Search engine optimization also known as SEO is a digital marketing practice used by marketers to increase their website’s visibility on the web for relevant search results.
This technique is widely used in marketing strategies to attract prospective customers organically and build a relevant audience.
How does SEO work?
Search engines have robots who are designed to crawl website pages to collect information and index them.
The intelligent search engine bots can analyze the pages and rank them accordingly while taking account of many factors and signals.
The main categories on which SEO is based are:
1. Quality of your website’s content
Content is king and it also stands for the ‘O’ in search engine optimization.
Content can be used in different formats on your website like title tags, meta descriptions, long and short-form blogs.
The quality of the content also depends on its uniqueness and readability.
It helps search engines understand what your website is about so that your content is relevant for the users.
2. Comprehensive Keyword Research
With comprehensive keyword research, you can gather information related to your website’s and business niche.
It can determine the keywords you can rank for, keywords your competitors are ranking for, and what people are searching for.
3. Internal Links
Internal links are created to help the google bots crawl and understand your website pages better.
You can add internal links by hyperlinking relevant descriptive text in your content to an important page on your website.
This practice is an indication for the bots to understand important pages on your website and rank them better.
Read More: How to Create Content based on Intent for ABM Campaigns?
4. External Links
External links points from your website to a third-party domain.
The weight of external links should be more than internal links on your website because they are one of the most important ranking factors.
Search engines consider external links as third-party votes which makes them different from internal links when talking about link equity.
5. Technical SEO
The first step while implementing SEO on your website is to optimize your website technically.
Technical SEO requires you to check your website’s:
- HTTP/HTTPS Status codes
- XML sitemap status
- Load Time
- Mobile- Friendliness
- Robots.Txts File
- Duplicate Meta Data
- Duplicate Content
- 4XX, 5XX error code pages
- Keyword Cannibalization
6. User Experience
Although User Experience has been a new term in SEO for the past few years. A good user experience on your website can positively affect your search ranks.
A bad user experience can also result in users being dissuaded to purchase because of a bad experience.
Not only does it affect your business but can also increase your bounce rates which are bad for SEO.
Columnist Sherry Bonelli, explains how SEO and UX work together to help both search engines and users. In the good old days, SEO was simple. Think of the partnership of SEO and UX this way: SEO targets search engines, and UX targets your website's visitors. Both share a common goal of giving users the best experience.
User Experience and SEO work the best together because UX can directly affect the ranking for your website because of the search engine’s user-engagement metric factors.
How long before SEO take to start showing results?
It depends. It can be 6-9 months or 6-12 months to start seeing SEO growth.
SEO is a game of consistency.
You can implement all the strategies on your website but it will only show results once you are consistent in optimizing your website every day.
