8/200: Why Focusing On These Items Will Improve Your SEO
It doesn't matter if you are new to SEO or have already invested a large amount of your marketing efforts to getting discovered online, it can become really exhausting trying to figure out why your website is not getting discovered online, or when you realize that SEO takes a lot of time to bring returns. While sometimes a page can become a viral sensation or a blog post can go live for a week and suddenly find itself on the front page of Google, these moments are few and far from the norm. From my own experience, it can take a minimum of 6 months to see your pages move up and up through the rankings. The result can be that will we often find ourselves focusing more and more on Google's algorithm. We want to see what exactly is Google looking for when it comes to page ranking, and it can become an even more daunting exercise when you see that there are over 200 factors that go into Google's algorithm. But don't get disheartened, all these criteria are relevant to where you end up in rankings, they don't all carry equal weight. So with that, I'm going to run through the 8 best practices that you should focus on first that will set you on a strong path towards improving your SEO.
1: Keyword Intent
This is one of the biggest changes to Google over the last few years, and yet it's still something that many marketers have changed with. Long gone are the days of Google looking for how many times your page mentions a keyword, also known as keyword stuffing. Google are no longer looking for the most instances of a keyword in a webpage, but rather the webpage that best matches the intent behind the keyword.
Let's say I have a blog on gardening and I want to rank for organic pest control designed to prevent pests from eating your plants. It won't rank well by simply including the phrase "organic pest control" several times in the article. Instead, I should include this phrase at least once, followed by real examples of organic pesticides, their ingredients, where you can buy them, why they're so highly rated, and what makes these pesticides organic.
2: Inbound Links
Also known as "backlinks", these are all the hyperlinks that direct back to your page from elsewhere on the internet. I often tell my own clients that this can be like a golden ticket for SEO. By having inbound links form other websites it tells Google that people trust what you have to say, enough to link to it from their own websites. Trust is a major thing for Google, and this shows a high level of trust. Think of it like a college essay; the essay with more references will do better than the one that doesn't because it's shown that you have done your homework.
To build upon these, you could start writing guest blog posts for websites in a field relevant to yourself and your persona, and ask for a link back to your website in the post in return.
3: Domain Security
Have you noticed https at the beginning of a url? The ‘s’ stands for secure. This ensures Google that the information its indexing is safe to the searcher. But what does this actually mean? When you land on a website page that has a form, after that form is filled-in - the information you just entered can be intercepted by a hacker on an unsecure website. But when you visit a website that's encrypted with SSL, connection is secure so that no one besides you and the website you're submitting the information to can see or access what you type into your browser.
Google has now started to name and shame websites that are not secure. Our research, conducted in 2017 showed that 82% of users would stop browsing a site that was not secure.
4: Topic Authority
This one is quite simple. The more content you publish on a particular topic, the highest each piece of content belonging to that topic will rank. Remember our gardening example from the first ranking factor, above? Let's say this website has 20 articles all about garden pests. By now, Google knows this website is probably an authority on the topic of pest prevention. This is why it's so important to do solid keyword research and bring in a pillar page strategy. If you haven't heard of this before you can read more about it here.
5: Content Structure
If you have read about the pillar page strategy, then this should be no surprise. Your website should be sectioned off into different topics that all complement and link back to each other. This is where the visitor is able to easily see what other assets exist on your website, creating an easy experience for them that they can navigate through without having to give it much through. You see this in action on blogs with recommended follow-up articles at the bottom of their posts, the ability to display pages by topic, or with relevant CTAs to further assets that complement the ideas presented of the current page.
6: Website Architecture
This is sometimes known as technical SEO. Google cares about how your website is built just as much as it cares about the content itself. If your website is full of broken code, links that go to nowhere, images that won't load, then you will be penalized with lower search results. HubSpot has a great technical SEO checklist here that I'd recommend checking out.
7:Meta Tags
The easiest way to describe this is that search engines are robots. Robots don't have eyes, so they cannot view pages the same way a human can. Meta tags allow for Google and others to be able to "see" what exactly is on your webpage, and what should be considered important on this. There are many different types of meta tags, from canonical tags to content type and more. Again we have a great blog post here that goes really heavy into the details on this.
8: Page Speed
We are really impatient when it comes to websites. If a page doesn't load up fast, we will leave the website, and Google has learned this. That's why Google will regularly check how fast it takes for your website to load up. Google themselves have said that 2 seconds is the threshold for acceptable web speeds. Their ultimate goal, however, is to show pages that load up in less than half-a-second. This is why it's so important to keep your code nice and clean, so that everything is been done to ensure your pages load up as fast as possible. Remember the more images, videos and other pieces of content (Including plug-ins and extensions that users won't see but still need to be activated in the background) that are on a webpage, the longer it takes to load. So run speed-checks, and if your website is slow to load then make this a top priority to fix.
The most important things to remember though, and Google knows this, is that Google isn't buying your services or visiting your website. PEOPLE are looking to purchase what you have to offer. If you build your content our just trying to solve for a machine, you are not putting your leads first. And if you look through the past 8 items, they are all designed with the visitor experience in mind. That's what Google cares about also. So if you build a website that solves for your prospects, then you are already doing the right things to rank.
Got any tips you'd share with the community? Feel free to comment below with your own thoughts!
.png "HubSpot Alumni"){kind=icon}
