will no longer appear in the search results. It may mean starting over from scratch with a new website, throwing your entire investment down the drain.
5. Duplicate Content
Since Google’s core business is connecting people with information, it cracks down on sites with duplicate content. The search engine prioritizes and shows pages with distinct information. Therefore, having pages with duplicate content on your website will hurt your Google rankings.
Once Google crawls and indexes a page, it “remembers” the content so the page can appear on the search results for the relevant search terms. That allows the search engine to readily identify pages with duplicate content on your website or copied from other websites.
Duplicate content hurts your search ranking because it confuses the search spiders and makes them unsure of which page to prioritize for indexing and ranking. If they can’t be sure which page is the original, all pages will struggle to rank. Worse still, Google may refuse to index your pages if it encounters multiple pages with duplicate content.
6. Creating Content for Search Engines, Not Humans
Search engines may dominate the online scene, but they’re hardly the masters. Instead, they fastidiously work to organize information so the primary users of the internet—humans—can easily find it. Simply put, the bots have no use for the information beyond indexing and showing it to web users.
Therefore, creating content solely for ranking high on search engines can harm your website. It ignores the needs of your primary target—human readers—and puts your site in Google’s crosshairs for poor user experience. Google considers such practices an unethical attempt to manipulate the search rankings at the expense of the web user.
Content that prioritizes the search engines is likely low-quality, keyword stuffed, and uses awkward and unnatural language that frustrates human readers.
Google increasingly targets sites that don’t provide real value to the reader and actively fails to index them. That may mean that your site may eventually disappear from the search results, condemning it to the deepest and darkest corner of the internet, generating no revenue.
SEO Strategies Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How long does it take to optimize my website for Google?
There’s no universal timeframe for optimizing your website to achieve a higher ranking on Google’s search results. That said, you may realize positive effects of your SEO effort in 1 to 6 months. The time it takes to optimize your site is a cumulative effort of various SEO efforts. It depends on factors such as site age, industry, SEO expertise, competition, and the specific updates Google implements. SEO is a long-term strategy that yields both short- and long-term benefits.
Why is SEO important for my business?
SEO is crucial because it directly impacts your online visibility. It powers your site’s ability to rank higher in the search results, which translates to increased web traffic and business leads to help you grow business revenue. SEO is the most cost-effective way to attract targeted audiences on the internet.
How does SEO work?
SEO employs various strategies to make your website more appealing to search engines and web visitors. These strategies range from creating high-quality content that meets search intent to optimizing on-page elements, improving user experience, and building backlinks. Having reliable SEO strategies allows you to refine your online marketing strategies to give your audience what they need and stay ahead of Google’s continuous algorithm changes.
Can I do my own SEO, or should I hire a professional?
While you may handle the basics by yourself, hiring a professional SEO can deliver better results. For starters, some aspects of SEO require technical expertise that take years to master and perfect. Secondly, SEO can be time-consuming, which may cause you to neglect the core function of building your business. Lastly, outsourcing your SEO needs to allow you to focus your strengths on revenue-generating efforts and grow your business.
How does link building affect SEO?
Link building involves getting other sites to link to your website. A link from another website amounts to a vote of confidence and signifies that your content is high-quality, adequately meets the search intent, and provides value to the reader. Search engines such as Google use the number of backlinks on your website to determine where your site should rank on the search engine results based on how other people view your site and its content.
What’s the difference between on-page SEO and technical SEO?
On-page SEO primarily focuses on optimizing the content on your pages for visibility and usability. It focuses on optimizing content, meta tags, and heading to help people and search engines find it. Conversely, technical SEO focuses on improving the functionality of your website. It involves optimizing website structure, mobile-friendliness, speed, and other crucial aspects affecting search rankings.
Should I focus on creating new content or optimizing site content?
SEO takes a holistic approach, so you should focus on both approaches. Ideally, you should start with a site audit to determine where you stand with your current content. Optimizing existing content ensures it remains useful and can deliver instant wins. Creating new content allows you to address evolving user needs and search trends.