You’ve finally made the investment in a brand new website. The big question is, how will anyone find it?
There’s a few avenues for growing traffic to your site, including social media marketing and paid advertising, but for organic growth, the first step is to make sure you focus on your SEO: Search Engine Optimization.
In big picture terms, SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a number of factors that contribute to a website’s ranking, including both the quality of the actual content and the website’s underlying structure. The most common framework for understanding SEO is known as the “EEAT” acronym. Coming to us from the team at Google, EEAT is a way to define exactly what qualities make a website belong in the top ranks of a search.
The new E-E-A-T acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In addition to adding experience as a factor, Google is placing renewed emphasis on trust.
Search Engine Journal
Most important to understand, SEO changes happen on a longer time-frame than other types of marketing. To improve your organic search presence, intervention is needed early and often.
Let’s explore some of the major focus areas for anyone interested in increasing their SEO, beginning with technical SEO.
Structure and Markup
Technical SEO is the catchall term for everything happening under the hood and in the code, so it starts with your site’s designer and developer. A good designer understands the correct structure of a webpage: knowing how to arrange the unique elements, what a good amount of content might be, and how to design in a way that complements modern web standards.
Similarly, the developer will focus on making sure that the markup underneath your site follows best practices, including title tags, image alternative text, proper semantics and heading hierarchy, advanced schema, and more. They’ll make sure that your site is properly indexed and your sitemap (the list of all the pages on your site) is being submitted to search engines like Google and Bing regularly.
Performance and Mobile
With the continued shift to mobile internet browsing, search engines are even more strict about mobile usability: essentially the experience of using your website from a mobile device.
In fact, Google and others use unique tools to simulate loading your website and testing it as if they were an actual user. Is the font size legible? Are the images optimized for size and speed? Are buttons and links easily clickable with a touch interface?
Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of any site on the web. Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
Web Vitals by Google
Increasingly, website speed and performance plays a larger role in your website’s ranking. New standards, such as Google’s Core Web Vitals, require relatively high scores and are critical to search engine optimization. Everything from the hosting company you pay to host your website, to the CMS, frameworks, and third-party tools you’re building with can affect how quickly your site loads and responds to user input.
However technical SEO is only one part of the equation. Having a solid content strategy is just as critical.
Content Strategy
There’s a reason that “content is king” is the oft-repeated cliché among search engine experts. The truth is that everything search engines do is an attempt to surface the best content for any search term. This is critical to keep in mind when looking at whether or not your site is showing up in search results.
Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it. Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.
Moz SEO 101
Your content should be well-written, informative, and relevant to your target audience. When you’re creating content, it’s important to choose keywords that people are likely to search for. You can even use a keyword research tool to help you find the right keywords. Every page on your site should have a clear purpose and hopefully provide valuable answers to your audience.
Search engines also love new content, so make sure you’re adding new blog posts, articles, and other content to your website on a regular basis.
Finally, build backlinks to your website from other high-quality websites. Backlinks are a signal to search engines that your website is credible and authoritative. That said, be wary of any link building services, as shortcuts–or “black hat” techniques–in SEO can get your site delisted.
Thinking Beyond SEO
As we’ve seen, improving your SEO is a multi-faceted endeavor. From technical SEO to content strategy, it takes multiple levels of expertise–and loads of time–to improve your performance on Google, Bing, and other search engines. While it may seem like a lot to know, understand that having reliable partners as part of your web strategy is often the best approach.
Even more important is remembering the ultimate goal of a website: communicating to your visitors. The better that you are at communicating, both through content and in technical aspects, the more successful your website will be. In that sense, SEO requires a holistic approach that includes performance, content, accessibility, structure, and more.