Why is SEO Important?
To start off, what is SEO exactly? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving your website to increase website traffic. These changes are usually quite small, but they add up to make a huge difference.
There are countless ins and outs of SEO and you can never stop learning about it. Since we live in a digital age, the prominence of your business’s online presence can make or break you, and this is why SEO is so important to learn about.
The ease of connecting with so many people from different parts of the world from the comfort of your own home is something you can take advantage of when building or growing your business.
But what’s the catch? It’s not easy.
It’s not enough to just build a website. The challenge is getting it out in front of potential customers. There is no point in building an awesome landing page for your products or services if nobody sees it.
This is when SEO comes into the picture.
How Does Google Work?
To first build some framework, let’s briefly go over how Google works. There are many search engines out there, but Google is by far the most well-known one which is why we are focusing on it.
Google works by going through three stages: crawling, indexing, and serving.
Crawling
This first step is how Google finds new pages on the web. It first needs to know about your site before it can show it to users.
Once found, it crawls (or visits) the page to find out what’s on it. The easier it is for Google to understand your page, the easier it makes it to match to search engine users who’re looking for your content.
Indexing
After Google finds out what’s on your page it goes about indexing. This is how Google understands what the purpose of the page is. Google better understands text than it does images which is why it’s best to use text to show content.
Serving
Lastly, Google serves the page up to users looking for that specific content. To provide the best user experience Google tries to use the best quality content which is why ranking is important.
Ranking is done programmatically, so to get better rankings it’s important to take into account a number of aspects which we will go over in the next section.
SEO Basics
Now that we understand how Google works we can get into SEO. To start off you need to work from the ground up. Like I mentioned earlier, crawling is Google’s first step when finding your page. This is why working on the site crawling and indexing of your website comes first.
Crawling and Indexing
The first step is to make sure Google can reach the pages on your website. To see if your website is in Google’s index, you can simply search the site’s home URL.
If your site comes up this means it’s in the index, but if not this could be for a number of reasons. The reason could range from the site still being new and Google not having time to crawl it yet or the design of the website making it hard for it to crawl its content.
If the page is new, you can submit the URL to Google (or a sitemap for many pages). If you decide to just submit one page, make it your home page since it is usually the most frequented page of a website.
Getting your page linked to by another page that Google already knows can help it find your page while also building credibility for your page. Using the URL Inspection tool can help you find and fix indexing problems on your site as well.
With elements like page titles, page headings, meta tags (metadata about an HTML document), page descriptions, etc. you want to make sure to use short and descriptive words/phrases that are unique for every page. This helps Google with indexing and understanding the contents of each page.
Structured Data
To help search engines understand your content you can also use structured data. Structured data is code that you can add to your site’s pages. This better understanding can help search engines to show your content in useful ways which can help you attract the kind of customers you’re looking for.
You can use this to mark up business-relevant things such as products you’re selling, business location, business hours, etc. You can then check your markups using the Google Rich Results test to ensure that it’s valid.
Implementing structured data means you have to change the source code of your website. If you’re unsure about doing this, you can instead use Data Highlighter which is a tool in Search Console. If you want markup code ready to copy and paste to your page, you can also use the Markup Helper tool.
Content
Make sure to create content that is interesting and useful to the reader. Taking into account the keywords a person could use to search for your content can be useful when writing your content.
You want to think about keywords, but not overdo them by stuffing your content with keywords. Optimize your content for the users, not search engines. Make sure your writing is easy to follow for a user that could come across your page.
A small, but sometimes overlooked concept is writing good link text. When linking to another page, you want to provide context using the anchor text you use for the link. The anchor text could be a few words or a short phrase that briefly describes the contents of the page you’re linking to.
User Experience
When working on optimizing your website it can be easy to lose sight of the customers in order to cater to search engines, but the user experience is an integral part of your site. It’s important not to forget about the customers when designing your website or making content.
Navigation
We all know how frustrating it is to go to a website looking for an answer to a specific question only to get lost in all the pages and links. This is why the navigation of a website is so important.
Be sure to keep the customer in mind when designing your website for the easiest and best user experience. A simple navigational page can be useful in this case, especially if your website has many pages. This page is meant to display the structure of your website in case visitors are having trouble finding pages.
Another useful tool for easy navigation is a breadcrumb list. This is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page. This makes navigation to a previous page simple.
Mobile-Friendly
Mobile phone users account for around half of web traffic worldwide in 2020. This means catering to this audience is prudent and the desktop version of a website might be difficult to use and view on a mobile device.
Building a mobile-friendly website can be done in a number of ways: responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate URLs.
Responsive web design is a way to approach web design that automatically adapts to a variety of devices and window sizes. Dynamic serving is a setup that uses a single URL but leads to a page for computers and a page for mobile. For the separate URLs approach, the device being used is assessed to then be redirected to the corresponding URL page.
To then make sure your site meets Google’s criteria for being mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Google My Business
Another great way to be more accessible to customers is to make a Google My Business listing. Google My Business is a free business listing service that is especially useful for local businesses.
Creating this listing will help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search results. This is a powerful but often overlooked feature.
When making this listing, you want to include all the useful information like contact information, business hours, a description, etc. You also want to keep it up to date by answering questions, uploading pictures, etc.
Overview
Overall, SEO is a great way to make full use of your businesses’ online presence. With the fact that a huge portion of the population is now online, optimizing your businesses’ website is an aspect that can’t be overlooked. Making these small adjustments to your site can easily pay off in the long run.
