With numerous businesses launched each year, such as 5 million in the US alone in 2022, getting discovered by customers is a real challenge. In the meantime, billions of people are surfing the internet and using search engines like Google to find answers. Especially for online businesses, consistently improving the three key components of SEO is critical to increasing organic internet traffic and leads.
SEO has many aspects to it and can be quite overwhelming to learn. It is also important that businesses perform regular SEO audits because it is a gradual and constant process, with initial effects showing after 3 to 12 months if done correctly. To help you understand this topic and boost your business, we will break down the three key components of SEO.
Technical
With an average attention span of just 47 seconds and an even shorter 8 seconds for Gen Z, every second matters when someone visits your site. You can have the highest quality content, but if those large PNG images bog down the loading speed, the user is going to click away with zero understanding of your business. Out of the three key components of SEO, this arguably is the most important.
You also don’t have to be a technical person to do technical SEO. If you know what tools identify and solve problems, the true technical part will be taken care of by those tools. Below are some important things to check:
Website loading speed
Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides valuable information for how your site loads on desktop and mobile. Other tools like GTMatrix can help as well.
Many things go into improving loading speed, but one easy thing you can do right now is to convert all images and gifs to WebP format. Google suggests using this modern image format as it’s faster to load and more lightweight.
Mobile-friendliness
Even if you’re on a computer all day, this shouldn’t be overlooked, as about 60% of online traffic is from a mobile device. Phone screens are already somewhat small, and it can be incredibly frustrating if your website is cluttered and hard to navigate.
To assess mobile-friendliness, mobiReady is a great tool in addition to PageSpeed Insights. To note, though, you don’t have to have a perfect score for these audits. Grammarly, for example, only has a 0.59 out of 5 mobiReady score.
Additionally, when designing your website, be sure to frequently preview on mobile to make sure everything is easy to read and navigate.
Sitemap submission
A sitemap details the structure of your website and what pages are on it. It is useful for search engines to crawl your site quickly and easily. Your CMS should generate a sitemap at yoursite/sitemap.xml. You might need to search for your CMS for more information. The sitemap should be submitted to Google via its Search Console. Additionally, feel free to submit it to Bing as well.
Errors and security
Another benefit to having Google Search Console is that it alerts you when any crawling or indexing errors occur. It’s also a good idea to periodically check for broken links, duplicate content, and nonexistent pages. Lastly, be sure your site has a valid SSL certificate and is using HTTPS.
Link building
Being an internet user and potential customer, how do you find companies that solve your problems? One common way is when a high-ranking website links to the solution or company. For example, if you’re searching “best wordpress themes”, you might arrive at a post by InfluencerMarketingHub, which potentially leads you to Astra. That post by InfluencerMarketingHub is a backlink of Astra. The whole point of link building is to grow the number of backlinks your site has from reputable websites.
DA & DR
A Domain Authority (DA) score predicts how well your website will rank on search engines. A Domain Rating (DR) score shows how strong a website’s backlinks are. You should check these scores for your and your competitors’ sites. Your DA and DR scores are partially determined by the DA and DR scores of the backlinking websites, so the goal is to get featured in well-established websites and avoid link farms (more on that later).
Dofollow & Nofollow
Back in the old days of the Internet, all links were dofollow, meaning search engines would crawl to those linked sites, boosting their SEO. Eventually, people took advantage of this and spammed links in places like comment sections. This led to the creation of nofollow, an HTML attribute that tells search engines to ignore the linked site, theoretically not benefiting its SEO. The ahrefs checker mentioned above states what percentage of links are dofollow, which are obviously the important ones.
Build your backlinks
You want to get featured in listicles as they are a popular way for customers to discover your website. In the above example, Astra got featured as #1 in a “13 Best” listicle. You can reach out to those website owners to prove why you should be featured.
You can also offer your expertise to reporters and journalists. If they use your quote, then your website will show up as part of your credentials.
Directories may seem old-fashioned, but they still work, at least better than nothing. Simply create an account and submit your website/company to relevant, trusted directories.
There are also software and services that generate backlinks for you, but…
BEWARE
Many gigs that offer backlinking to your site are expensive and ineffective. They might claim to have a high DA or DR, but you should carefully analyze their traffic as they might use bots to boost their spammy directories. An easy way is to see where your site is being linked, and if it’s literally a wall of links or is part of a terrible blog post, then you should stay away from that service. Otherwise, Google will actually penalize your site and lower its rankings.
Content creation
SEO can be super fancy, with an overwhelming number of tools and techniques. At the end of the day, though, you need high-quality content that shows your value and expertise to both Google and customers. Back to that “best wordpress themes” example, this search result lists one of its own products at the top. It might seem cheesy, but it’s a very common strategy.
Your high-quality content will also help other writers do their research. In return, they will link to your post as a source, creating a backlink. Sometimes you might want to manually reach out to non-competing websites to show why linking your content will be mutually beneficial.
Creating informative but also SEO-optimized content can be quite tricky and time-consuming. Below are some key steps and tips.
Keyword research
To get your content to show up in a search result, you’ll need to understand the keywords your potential users are searching for and target them. There are countless keyword research tools, but at its core, you need search volume and competition level.
If the keyword/keyphrase is short, then generally the search volume will be higher but also the competition level. If you have limited resources and budget, you should instead target long-tail keywords that are specific and easy to rank. An example long-tail keyword would be “best wordpress forest themes for nature blog”.
User intent
To hit users with satisfaction, you’ll need to understand what they are truly wanting when searching for something. The three main user intents are informational (how-tos, guides), navigational (best, [x] number of ways), and transactional (buy, price, free, shipping). An easy way is to copy the format of top-ranked results when searching your keyphrase. “best wordpress themes” is of navigational intent and results in listicles, so if your title is “How to choose the best wp theme”, you might be a bit off.
Content outline
If you already know what subtopics to go for, then just write them and optimize them later. If you have an overall topic but are struggling to fill in the blanks, feel free to read your competitors’ posts to see how they did it as well as the “People also ask” section. Those resources provide great ideas for subtopics and FAQs. When designing your subheadings, a good SEO practice is to include your focus keyword in them.
Content writing
Alright, time to fill in the outline with high-quality content. You might love or dread this part. It takes a lot of time around 4 hours plus the brainpower to create an SEO post. Especially if you’re a new writer or hate writing, valuable time will be spent on this instead of improving your product or service. Luckily, a content agency like us can take care of this tedious process so you can focus on what you enjoy while seeing an organic traffic increase.
Remember, the goal of creating content is to prove your expertise to humans. Appealing to search engines is important, but it should be secondary. So, time to start writing even if you need to force yourself a little. We also have a few SEO tips that can be helpful:
- Long-form content: A length of 1k5 words seems to do well with Google.
- Link to credible and up-to-date data (external).
- Link to your own website/pages (internal).
- Add images with the alt texts containing the focus keyword.
- No keyword stuffing – write and add keywords naturally.
- Use simple words and clear formats, like a bullet point list.
- Update old content to show you are actively contributing to the Internet and care about your website.
- Use SEO tools and plugins like RankMath to help audit your content.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a founder or marketing manager, understanding these three key components of SEO is a great step to boosting your business. We hope you enjoyed this post and are open to any feedback. If you’re interested in learning how our content writing services can grow your business and save time, please contact us, and we’ll respond quickly.
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