You’ve built a beautifully designed website. You’ve created compelling content that builds trust with your audience and establishes your business as a leader in your industry. But when you look for your business in popular search engines like Google, you have to click through 3, 5, or even 8 pages to find it.
Search Engine Optimization is vital to the success of your website. User experience, design, and content all work together to create a strong online presence and boost your website’s rank across all engines. As a business owner who wants to drive growth and be seen, you can’t afford to leave professional, technical search optimization out of your marketing strategy.
What is SEO and Why is it Important?
The first step toward understanding the importance of SEO is learning what it is and how it works. That might seem straightforward: add some keywords and wait for the clicks to roll in, right? But effective SEO is a far more complicated, multifaceted system, and there’s more to it than simply stuffing your site with a handful of keywords.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s essentially a way to show Google and other major search engines not only what your content is about, but that you have authoritative knowledge on the subject. Your website needs to prove that it is a useful place for people to find what they’re looking for.
There are billions upon billions of sites competing against each other for top search engine rankings. Not every site will be listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user searches for certain keywords, search engine algorithms decide which pages’ content most appropriately matches and will most likely be useful to the viewer.
By adhering to up-to-date SEO best practices and engaging in a long-term SEO strategy, your site will become more visible over time, leading to more traffic and more opportunities to engage with potential clients or customers.
What Are the Key Elements of SEO?
Search algorithms change frequently, so even by the time you read this article the most important elements of what’s outlined here could be different. Digital search companies like Google notoriously keep their ranking algorithms secret, so SEO best practices are established through industry trial and error that can change at any time.
Employing a professional agency that understands the ins-and-outs of an effective SEO strategy, understands how to formulate a long-term SEO plan for your business, and can quickly adapt to sudden changes in how search rankings are determined is important to increase and maintain search rankings.
Excelling at the individual elements of SEO, then combining them together to build strong SEO best practices and strategies, is what will ultimately help your site rank in the SERPs.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO deals with optimized website content targeted at specific search inquiries to improve SERP ranking.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves publishing activity and linking away from your website to increase domain authority, which ultimately helps SERPs validate your website as an authoritative source and increases search engine rankings.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO has to do with certain technical (surprise) elements that impact the indexing and crawling of your site by search engines. Checking all of the technical SEO boxes can significantly improve your search engine rankings.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a newer Google-specific set of SEO rules that heavily impacts rankings in the Google ecosystem. Core web vitals measures mobile and desktop loading speeds like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and time to interactiveness.
To simplify, the longer your page takes to load, the more it will negatively affect your search rankings. Mobile loading speed is heavily weighted in Google Core Web Vitals as the majority of current web traffic is done by mobile devices. There is no easy solution to increase website loading speed, which often requires a comprehensive website audit and a custom-tailored review including image optimization, code minification, and analysis of unnecessary or alternative plugins.
SEO Monitoring and Reporting
We always say SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Improvements in search ranking require long-term strategy, targeted content creation, and consistent monitoring. When a website update is made, its effectiveness toward search ranking position must be monitored to determine whether it was a positive or negative change. Sometimes you may think updating a header or keyword will help rankings, but it may actually have the opposite effect.
Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like organic traffic, conversation rate, clickthrough rate (CTR), keyword rankings, bounce rates, and link building is a crucial step in improving your position through SERPS.
If you’re not implementing a solid SEO strategy and taking best practices seriously, you’re asking to get lost in a sea of other competing websites, unable to stand out in an ocean of noise.
Conclusion
This may seem like a lot of work – and it is. To ensure your business is making the right moves at the right times, we recommend hiring a professional SEO agency to guide you through a long-term strategy.
An agency that knows SEO, and has a team of specialists to assist, monitor, and update your presence across digital platforms can be absolutely game-changing for your business.
Work with the team at Boost Media to help your brand succeed online.
