Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of making web pages discoverable and relevant to user search queries, using on-page (how a page is configured), content marketing and off-site SEO methods.
Successful search engine optimisation strategies seek to attract visitors who will convert to customers or clients and come back, and this article will focus on some key components of SEO.
Keywords
Consumers rely heavily on search engines for finding products and services they require, with consumers increasingly turning to keywords as one of their go-to strategies for finding what they’re searching for online. Businesses must understand what their audience needs to rank high in organic searches and attract potential customers; keywords are an effective way of doing just this; having the appropriate ones on their website ensures it speaks the same language as its audience.
Keywords help search engines match your page content with users’ search queries, so that it ranks higher in organic search results. The more closely your keywords match user queries, the higher you’ll rank in organic results.
Approving keywords requires careful thought and trial and error, but using tools like Ahrefs can make the task simpler. They offer information such as search volume, intent, competition and keyword difficulty as well as semantically related and long-tail modifying words for semantic enhancement and long-tail modification. Finally, Ahrefs allows you to keep tabs on your website’s ranking by tracking potential opportunities as well.
Content
No matter where your customers are in their buyer journey, SEO can be instrumental in raising visibility – but great content will keep them coming back again and again.
SEO involves writing content that meets both search engine optimisation (SEO) standards and your audience needs, such as keyword research, using headers and subheaders to signal hierarchy, creating visuals when possible, and structuring it to make sense for your customers.
Crafting friendly search engine optimisation content takes careful planning and consideration. Rather than stuffing keywords into unrelated pieces of writing, or forcing keywords onto an irrelevant topic without their natural placement in context, crafting SEO-friendly posts requires understanding search intent for each topic you cover – using AnswerThePublic as an idea generator is one such free resource to generate ideas cantered on keywords that matter most for your target audience.
Link building
Link building is one of the key aspects of SEO. When other websites link back to your content, this signals to search engines that you offer something valuable and helps it rank better on search engine result pages (SERPs). Aiming to attract links related to your niche such as writing about tools can also help ensure relevance; targeting similar websites might yield better results when link building.
Researching competitors is another integral element of link building, using tools such as Ahrefs to identify sites that contain backlinks to them and contact those listed as potential targets for link exchange requests.
However, you should never use black-hat techniques to buy or acquire links – this violates Google’s guidelines and could result in severe penalties from them. In order to build long-term link strategies it is wiser to avoid such practices altogether.
Analytics
Search engines are the go-to place for many web searches, which means business owners should capitalise on this to attract relevant search traffic to their websites and turn it into sales leads organically. Optimising for specific keywords doesn’t just mean ranking high on SERPs – it means turning those visitors into customers or clients!
To do this, it’s crucial to have an in-depth knowledge of your search engine optimisation metrics, which you can achieve using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics to view reports. With these tools you can assess Search Engine Keyword Performance which gives information about which queries are driving traffic to your site as well as their average SERP positions.
Search Exit Metrics are another useful metric, showing data on queries where users searched but did not find satisfactory results. This data can help prioritise SEO efforts.