So it is now 2022 when this post is being written and everyone know that SEO is important for a website right? Every customer I have met has asked me to position their website in Google and most people know that somehow SEO is involved in that.
Surprisingly, despite being a very determinant element of good website ranking, very few people actually know what is SEO and how to achieve it.
SEO means search engine optimization, and it is often simplified as how well ranked is a website for the search engines. However, it is much more than that…
The search engines are not authoritarian judges who decide who is first and who is buried in the last results. Their algorithms just work to make life easier for the person who is looking for information.
We need to think of SEO as helping the search engines to index our website properly, generating a connection with what we call keywords or key phrases.
Having said this, we need to stop searching for good SEO from our business perspective. Instead, we need to think as our target market and how would they navigate through the internet.
Case Study "Fitness Studio" SEO
For example, lets say I am looking for a Fitness Studio. I would probably just go into Google and write “Gym”.
It is interesting that the first thing I see on my screen is a map with geolocated Fitness Studios within Google Maps. Second group of results is made up of images related to “Gym”. These images are not random gym images, they take me to actual fitness studios near me. Third I see the normal Google results where I notice 2 things:
- 6 out of 8 results include an image besides the description
- The top 3 results are also showing up in the Google Maps results and the Images results that were displayed first.
This means that to be on the first page, the fitness studios had to, at least, be geolocated, apply correct use of metadata on the images, and use a correct schema format.
There are many elements for SEO but now we are starting to identify them.
The 5 SEO Basics
I would divide SEO into the following segments:
- Understanding Target Market
- Creating Keywords or Key Phrases
- IT / Web Design
- Content Quality
- Relevance
Understanding your Target Market
The first thing you need to do when trying to develop good optimization is to actually understand who your target will be. The more information you have about the people that you want to convert into customers the better your SEO will be.
You need to be able to define the group of people and identify some details such as age range, demographics, socioeconomics, attitudes, hobbies…
Creating Keywords and Key Phrases
Once that you have identified your Target Market, you will be able to develop some keywords and key phrases that will be the fundamental blocks of your SEO.
We recommend brainstorming a large list, with all the ways you think that your target market will search for what they are looking for.
For example a pizza place would have:
- pizza
- pizzeria
- the best pizza
- pepperoni pizza
- take away
- fast food
- so on…
You will end up with many keywords, but that is completely fine. Next, you need to select the top keywords and phrases. You will identify, given the information that you previously collected from the target market, the words and phrases that would be used by the people to look for a place like yours.
Lets say you are specialized in Neapolitan style pizza, just havien “pizza” as a main keyword might be too generic. So “naepolitan pizza” might be selected into the top keywords.
We recommend starting with 10 keywords and phrases, you can increase the list later on. Starting with only 10 words will help you focus, specially when the website is relatively new.
IT / Web Design
This element will require a complete set of posts just to scratch the surface of information! What we can summarize here is the following:
- Using proper schema format
- Good use of the header tags
- proper font size!
- Efficient navigation
- Internal links
- Page speed optimization
- Trusted certificates
- Reliable servers
- Correct use of keywords in header and text
- Code/Text ratio
There are many tech elements to develop good SEO because search engine algorithms are quite complex. They need to sort of millions of websites and so they look for the best organized code structures.
Content Quality
This is the part where we have seen most websites fail. There are countless of beautifully designed websites that lack good content. The top visuals might captivate the visitors for a few minutes but the retention will drop drastically as the goal of the visitors is not actually met. They will continue their search in other websites where content is the king.
One clear example is Wikipedia, it has no great visual elements but it is one of the most visited websites in the world because it has good quality content.
Of course having your own Wikipedia would be nearly impossible, but what you can do is create valuable snippets of information. You do not need to have a lot of text as long as it is written in good form, focusing on making the pre selected keywords the star of the content. Making sure to include them consistently on the headers and the text, creating a relevant connection that both the visitors and the algorithms can identify.
Relevance
By this point you have done your job identifying target market, keywords, programmed a great website and developed top quality content! Now its time to convince the search engines that your website is relevant and will add positive value to their search results.
My top 3 ways to do so is by:
- increasing retention and avoid bounce clicks
- generating external backlinks
- good social media
The best way to avoid bounce links is to have a fast website, where the user can easily access and navigate through the sections. This will naturally increase retention as the visitors will spend more time in a website that feels easy to navigate and contains valuable information.
Generating external backlinks is not as difficult as many people think! There are many free forums and directories where you can add your business website. You can also collaborate with fellow entrepreneurs and bloggers by exchanging posts in each others websites.
Lastly, social media has been part of our lives for the last decade. Good social media, shares, integrations and interactions will be of great value to generate relevance in search engines.
