What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The objective of SEO is to increase the presence of a business in regular search engine results. Consequently, these activities bring more visitors to the business’s website, enhancing the probability of them spurred to action which leads to additional clients and higher profits.
When asked to talk about SEO, I describe it as a method to guarantee that your site appears on the first page of Google search results when someone queries a product or service that your business offers.
But this simplifies the discipline a bit.
There are plenty of methods to enhance the search engine optimization of your webpages. Search engines investigate components such as headings, keywords, pictures markers, inner connection configuration, and outbound links (additionally alluded to as backlinks). Search engines evaluate website architecture and style, how visitors interact on the site, and other aspects that are not derived from the website when deciding how much to rate the site in their SERP results.
Considering all of these elements, the main purpose of SEO is to influence two facets – search engine rankings and visibility.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engine optimization (SEO) seeks to improve a website’s position in search engine results by optimizing its content, researching relevant keywords, and getting incoming links to that content. This helps raise the ranking and make the website more noticeable. When a website is discovered and looked through by a search engine, the consequences of your optimization endeavors will generally become visible on the SERP. However, you should be aware that it might take a few months for your SEO projects to show their full effect.
Rankings
Search engines employ this process to decide where to place a certain website page in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The order of search engine results for a query go from 0 to the final number, with each web page holding a single rank. Over the course of time, the position of a web page in the results shown by a search engine can fluctuate because of its age, rivalry among the search engine results page, or if the search engine alters its algorithm used.
Visibility
This phrase refers to how prominent a website is in the search engine results. Search visibility is low when a website isn’t showing up in a lot of relevant search results, and it is high when the opposite happens.
The two are responsible for accomplishing the primary goals of SEO – increasing website traffic and building domain authority.
What’s the importance of SEO?
An additional essential incentive to utilizing SEO is that it practically facilitates a presence for your company throughout the entire purchaser’s passage.
SEO can make sure that your marketing approaches fit with the new purchasing manner.
Google conceded that customer habits have changed irreversibly.
As of June 2021, the majority of internet lookups are performed on a platform owned by Google, which is 92% of the total.
Furthermore, they would rather manage the majority of their shopping independently.
Ststista discovered that six out of ten folks look up info concerning a company before purchasing something. What’s more, this process has never been more complicated.
In conclusion, according to DemandGen’s 2022 B2B Buyer’s Survey, the majority of B2B purchasers start their buying process with a general online search.
What methods do they use to utilize search engines in their procedure?
At the start of their endeavor, they employ Google in order to search for data associated with their issue. Some also inquire about potential solutions.
Subsequently, they assess the available choices based on ratings or social media publicity before asking a business. But this happens after they’ve exhausted all information sources.
Therefore, appearing in the search results is the only way to draw attention from prospective customers.
How does Google know how to rank a page?
Search engines have a single goal only. They strive to furnish people with the most appropriate solutions or data.
Every time you utilize them, their computer programs select webpages that are the most pertinent to your search. Organize them in order of importance with the most powerful or well-known ones at the top.
To deliver the right information to users, search engines analyze two factors:
- Relevancy between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines assess it by various factors like topic or keywords.
- Authority , which is measured by a website’s popularity on the Internet. Google assumes that the more popular a page or resource is, the more valuable its content is to readers.
To make sense of the data, researchers employ intricate formulas referred to as search algorithms.
Search engines keep their algorithms secret. SEO professionals have eventually figured out certain elements that are taken into account when evaluating a page. These elements are known as ranking criteria, and they are the main topic of a search engine optimization plan.
Using the E-A-T system is tremendously helpful when investigating the reliableness and authority of a source. E-A-T in SEO stands for “expertise”, authoritativeness”, and “trustworthiness”. Although not influencing rankings directly, enhancing your SEO content can have an impact on direct ranking factors.
It won’t be long before you recognize that — by incorporating more material, refining picture names, or improving internal connections — your positions and hunt visibility could be changed. Subsequently, these activities enhance a positioning element.
What is SEO strategy?
A set of tactics to increase website traffic by utilizing search engines is what forming an SEO marketing strategy boils down to. The success of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) depends on strategies that occur on a web page, such as utilizing keywords based on the desired user intent. Additionally, achieving success in the SEO department requires garnering external links from external websites.
How to Monitor & Track SEO Results
Ensuring that the technical setup of a website, the content it contains, and the links it incorporates are all crucial for the website to appear in search engine results. Monitoring your efforts helps improve your strategy further.
It is essential to track knowledge regarding visits, interaction, and connections to accurately assess the success of SEO. And though, most companies develop their own sets of SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), here are the most common ones:
- Organic traffic growth
- Keyword rankings (split into branded and non-branded terms)
- Conversions from organic traffic
- Average time on page and the bounce rate
- Top landing pages attracting organic traffic
- Number of indexed pages
- Links growth (including new and lost links)
Local SEO
Until this point, our concentration has been on improving the search engine positioning of a website in general. If you own a local business, Google can help put it in front of people who may be interested in what you have to offer in your area. But for that, you use local SEO.
And it’s well worth it.
46% of Google searches are for local businesses. They hunt for vendor proposals and pinpoint exact business locations.
Moreover, vast majority of those who search act on that information quickly; 72 percent of them go to a local store or business within 24 hours of their search.
Is local SEO distinct from the SEO we discussed earlier?
Yes and no.
Search engines use similar methods when determining rankings both in a particular region and across the world. Since they design a website to provide information based on a certain location, they must assess some additional criteria when determining the rankings.
Even local search results look different:
- They appear only for searches with a local intent (for example, “restaurant near me” or when a person clearly defined the location.)
- They contain results specific to a relevant location.
- They concentrate on delivering specific information to users that they don’t need to go anywhere else to find.
- They target smartphone users primarily as local searches occur more often on mobile devices.
SEO Issues That Cause Search Rankings & Traffic to Drop
1. You Haven’t Updated Your Site in a Long Time
It is essential to keep up with the competition in your market by consistently updating your website.
An examination of other websites in your category will uncover what actions you must take in order to stay current with them.
Generalizing, if your site continues to stay the same with no progress in content, links, or other webmarketing, you won’t likely get increased benefits.
Your plan may involve just creating a blog post every day, which is particularly pertinent if you have not been giving your blog much attention recently.
It could be intricate and it will take a lot of effort in order to obtain results.
If you post blog entries from time to time, it might not be enough recent material to acquire the backlinks necessary for your website to prevail against others in its field.
Through investigating other companies, you can ascertain precisely what your opponents are doing in order to attain the highest rankings in search engine results pages.
2. You Haven’t Made Any Significant Changes to Your Content
This is related to the ongoing changes being discussed.
If you haven’t put in effort to modify your content, you might be inadvertently preventing yourself from gaining higher search engine placements and website viewers.
3. You Updated Your Site With a New Design
Renovating your website with a fresh look does not necessarily imply a decrease in visits.
Taking into account any possible redirects and other matters that could negatively affect the website’s ability to be crawled and indexed is especially important.
For example, your business could lose its Google rankings if the website’s layout has been done predominantly in JavaScript – because this type of issue can obstruct its crawling and indexing process.
It is essential to involve an SEO expert when launching a fresh website.
Experts can recognize elements that a typical programmer might not be aware of.
Developers may have the best intentions when selecting a headless CMS, however, if it negatively impacts how search engines crawl and rank a website, then the resultant outcome will be a reduction in traffic from search engines.
4. You Removed Traffic-Driving Content
Say you embarked on a new content audit project.
It is recommended to get rid of thin and redundant material from your website.
The audit is a concern because it does not evaluate whether the webpages are being seen by people or simply the standard of the pages.
In this instance, your content audit is having a negative impact rather than being advantageous.
This illustrates that there is not just one way to look at the problem of the content.
Although working on duplicate and thin content is essential, it will not be effective if the technical aspect of search engine optimization is not taken into account, such as examining which pages are drawing attention or have had little internet activity.
5. Your Robots.txt File Can Cause Indexing Issues
One of the most frequent technical issues I come across while conducting an audit is when the customer has established a ban on crawling all pages and directories incorrectly through robots.txt.
This file could potentially be your downfall if you are not cautious and don’t fully comprehend how to utilize it or stop it from being used.
For example, if you add “Disallow: /” to the start of your robots.txt file, search engines will halt their activity in terms of crawling and indexing your complete website; therefore, leading to a decrease in traffic.
6. Links Removed from Sites
This happens more often than you may think.
If you notice a decrease in visits to your website, check to make sure you haven’t disconnected some connections that were sending that particular flow of traffic, to rule out the possibility that an official punishment has taken place.
Webmasters like to clean up their links.
Gaining familiarity with assessing link profiles and deleting connections is beneficial in examining such connections.
7. A Site Linking to You Went Down
If the website that pointed to yours was to cease existing permanently, you could end up in a situation where you have a permanent decrease in visitors from that source.
There is no method that can be used to stop this from occurring or provide security against it.
You will only have to exchange the website for another one when obtaining links.
Once you realize this, you must focus on locating other websites to link to you in order to elevate that amount of visitors.
8. Sites Linking to You Are No Longer Receiving Traffic
If websites that connected to you are given a penalty and taken out of Google’s search ranking, the visitors to your site from those sources will no longer be able to access it.
Regrettably, it may not be possible to identify this.
It is essential to keep pursuing link-gaining efforts in order to stay successful even when encountering temporary difficulties.
9. Featured or Rich Snippet Changes
Should your featured snippet, rich snippet, or any other type of snippet be the driving force behind website traffic, sudden changes to the SERP could result in a sharp decline in web visits overnight.
A rival may publish a more superior asset that outshines yours and thus leaving it out of the privileged snippet.
If a variety of search engine results pages have been altered, it is necessary to review them and determine if the reduction in website visitors is caused by the elimination of these essential SERP features.
10. Changes in Audience Search Behavior
The patterns of what people look for on the web can shift over time, causing a page that used to rank high on search engine results to experience a decrease in visitors.
Occurrences of this may be as a result of broad problems such as an international virus outbreak, or as something more innocent as a fashionable product or service taking off.
