7 Steps to implement a successful Account-based marketing strategy
Interns Story Tania
What is Search Engine optimization?
Search engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing practice to rank web pages higher in search engine result pages (SERP). Some of the popular search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc. It is an important part of any website that helps search engines understand how to index your content so people can find it when they search online.
A study by Backlinko, a premiere SEO training company, indicated that the 1st result on Google gets 31.7% clicks out of the total clicks. The 1st spot gets 10x more traffic as compared to the 10th spot on the 1st page. So, If your website ranks on the 1st page and among the top 3 results for relevant search queries, a majority of the users will click on it and visit the site(Organic Traffic).
Activities Involved in the Search Engine Optimization
Generally, the following are broader activities involved in Search Engine Optimization.
1. Website Analysis
Also known as SEO Audit, this step helps understand the current website strength, point out areas that requires improvement and other page errors. There is plethora of free and paid Analysis tools available that can give you insights on Index and Non-index pages, Pages without Meta Descriptions, Pages with thin content, Website Loading time, Canonical errors, Pages with too long or short title description and more such information.
2. Keyword and Competitors Research
True to the notion, “All Ideas Are Made Of Other Ideas” – competitive research is a reverse engineering process to find out the content, keywords and link ideas implemented by the competitors and refine them further to rank ahead of them.
Keyword Tool like Google Keyword Planner helps you find out average traffic for a selected or group of key words along with change in their popularity in past few months. Basis on the key words ranking difficulty and search volume, you can decide the words that you wish to include in your content strategy.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page optimization, also known as “On-page SEO” is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines and users. In general, it includes adding and optimizing Meta tags, Titles, Headings, Links, Anchor text, Content optimization, Keyword Research & Placement. Right On-page strategies will help you increase your website rankings in SERP, attract more users to your website and increase the chances of lead funneling.
4. Off-Page SEO
Any activities conducted on the web to improve a website’s visibility are known as off-page SEO. It includes sharing the website content on social media channels, content aggregation websites, image submission sites, guest blogging, publishing presentations and infographics with an objective to increase the backlinks and referring domains.
If you can generate many high-quality backlinks to your website, it indicates to the search engine that your website has good content for the users. It will help your website to be ranked higher on the SERP for relevant topics.
Technical SEO
Ahh! this is not so fancy but when done right improves the user experience on the website. It generally includes making website multi device responsive, optimizing the site’s loading speed, structuring the data correctly and optimizing the website code.
Local SEO
Local SEO is beneficial for businesses with physical locations like retail outlets, restaurants, mom and pop stores, etc. It helps them to attract visitors from the nearby areas. It includes listing your business on the search engine to display it within the specified geographic location in the relevant search results
How to start an SEO Campaign
As an SEO beginner, you should have an idea about what are the easiest and beneficial steps that you should follow to get the best SEO results. We have noted down 5 steps of SEO strategy which will help beginners to achieve success in SEO.
Step 1: Know Your Audience.
If you’re new to SEO, you might not know who your audience is. Knowing your audience allows you to tailor your content to them. For example, if you sell products online, you’ll need to make sure your audience knows what they’re looking for when searching for those products.
Step 2 : Create Great Content.
Creating great content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your SEO. It’s also one of the easiest ways to build an audience. In fact, creating great content is so easy that anyone can do it. All you need is a good idea, some creativity, and a lot of passion.
Step 3: Build Links.
If you’re looking to make money online, then you should probably focus on building links. That’s because Google loves links. And when people link to your site, Google gives them credit for helping you out. So, by getting other sites to link to yours, you’ll get more search engine love.
Step 4: Promote Your Site.
To build links, you need to promote your website. There are two ways to do this: One is through social media, and the other is through email. Social media is free, so it’s easy to use. However, it takes time to build up an audience. Email is much faster, but it costs money to send emails.
Step 5: Monitor Results.
Once you’re ready to launch your campaign, monitor results. If you see no progress after a few weeks, consider changing tactics. you have to use trial and error technique to see which strategy or combinations is giving you the best SEO results
By connecting your website to Google Analytics, you can evaluate the growth and pattern of SEO when you are getting traffic. It shows all the SEO KPI’s such as Organic traffic, Bounce Rate, Page Speed, etc. which help you to measure your SEO Efforts. Evaluate the growth over 3 to 6 months and observe the pattern
Key SEO Metrtics & KPIs to Measure SEO success
Search Engine Optimization metrics provide insights on website health, growth in users traffic, source of new users acquisition and their activities on the site.
1. Impressions:
The impression count indicates the number of time website (a particular web page) has appear in search results for keywords related to your services and offerings. The corresponding metric to impression is CTR i.e. Click Through Rate. CTR indicates after viewing your web page in the search result (impression), how many users click and visited your site. The impression and CTR data can be viewed in Google Search Console.
2. Organic Traffic:
Website visitors (users) who found your website in internet search. It’s also important to know if you have acquire users by running a paid advertisement, it doesn’t add up in organic traffic. This data is available in Google Analytics.
3. Keyword Ranking:
Keywords are a starting point to start the SEO activities. Many companies struggle to decide on the top keywords to rank for their site. The easy way out is to refer the existing web pages or services offered by the company as ‘Seed Keywords”. After a month or two, one should review and if require change the primary keywords.
4. Bounce Rate:
The bounce rate percentage indicates the number of website visitors (users) who had exited the website after viewing one page (the landing page). The ideal situation is to have lower bounce rate percentage. One of the way to reduce bounce rate is to increase the inside page navigation – buttons and hyperlinks within the web page that encourage users to move from one page to another in search of quality content.
5. Average time on page:
The number indicates on an average the number of minutes each users spend on the site. One should aim for a higher number, as indicates that users is finding the information relevant or useful.
6. Page Speed:
Page loading speed is a critical metrics to track. Considering the low attention span of today’s internet users, it is necessary that website loads faster. Anything in the range of 5 seconds to 10 seconds can be consider as an ideal page loading time.
7. Domain Authority:
DA i.e. Domain Authority score indicates the popularity of your website in search engine ranking. Higher number indicates that search engine will drive more traffic to your site for related search query. Another associated concept is PA (Page Authority).
8. Backlinks:
Backlinks refer to incoming links from other websites that point to a particular page on your website. You can use backlinks to boost the ranking of your website and improve its search engine visibility. Backlinks help Google determine whether a page is relevant or not.
Generic SEO Terms For Beginners
Learn the various terms or SEO glossary associated with Search engine Optimization. Although this is not the entire list but it covers most of the topics for the SEO beginners.
1. Website Audit
A website audit are a series of steps taken to check whether a website follows the prescribed guidelines laid down by a search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing and others. The result indicates the search engine friendliness of a website. There are various tools available in the market that assist you in performing a website audit. In case you have built site using WordPress Content Management System (CMS) you may manually begin auditing the site and bring about the basic changes like title tags, meta description, alt text (images).
2. Keyword Research
Keywords are phrases or words used to search for information. Keywords are basically the combination of words that defines the services, products, or the information available on the website. As an SEO expert, while conducting the website audit one will also check the density of targeted keywords across web pages. Keywords research also helps in creating future content for the blogs article.
A brand generally prepares the keyword list as phrases its future customer might be using to search about the product / solutions / services offer by the brand. However, more professional approach is to take help of keyword research tools to exactly know the trending keyword associated with the business or keywords that has higher search volume. One of the most widely used Free Keyword Research Tool is “Google Keyword Planner”
3. Web crawler
A “crawler does website Crawling.” A crawler is a piece of code that reviews all the web pages on the internet. It aims to identify the new web pages added to the internet and any content changes to the existing web pages.
4. Website Indexing
Once the webpages are crawled, all the content is indexed, i.e., arranged and organized. If indexed efficiently, it can help the search engine provide results to search queries quickly.
The longer it takes to display the results, the higher is the chance of the user exiting the current search engine and moving to another one to find the required information. As a website administrator, you can use Google Search Console for crawling and indexing your website on Google.
5. Ranking
It is a process of displaying search results to the users in a specific order. The search results’ relevancy to a user’s search query is essential. The aim is to help users find the necessary information in the shortest possible time. The most relevant results are shown higher, and as users go down the results page, the relevancy decreases.
For a search engine, ads are a significant revenue source. If we quit the search engine, it will be unable to show us any ads and that will impact its bottom line. Hence, they focus on delivering the best results to the users as quickly as possible so that they use the search engine more and click on more ads while browsing through it. If we do not find the information we are looking for, we will go to other websites to search for it.
As per Google, more than 200 parameters are used to track the SEO performance of a website