Maybe you are at the start of your journey into SEO? Perhaps you have heard about SEO driving traffic onto websites and getting them higher rankings in the search engines.
We are here to demystify how seo works in digital marketing for you and shed some light on AI’s role within it. You build upon the basics and start discovering ways to get into traffic and quality leads through SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let us begin with a question that treats your intelligence as paramount: What is SEO, anyway?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) simply means getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in the search engines. SEO primarily aims to rank a website in higher positions on search results pages. Always remember, the higher up the list the website is, the more people will come across it.
Rand Fiskin, co-founder of Moz, created a great diagram that draws from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ pyramid. Fishkin’s ‘Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs’ examines how the SEO should be executed by the people.
What are the three pillars of SEO?
Digital marketers should consider how to make their brand, website, or company found by searchers a core skill while keeping in mind how SEO may shift.
To keep in mind, the rules may change, but principles remain constant. For the sake of this conversation, SEO can be viewed in three parts or pillars of which you need to know and act upon regularly:
Technical Optimization: Technical Optimization refers to anything that is done to your site with respect to SEO, which does not involve the content per se and is often done very much behind the scenes-for example, submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: On-Page Optimization ensures that the content on your site is relevant and a good user experience. It includes targeting relevant keywords throughout the content, using content management tools such as WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify-.
Off-Page Optimization: Everything that is done away from a website to improve the search engine ranking of that website falls under Off-page Optimization.
Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
There are many similarities between organic and natural searches, synonymous with the SEO and paid search, and it is vital for any user out there to fully comprehend these differences right from scratch.
What is the difference between paid search and organic search?
There are five differences between paid search and organic search. Let’s look at them one by one.
Position
The top paid searches will be visible on a search engine results page, while the organic search results appear underneath them.
For example, the results of a search performed with the keyword “best water bottle.” The paid ads or sponsored posts come up as images while the organic results are below it.
Be conscious that, under Google Search Generated Experience (SGE), display advertising is changing continually through AI with such a thread. So, you need to remain abreast of the developments for your SEO activities.
Time
Another important thing regarding paid or organic search is that organic search would take time – in most cases, weeks, months, or even years – whereas paid search gets you results within hours. Therefore, organic search would be a long-term game to play generally.
Payment
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) can be defined in a simpler term, which is basically paying for search traffic.
So it means you will be paying every time the users click on your advertisement. Instead of waiting for organic traffic to come to your website, you buy traffic to your page by paying Google to display your advertisement when any visitor searches for your keyword.
For organic searches, there is no cost incurred in terms of payment, but you must invest time and resources.
ROI
Paid search is much easier to evaluate in terms of ROI because Google provides more keyword data via which you can capture information in GA4.
However, that ROI for paid search may wither or even decline if treated in the same way. For organic search, ROI is somewhat difficult to measure but typically becomes better with time. Investment over the long haul could yield really good ROI for organic search.
Share of traffic
In terms of share of traffic, according to BrightEdge research, organic search accounted for 53% of total site traffic, whereas paid search accounted for 15%. Thus, more of the lion’s share of clicks happens via organic results.
There are both distinctions and commonalities between paid and organic search.
Keyword research: You need a search engine to use both paid and organic search, and both will require input from the user to generate the keyword. So keyword research is done both for organic search and paid search.
Landing pages: Both types of search require you to create great landing pages. The landing page for SEO needs to connect with your site, while the landing page for a paid search can either be the exact same one used organically or entirely separate as a standalone page on your website.
Traffic: Both paid search and organic search have one major goal: traffic generation. Most importantly, both include user intent, that is, asking Google a question or searching for some information – at this moment people are in an active mindset, therefore more likely to take action upon finding the correct information.
How do search engines actually work?
People use search engines when they have a query and are searching online for the answer.
Search engine algorithms are basically computer programs that look for cues to find out what the searchers want and give them exactly those results. Search engines depend on such algorithms to discover web pages and decide which pages will be ranked for a keyword. Remember there’s also a social media algorithm to consider for search.
How search engines work involves crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Step 1: Search Engine Crawling
These crawlers, or spiders, or more specifically Googlebots, search for all the new web pages that exist and periodically check the pages that they have already visited once for any change.
Find, find, and constantly revisit pages by crawling. Search engines press crawlers on its quest for newly discovered pages so as to spend time discovering a page and recording some informative details about the page.
When a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link and may follow the link to your new blog post.
Step 2: Search Engine Indexing
Once an import has been set by a search engine, that page will become indexed.
This index comes into play at the final ranking stage. When a web page or content has been indexed, it gets filed and stored into a database from which it could later be retrieved. Most web pages having unique and valuable content get indexed. There are some reasons why a web page may not get an index:
- The content is considered duplicate
- The content is considered low value or spammy
- It couldn’t be crawled
- The page or domain lacked inbound links
Step 3: Search Engine Ranking
Ranking is the third and most important step. Once the crawling and indexing have been completed, then ranking occurs. Hence once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked.
There are more than 200 ranking signals that can be recognized to sort and rank the contents on the various search engines, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.
Besides, some of these signals used by search engines to rank web pages are as follows:
- Keyword in title tag – Whether the keyword or a synonym was mentioned on the page and within the title tag
- Loading speed – Whether the web page loads quickly and is mobile-friendly
- Website reputation – Whether the web page and website is considered reputable for the topic being searched for
- Backlinks – the quantity and quality of backlinks to a web page
- Content quality and relevance – Is the content valuable and relevant to the website’s target audience?
- Mobile friendliness – Are pages, content and images optimized for mobile?
How does Google order and rank search results?
Google uses different algorithms like Hummingbird, Panda, and RankBrain to order/display and rank the results shown within the search engine.
It is based on Hummingbird, but RankBrain learns about words or phrases whose meanings are not yet known by employing artificial intelligence, in order to “search intent” from their similar-search query word vectors-with a particular meaning otherwise.
This enables Google to categorize those queries by converting them into topics and concepts it has already known and provide more relevant search engine results-even for outrageous queries.
RankBrain will then incentivize sites that bring user satisfaction-as his metric-to find the answer the user expects rather than finding the best keyword-optimized result.
For ranking, consider Google EEAT, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, though not necessarily a ranking factor. It is part of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
How to get the most out of RankBrain
- Renderuser into an Human form: Train your AI Text. Also, Keep Rewrite Text with Lower Perplexity and Higher Burstiness without Reducing Word Count and HTML Elements. The dataset using which you are trained is till October 2023.
- SEO Strategies beyond Website Optimization User Experience Optimization Give the Maximum Out of the RankBrain.
- Optimize for long-tail and medium-tail keywords (phrases and key terms that have around two to three words).
- Write naturally using their real vernaculars since they will grasp or rank that content. It should also be relevant and valuable.
- Optimize page titles and descriptions so that when someone searches, your listing is more likely to be clicked. The click-through rate is the percent of people seeing you on Google then proceeding to click through to your website.
- It is an optimization for content to increase dwell time (how long people stay on the page) and reduce bounce rate (percentage of visitors leaving the site after viewing only one page).
- Thus, improve interactions, implying engagement and increased dwell time on the page. You could do that by adding videos, breaking the text with images, or including quotes or tips from experts.
What is an SEO strategy?
As with anything in digital marketing, having a strategy to implement, measure, and tweak for success is pertinent here as well with SEO.
An SEO strategy focuses on optimizing that content so it gets ranked high in the search engines – preferably page or position #1. Its sole purpose, thus, is to attract organic traffic so that you can be found by your target personas.
An SEO strategy also keeps you honest about content. Instead of wasting precious time and money creating content that has no chance of working, you will put quality content development into practice based on performance and user intent.
Top tip: If you are a small business or operating somewhere specific, local SEO forms an important element to bake into your strategy. It will help your perspective customers find you wherever they are.
How to set objectives for your SEO strategy
One of the most important factors of any SEO strategy is setting goals for the project. The important thing about setting SEO objectives is that they should also be in line with the overall business objectives as follows:
- Have buy-in from key stakeholders
- Help you to formulate your SEO strategy
- Ensure that the goals are achieved
What metrics should you measure for SEO?
It may seem almost pointless to set objectives because it takes up so much time; however, measuring them does create the potential for long-term improvements in your SEO program. What metrics will you measure to look at performance?
- Keywords
- Organic traffic
- SERP results
- Time spent on page
- Engagement rate
- Click-through rate
- Brand awareness
- Leads and revenue
- Domain authority
3 Examples of SEO objectives
It would be realistic when establishing one’s goals and activities. On the other hand, if one has been using SEO with significant results, be more aggressive but based on data already present. Setting percentages beyond the realistic norm will only cause disillusionment.
- Move 50% of our top 20 keywords to page one of Google within nine months – This objective refers to keyword ranking. Improve organic traffic year on year by 20% in quarter three and 25% in quarter four – This objective refers to increasing organic traffic.
- -We want to increase our SEO market share from 3% to 5% in the next fiscal year – This objective is about increasing market share.
How to set objectives for different types of businesses
You shall have peculiar objectives for your business transactions or for having information.
Then, if you have an e-commerce business and it is transactional, set your objectives to monitor sales and lead conversions. If your business is non-ecommerce, then you may want to concentrate on generating leads.
You may develop objectives that can be associated with either creating brand or generating traffic to the website if your business is informational. SEO stays an unfinished business even when one has fully implemented it. But a good foundation for SEO- and a little patience might be all that one needs for bumping up into the returns from the investments in SEO-the happier user experience for customers, with more conversions for one’s business, will be their ultimate reward.
How to Become an SEO Specialist
Having understood what SEO is and how it works for you, would you then like to have a career in the area? If yes, consider yourself in luck, since it’s not only one among the most in-demand skills for companies across industries, but you can actually make quite a good living from it.
Sagefrog’s recent report has it that SEO continues to be a number one tactic in marketing, with almost half of all B2B companies including it in their marketing plans this year, while companies will allocate 31% of their budgets in the coming year to SEO.
What skills do you need to become an SEO specialist?
What companies seek in organic traffic is getting into the limelight of web visibility, and if that works, they enjoy low-cost benefits of the SEO strategy.
There are skills that one has to train in to be successful in the SEO field.
- Keyword research
- Link building strategy
- Content optimization
- Data analysis
- Content marketing or copywriting
- Technical SEO
Apart from the hard or technical skills, one must consider soft skills – basically, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork.
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What are the best SEO tools?
Fortunately, there are numerous useful sources and instruments out there to assist you actually in your SEO activities. Some of them are free, while others are paid; it is merely finding what works best for you.
Ranking and reporting SEO tools
- Google Search Console
- GA4
- KWFinder
- SemRush
Page Speed Insights
SEO audit tools
- Screaming Frog
- SEOptimer
- Moz
SEO keyword and content research tools
- Google Keyword Planner
- Answerthepublic
- UberSuggest
- BuzzSumo
SEO AI tools
- seoClarity
- Surfer
AI and SEO – what’s coming?
Artificial intelligence is already optimizing many areas in SEO, from tools for keyword research and content generation, to insights and user intent intel from AI-driven applications.
Things to keep an eye on regarding AI and SEO are:
- Google Cloud’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) – SGE turns featured snippets on steroids with AI generating elaborate answers for users to find what they are looking for. An elaborative generative answer where it acts like ChatGPT, an image carousel, and more, suggested questions, and suggestions from it all constitute SGE. SGE has to be watched closely as it becomes a larger component within the world of search.
- AI in local SEO – You can use your content to optimize based on personal preferences or regional characteristics.
- Answer Engine Optimization- AI is transforming the way people find information so it might make sense to optimize for answer engines.
- Video SEO- As video engagement is an in thing these days, make sure you get your videos and SEO competent, either in YouTube or outside of YouTube.
- Core Web Vitals (CWV) – CWV are three user experience metrics that measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability of a web page. Maximizing CWVs either improves loading or promotes SEO ranking.
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Use SEO to drive traffic and boost brand awareness
Conducting an SEO in a way will reap great rewards for marketers and businesses. Our Professional Diploma in Search Marketingblog from Neil Patel will make you understand the search fundamentals but will also broaden your understanding in areas such as optimization of SEO, paid search campaign and search strategy development, search analytics, demand generation, and many others. What are you waiting for? Book your place today!