When you think about how people learn or find information today, your mind almost immediately goes to the internet. More often than not, the web is the starting point for much of how we learn and communicate today. For this reason, being one of the top websites on a search engine is a top priority for many businesses or content creators. Achieving this will ultimately bring a lot of traffic to your website, but it can be surprisingly difficult to reach the top without paying for ads.  It may take weeks or months, but it’s not impossible. To do this, you have to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) strategies into your web and marketing plans.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the activity of driving traffic to your website and ranking high on the organic search engine results. Organic search results are separate from Paid Ads that appear on search engines, and refers to the websites and pages that search engine pulls and displays via its algorithm.

SEO is the magic you use to help search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing include your content as a top result when someone searches a keyword or phrase related to your post.

What Makes up SEO?

Know that you know what SEO stands for, let’s break it down. These are the critical components that make up how we approach SEO:

• Organic Results

Once again, organic results are the traffic you don’t have to pay for, and still appears on search engines. Paid ads make up a lot of the search engine results pages (SERP), but there is still room for organic. 

• Quality of Traffic

The organic results from search engines can be helpful, but only when the visitors are there for the right reason. You could run an archery shop, but if you’re attracting customers looking for Target products, you’re not optimized. In many cases, search engines can measure quality of traffic by how long visitors stay on a site, so if you’re attracting the right customers, your drop off (or Bounce Rate) will be lower. 

• Quantity of Traffic

Once you taper the quality of customers, then more quantity is always a good thing.

• Links

Also important to help rank effectively are the links related to a website. Backlinks are links from other websites that link back to your website. This lets search engines know that this site is a trusted resource. Linkbuilding has taken on many different forms throughout the years, but it is still vital to building good SEO.

These are things to consider when evaluating how to develop your SEO plan. 

How Does SEO Work?

SEO is important because it does the work of convincing the search engines that your content is the content that is most relevant to what the person is searching for. 

To understand SEO and master it, you need to cater to the search engine’s algorithm and ranking system. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. For Google alone, there are over 200 signals that could affect ranking. This may seem daunting, but a lot of them work in tandem with the intention of creating a cohesive web experience. SEO can also be divided into on-page SEO or off-page/technical SEO. Later, we will break down some of these in the Consultant’s Couch blog.

Each search engine is different and may require different adjustments, but the core concept of creating relevant content is the same. Here are some of the easy, fundamental steps to increasing your SEO rank: 

Ways to Increase Your SERP Ranking?

1. Keyword Research

This one is extremely important. The research is a fundamental part of how you will create content. The idea here is to match your products, services, or content with what users are searching for. You can use tools, including some from Google itself like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, that provide information about search traffic and current topics. Once you’re familiar with what your audience is looking for, you can model content - videos, blogs, social media posts - after it and help your site climb the SERPs. 

2. Have a Mobile-Friendly Site

Back in the day, it may have been natural to assume that visitors were coming to your site via a desktop or a laptop. That is not the case anymore. Assume that most, if not all, of your traffic is coming from a mobile device. According to Statistica, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53 percent of global website traffic in the second quarter of 2020. To reach digital users, having a mobile-friendly site is necessary. This will increase your visitor’s experience on your mobile site and increase your ranking.

3. Produce Quality Content Often

This element will increase your SEO ranking because being consistent with your content will keep your visitors coming back. The more unique, quality content you have on your site will give the search engines more phrases to understand and know what your site is about. This will help them to know what they’re delivering to your consumers.

Now that you know about search engine optimization, take this information and apply it to your business. Be sure to take an audit of your site’s current content and inventory, and where you rank on search engines. Combine your audit information with what you know now about SEO, and come up with a plan to increase your company’s placement on SERP.