If you have a website, you’ve likely heard of SEO. But what exactly is SEO, and how does it work? Should you be focusing on it?
SEO, short for search engine marketing, is an umbrella term for a long list of tactics used to improve your website’s visibility on search engines. And if you’re not already working on it, you’re seriously missing out! SEO is one of the strongest marketing tactics, and it is also one of the most cost-effective, with a much more significant ROI than any other type of marketing and a heck of a lot more lasting results.
SEO sounds a lot more complex than it is. So, don’t worry about getting lost in technical jargon and computer terms. I’ve got your back with a totally understandable guide for everyone to learn what SEO is and how it works. Let’s get into it!
What Is SEO?
SEO centres around improving your website so it ranks higher on search engines. In plain terms, search engine optimization is all about reworking your website to be more easily viewed and ranked by search engines.
When you optimize your web pages, you’ll rank higher; the higher you rank, the more visibility and traffic you’ll likely get.
How Does SEO Work?
Before we discuss search engine optimization, you need to know a bit about search engines.
How Search Engines Work
A search engine aims to give a searcher the most relevant information to their query. They do this by crawling websites and indexing them, which means categorizing and ranking them.
Search engines rank content based on how it measures up to hundreds of factors that really boil down into four categories:
Content Relevance
Content Quality
User Experience
Site Trustworthiness
What Does SEO Do?
Search engine optimization involves using various tactics and techniques to increase your website's visibility and ranking on search engines. The higher you rank, the more visibility you have, the more traffic you’ll get, and so on.
Why Is SEO Important?
Over 95% of pages get no search traffic at all. Yep. You read that right. Only 4-5% of pages on the internet actually get traffic. That’s the main reason you need SEO.
At its core, search engine optimization is vital to your business because it gets your website out there and in front of people who are already looking for things related to what you offer. It gets you into that 4-5%.
Besides that, search engine optimization is also important because it brings in 1000x more traffic than social media. Plus, the traffic you get from organic search ads is much more valuable than the ones from social media. If you own your website’s domain, you control how your website performs under search engine algorithm changes (which are much easier to adapt to than social media algorithm changes).
You also have the rights to the audience you build through your website, whereas, on social media or another platform, that audience is controlled by the platform, and you’re just part of it.
SEO vs SEM
The main difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) is that SEO tends to focus more on organic search ads, while SEM is more involved with pay-per-click (PPC) or paid ads.
You might think that focusing on PPC advertising would be the most effective use of your marketing budget, but they aren’t as effective as you’d think, not like social media ads.
Yes, they’re at the top of the page, but when did you last click on an ad in the search engine results? Exactly. Between paid and organic search ads, organic ads get most of the clicks, at over 94%.
Who Is SEO Most Important For?
No business or industry is exempt from SEO. If you have a website, you should be working on it. But it doesn’t stop there—SEO also applies to social media, YouTube, Spotify, and Pinterest search engines, as well as e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and even Poshmark.
Most Important SEO Ranking Factors
Google has over 200 ranking factors. But, generally, the most critical factors are relevance, quality, user experience, authority, and links.
Relevance
Relevance is where on-page optimization comes into play. This means the relevancy of your site to the searcher’s query, which is why keywords play such a crucial role in SEO. Having related keywords in your title tags, text, and other on-page elements signals your content’s relevance to the search query.
Content Quality
Search engines are focusing heavily on high-quality content lately, weeding out AI, poorly written blogs, and website copy. So, well-written website and blog content is vital to good SEO standings.
User Experience
Other than relevancy, SEO is centred around user experience. Technically, content quality could fall under that category, but it really involves more practical and technical things on your website, like page load speed, site navigation, and the design’s mobile-friendliness.
Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) is your website’s reputation for having good quality, factual content. Domain authority is determined by your backlinks, internal links, and external links, as well as other factors like user experience, content quality, and your website’s age.
Types Of SEO
Depending on who you ask, you might hear that there are between 2 and 67 types of SEO. But really, there are only four that you need to worry about.
On-Page SEO
On-page optimization focuses on optimizing your site's content. It is the most effective way to get your website accessed and ranked by search engines and focuses on user experience. This usually involves auditing, optimizing, and creating content and relevant metadata.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves using tactics outside of your website. Basically, it’s using other platforms to point people back to your website. This could include using social media to promote your site, guest blogging, or using backlinks.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing your website's technical aspects to help it be visible to search engine crawlers. In many cases, this is also classified as a subcategory of on-page SEO involving structured data, sitemaps, and robots.txt files, among other things.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a mix of technical, on-page, and off-page SEO, but it’s all centred around local search. This is the most crucial type of SEO for local businesses that serve a certain geographical area, meaning optimizing your site to come up for local searches instead of showing up for someone who’s not in your area and, therefore, irrelevant traffic.
What’s Involved In Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization involves a long list of tactics. It could look different depending on which type of SEO you’re working on, but each will likely involve the following elements.
SEO Audits
An SEO audit analyzes your website's performance in terms of search engines and identifies problems that are preventing it from being crawled, indexed, and/or ranked.
An audit generally looks at things like:
Keywords you’re currently ranking for and SERP ranking
How you measure up to your competitors
Technical and on-page issues preventing you from ranking well
Internal, external, and backlinks
It will usually give you data that informs you on
Page issues (and suggestions)
Content gaps
Keyword opportunities
Backlink opportunities
Optimization
Optimizing on-page issues (including both metadata and page content)
Fixing technical aspects like core web vitals, site speed, robots.txt files, structured data, etc.
Internal linking
Creating An SEO Strategy
An SEO strategy outlines your game plan for improving your website's SEO now and in the near future. It is a series of steps you (or a pro) can take to improve your site’s ranking on search engines.
Your SEO strategy will also tie your SEO goals to your overall business goal. For example, if your goal is to make more sales this year on your e-commerce store, your strategy will centre on your product pages and bring in traffic that wants to make purchases instead of growing traffic for your blog.
Performing Keyword Research
Keyword research involves gauging your current keyword performance, analyzing competitors, and leveraging search engine data to find keyword suggestions that would be easier or more effective for you to rank for.
Some keyword tools I like to use to get the best data and keyword opportunities:
Google Keyword Planner
Semrush
Moz
LocalIQ (previously Wordstream)
Writing SEO Content
Content is the biggest leveraging tool for any kind of marketing, and SEO is no different.
Writing good content that is super relevant to your keyword and its respective search queries is vital to SEO. It’s also vital for your website visitors as well.
Good SEO content is:
Highly relevant to a specific keyword and its related search queries.
Super well-written and sourced from reputable websites.
Optimized for search engines, meaning all the on-page elements are in place.
How To Check Your Rank Position
Want to see where your website is ranking for your keywords? Find your search engine ranking using one of these free rank checker tools:
How To Rank Higher On Google
Here are some of my SEO best practices:
Use keywords with high search volume and low competition rates.
Make your website easy to navigate with internal linking.
Work on backlinking.
Optimize your title tags.
Write super-relevant and high-quality content for your website.
Make sure your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.
Where To Learn SEO
If you want to learn SEO or do it yourself, I highly suggest these places.
Who better to learn from than the #1 search engine, and likely, the one you’re focusing on?
Google Skillshop offers a long list of courses, from free certifications to career courses for SEO (along with other digital marketing techniques) and for their tools, like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and more!
Semrush
Semrush is my personal favourite. I’ve also learned a lot from the Semrush Blog and even more from the Semrush Academy, which offers courses for on-page SEO, audits, link building, and other SEO elements. My favourite thing is that they make SEO's technical aspects easy to understand.
HubSpot
HubSpot is another fan-favourite of digital marketing pros. It offers SEO software and provides many great courses for learning it on your own. You can learn almost anything related to marketing on the HubSpot Academy, from SEO to CRM and beyond.
SEO Tools:
If you’re going to do your own SEO, you’ll need some help. Luckily, there are super helpful tools out there to help you. Here are some of my favourite SEO tools.
Paid Tools:
Free SEO Tools:
Wix SEO Assistant
SEOSpace for Squarespace
Make SEO Easy With An Expert
There’s a really easy way to get your web pages to rank well so they can get the online visibility they deserve. Hire an SEO Expert!
Professional SEO services are always your best bet for getting effective audits, optimization, strategies, and more. Need help with on-page SEO services? Take a look at my portfolio, and let’s have a chat!
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