SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of making a website more findable, relevant, and popular to search engines through the website’s content, technical configuration, and link popularity.

Once a website is ranking well on a search engine such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it becomes more accessible to the user.

SEO is unpaid traffic also known as “natural” or “organic.” Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO includes keyword research, content creation, technical optimization, link building and more.

Why Use SEO?

To bring more traffic to your website organically.

How Does SEO Help My Website?

By meeting the users online needs by ensuring high content quality, usability, content relevance and more.

What Does SEO Stand For?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Types Of SEO

There are two main types of search engine optimization: on-page and off-page.

On-page SEO: the content, structure, and code of a website.
Off-page SEO: the presence of a website on other websites through avenues such as backlinks and social media.

SEO Vs. PPC

SEO vs. PPC means organic vs. paid ads. SEO, as we have been discussing, is the organic results. You use on and off page strategies to rank higher on search engines such as google. PPC, also called a search ad, stands for pay per click meaning that every time your ad is clicked, you are charged.

I googled personal injury lawyer. Below, is a highlighted image of where the organic listings show.

SEO takes a long time and involves much consistent and hard work, but there is a low cost. PPC is faster and you rank higher depending on how much you are willing to spend, but, depending on your field, the charges can get very high. Despite being able to provide instant gratification, PPC can also become time consuming because it requires continual keyword uprates and market research.

Some of the the pay per click ads show up above the map listing as shown below. They also appear again at the bottom of the page.

There is another type of called Local Service ads, which is also a ppc and is through google. In Local Service ads you cannot directly choose your keywords, but you can dispute your leads and get your money back. Local Service ads requires a background check as well. You will see the words “Google Screened” near the ad to guarantee the user, the company went through the screening process. The process to sigh up and fulfill the screening requirements is outlined on Google when you go to sign up for it.

The Local Service Ads are highlighted in the picture below. They appear above the PPC ads as well as the Google map listing and organic SEO listings.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines crawl, index and generate a list of results, URLS, to the searcher.

Crawling: Search engines like Google use bots called “crawlers” to continuously scan the web for new and updated content.
Indexing: Each page is analyzed based on the information gathered from the crawlers and then stored in a database.
Results: The list of URL’s produced.

In less technical terms, after a searcher enters in a term, the search engine determines which pages are best based on quality and relevance and puts out a list for the user to choose from.

The practices of Technical SEO are what determine crawlability and indexing of your site.

What Does Technical SEO Include?

Technical SEO includes the following

URL Structure
XML Site Map – There are plugins that will create an XML sitemap. That sitemap can be submitted to google through search console.
Structured Data
Duplicate Content – Duplicate content includes the content on your URLs and includes your metadata.
Site Architecture – The organization of your website as a whole starting with your menu. The easier it is for the user to get around, the longer the user will stay.
And more.

How Does SEO Work?

As an Internet marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization looks at how search engines work by examining the below:

The computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior
The terms that people search for meaning the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and
The search engines that are preferred by their targeted audience.

However, most people do not know every algorithm or how to determine prefered search engines . To get SEO to work for you, try to concentrate on the following:

Relevance: Optimizing Content for Search Relevance:

Keyword Research:
- Identify keywords relevant to your website’s content and that people are likely to search for.
- Use targeted keywords naturally within your content, title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.
- How? Start with a pen and paper and think about what you would search for if you were looking for you website. Next use tools such as google ads or SEMrush to find keywords.
Content Quality:
- Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that provides value to users.
- Search engines prioritize content that is both relevant and useful.
- While there are many search engines and you have to be prepared for all of them, Google pays a lot of attention to E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google gives lots of credits to websites meeting the E-EEAT criteria.
- How?: One method is to start by sitting down and writing and see what happens. Nothing is set in stone and you can edit based on your websites performance. If you are not ranking, you can always make a change.

2. User Experience

The user experience mostly refers to the technical SEO.

Website Structure:
- Organize your website with a clear hierarchy and logical navigation to make it easy for both users and search engines to understand. Once it is hard both the user and search engine will be gone.
Site Security: Get an SSL certificate. You can get it through a company such as Godaddy. This the certificate that will make your website reflect the https and make your visitors feel at ease what using your site.
Page Speed:
- Improve your website’s loading speed. Slow pages can negatively impact user experience and rankings. Factors that may affect page speed are images that are too large, poor hosting, plug ins and more. PageSpeed Insights will not only tell you your page speed, but will also tell you want you need to do to fix your website to increase your page speed.
Mobile-Friendliness:
- Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices including phones and tablets, as most searches now occur on these devices.
Structured Data:
- Use code to provide search engines with additional information about your content, such as product details, event schedules, or recipes. For example, you might use structured data to highlight the title, author and other details about a recipe. Structured data live in the code of the website and the vocabulaty on schema.org. For more information, read more about General Structured Data Guidelines.

3. Authority

Website Authority is determined by building backlinks, but not just backlinks, they need to be high quality. Use websites that you want to be associated with.

Backlinks:
- Earn backlinks from other reputable websites that link back to your content. Focus on the quality of the website you are linking to over the quantity. These backlinks act as votes of confidence and signals of authority to search engines. To do this, you must create relationships with other websites, which brings us to promotion.

How Do I Promote My Website To Get Backlinks?

Promote your content through social media, email marketing, guest blogging, and other channels to increase visibility and potential backlinks.

Social Media: Includes Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TIk Tok, and X. Find businesses relevant to your business on social media and like or comment on their posts. Attend their events virtually or in person if applicable. Connect through your social community.

Email Marketing: Put an email sign up on your website and start sending out promotional emails about your company. These could be emails about anything from sales and promotions you are offering to simple updates and information about your company on quarterly basis or even just a little message around the holidays to remind your readers you still exist. You can send them out as frequently or infrequently as you see necessary. Always leave a way for a user to unsubscribe.

Guest blogging: Find websites relevant to yours and reach out to the owner and ask if you can write a guest blog. If yes, you can ask to link back to your site even if only through your signature.

Broken link building: Find broken links on other sites and tell the owner. The owner may just want to fix them, or may want to use links to your pages as replacements.

Before You Get Started With Backlinks

Run some sort of backlink audit to get an idea of where you stand. A backlink audit can help you analyze the links that are pointing to your website and even show you what links are pointing to your competitors websites and not yours. This research can help you start to establish a backlinking plan.

As you can imagine, this can take a lot of time, but can yield the results you need to be an active and trusted member of your online community.

Ongoing Monitoring and Improvement:

Analytics: How do you know if your site is performing? You can just google yourself, but for a more in depth picture of performance, track your website’s performance in search results using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Experimentation: Experiment with different SEO strategies to see what works best for your website and audience. What works for one site, may not be right for yours. However, with each experiment, give your website a chance to settle. Changes to a website can take time for search engines to crawl and you need to give your site time to see how it performs with your changes.
Adaptation: Stay updated on algorithm changes and adapt your SEO efforts accordingly. As mentioned above, you do not need to know all the details of an algorithm, but if you read an article that a new algorithm is coming out that wants you to focus more on your content, focus more on your content.

Why Is SEO Important?

SEO is important because it helps users, protentional clients, visitors, etc. find your website on google or any other search engine. There are so many websites to choose from, use SEO to standout and drive traffic to your site.

The better your website performs, the more likely you are to get visitors.

Benefits Of SEO:

Potential increased website traffic: Presumably, the more visible your website is on a search engine, the more visitors your will attract to your website.
Improved brand awareness: The more frequently users see your name on google, the more aware they are of your brand and the more recognizable your business becomes.
Cost-effectiveness: SEO is a relatively cost-effective way to market your business. Unlike paid advertising, SEO does not require an ongoing investment to maintain your results.
Long-lasting results: Once you have implemented SEO best practices, the results can last for many years. This is because SEO is focused on optimizing your website for long-term success.
Better user experience: SEO may help to improve the user experience on your website by making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. This can lead to increased engagement and customer satisfaction.

Who Benefits From SEO?

A local business can use SEO to improve their ranking in local search results. Local search results include the map on google. Being in the local 3 pack, which are the top 3 listings on the map, can greatly increase your websites visibility with in the community.
A national or worldwide business can also use SEO to improve their rank.
An e-commerce business can use Search Engine Optimization to improve their ranking for product keywords, which can lead to more sales.
A blog can use SEO to improve their ranking for blog post keywords, which can lead to more traffic and engagement.

Is SEO Worth It?

Yes, SEO is worth it. It is time consuming and continuous, but if you keep at it, it can produce fantastic results.

How To Get Started

Keyword Research: What keywords do you want to rank for? This can be difficult to determine, but there are free sites that can help. For example, SEMRush has a Keyword magic tool feature that allows you to type in a word and then generates a list of keywords along with their search volume, keyword difficulty and more. Keyword research never ends and should be done frequently to stay current with the trends of your business.
Keyword Tracking: Once you have established and started using your keywords, track them and how your website performs with those keywords. Again, there are many online tools that will help. I use SEMRush to do two things. First, I establish a project that will show what keywords I show up for organically (note this is how the keywords rank nationally, not locally). The organic list generates automatically. Second, I use Position Tracking as a part of my project, where I can add keywords to see how my website is performing with them.
Competitors: Check out your competitors websites. First physically look at their sites. Then, do a domain analysis. A domain analysis can also be done through tools on the web. Take your time and figure out what your competitors are doing well and see if you can use their techniques to optimize your site in combination with your own tactics and ideas.
Website Audit: If you already have a website established, begin with a site audit. A site audit will examine each page and tell you what you need to do so you can optimize your website and meet your goals. More specifically, a site audit will examine your content, page speed, keywords, broken links, metadata (page titles, descriptions and keywords) and more.
Start Writing! Write what you know and be genuine and real while applying what you have learned from all your keyword and domain research.

SEO Services

When building a website, the goal is to make the website easy for the user as well the search engine. SEO is labor intensive. It takes time and patience and consistency is important.

As a digital marketing director focusing on SEO, I have learned that SEO can take what seems like forever to produce results. But, keeping at it can be very beneficial. Do you need SEO services near me? My SEO services include help with on-page, off-page and technical SEO. Contact me for any help!

What Is SEO?