Get started with your SEO
SEO has been a core part of any digital business for many years, but how is it evolving?
What is SEO
SEO is not a new topic, and most of you already know, but: Search Engine Optimization is the work that makes your website content rank on a Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP). Simple, right? Not so much. There are around 200 different factors that decide where your page is ranking on the SERP, and search engines are continuously updating their algorithms. After some updates, changes are very noticeable, and many have suffered the consequences. And the worst thing from a marketer’s perspective is that you don’t REALLY know what’s going on, and keeping up with all the updates is going to cost you a lot of time. I’ll be providing you with some simple and up-to-date knowledge that you should know to rank in the top 10 of SERP. This is the first of many articles related to SEO and will not cover everything you need to be successful at SEO. Just a few factors.
Does SEO even matter?
Yes, SEO matters, and it helps making your paid strategy cheaper. Can you create a profitable, successful business based on SEO? Most likely, no. It can be okay, but you will reach a limit to how many impressions your business will get. Why? Because Google is a greedy corporation out to steal your money, and it would be pretty dumb of them to let you reap all the benefits of their services without even paying. It might have worked before, but it doesn’t anymore. While organic searches in Google still accounts for 40% of trackable traffic to websites, paid ads have slowly become more dominant, now at 28%. A pretty drastic change from 2008, when 70% of search clicks were organic compared to 24% Paid.
So yes, SEO matters, but there is a huge BUT. Google is continuously finding sneaky ways to make organic search results appearing further down on the page, making the top spots even more critical. While the top site in organic gets you a CTR of 28,5%, it drops to 15,7% in second and 11% in the third on average. If you are the lucky person getting the 10th slot on the first page, you are graced with a full 2,5% CTR. Wait, that’s not too bad? To be fair, if the average were a good measurement, SEO would still be superb. Now it’s just ok. Why? The span is between 13,7% and 46,9%.
It depends on the Layout of your Ranking page, which again is dependent on the search intent. So let’s look at how the average is with some of the newer features Google have added:
With Featured Snippets, the first organic search has a CTR-rate of 19,6%.
With Knowledge panels, CTR-rate is 16,7%.
Commercial searches with a Google Ads CTR-rate is 18,8% or Google Shopping Ads with a CTR-rate of 13,7%.
So as long as you have no competitors, you will be sufficient only caring about SEO! So to conclude so far: Ranking high on SERP is good. The efficiency of it depends on the searches you appear in. And if you have competitors, you will have to combine SEO with a PPC-strategy if you wish to optimize your Google reach.
What do I rank on?
There are around 200 different factors, but we know that some are more important than others. According to Google, this is what they are looking for:
Purpose of the page
Content quality and amount
Website info and info about the content creator
Website reputation and content creator reputation
User interaction with the page (time on page, bounce rates, and so on)
Expertise, Authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
So just a little bit above average vague there. About half of that makes sense, though, luckily. The other half is a bit like:
That said, some very reputable people have documented strong correlations to E-A-T and ranking.
Whatever that means.
Keyword research
The first thing you have to do is Keyword Research. It might seem like an annoying and tedious job that slows down the process of ranking high on SERP. The problem with trying to rank on what you ‘want,’ without doing any research,’ is that you might find the keywords to be very hard to rank on, and the resources you put into it will have little return when you’re starting up. Take Medzys; we wish to rank for the keyword Restless Legs Syndrome. Only problem? The keyword difficulty is 90%, which means that it’ll be challenging and tough to reach the top spot. Focusing on a long-tail keyword like “The best treatment for Restless Legs Syndrome” will be easier to rank for. My favorite tool for this research is SEMrush, which I’ve found to be very useful, and if you search on the internet, you will find 14-30 days trials.
Long-tail vs short-tail keywords
So long-tail keywords? Should I focus on that? It depends. What you have to take into consideration is the customer funnel. Often you can identify where in the funnel the customer is. For instance, the search term “Restless Legs” is very high in the funnel, and chances are the searcher doesn’t know much about it. However, if he searches for “best treatments for restless legs,” he is most likely in the research phase. The pro’s about ranking high on short-tail keywords is that your brand enters the research stage top-of-mind, and you will be the benchmark brand. On the other hand, long-tail keywords often have high intent. That means that you know you’re replying to a customer that is considering your product or service.
So what is the right thing to do? Thinking there are too few using long-tail? Remember that long-tail keywords account for 70% of searches. If you can, do both short-tail and long-tail; if not, long-tail should be your focus. People are having longer research-phases nowadays and still considers brands they encounter further down the funnel. So if you can rank for high-intent long-tail keywords, you will still be able to have the upper hand on the benchmark competitor.
On-site SEO
Now to the more technical stuff. You now know what keywords you want to rank for, and need to start optimizing your website and it’s content to ensure that Google’s spiders enjoy your website. We will cover more of these factors in later blogs, but to get some basic things out of the way:
1. Don’t misuse keyword stuffing
If you’ve decided on your keywords, don’t push as many of them into your website as possible. Google will notice it, and you’ll most likely be penalized for it. Why? Google understands, to some extent, overuse of keywords, and your content will most likely lose quality because of it. Remember that the content you create has to solve a problem. All Keyword-stuffing is not bad, though. As long as you vary the keywords and create useful and relevant content, you’ll be okay.
2. Make it User friendly
Duh? Well, people have subjective definitions of what is a ‘user-friendly’ website, but Google might disagree. Your analytics-numbers will give you a good indication of whether or not your page is User friendly. To make it simple: Have a fast website, with a clear flow of action that leads to a conversion. The more people that convert, the higher the probability that your website is considered user-friendly. Give the consumer the information he/she would want when he/she searches your keywords.
2. Quality over quantity
According to Hubspot, in 2015, the optimal number of blog posts a month was 16. I made a blog post a while back on the dangers of old sources. Don’t fall into that trap! Don’t make 16 crappy posts a month because someone told you in 2015. It all depends on the size and capacity of your organization, but you will benefit much more from creating one excellent post per month. Google had a more challenging time recognizing high-quality material from low-quality material in 2015 compared to 2020. Things change. Make sure you solve your customer’s problem with your content.
3. Content length
Most likely, the size of the content has little to say in the ranking of the content on a content piece; it’s how comprehensive the content piece is that matters, and yes, there is a difference, according to Google. Just solve the problem that the customer searches for. However, long-form content generates more backlinks than short-form content. Why? Chances are there are more details in long-form content, and that it provides you with more information. However, don’t let this trick you into creating an academic paper. If you don’t have the resources to create long-form content, don’t try to. While most of us have felt the pressure of making content longer while in college to reach the expected word count, Google and readers appreciate no-bullshit writing that provides value.
4. Don’t copy your content
Don’t copy content! If you write about your B2B-offerings on one page, and then copy it and write B2C on another one, Google will pick up on it and consider it duplicated content. It is hard not to copy at all, but remember that Search Engines want original content. This is a widespread mistake among those who try to rank on different variations of similar keywords and end up with very thin content as well. Google want one comprehensive page on a topic instead of several small ones.
5. Meta descriptions
It’s not time-consuming, but it is forgotten. Remember to provide your Search engine with a Meta Description. Not sure what a Meta description is? In short, it’s just a brief summary of the content on your website, and it is the text you see in the description-part of searches. If you don’t provide the search engine with a Meta description, it will create its own, and the critical parts of your text and its keywords will be forgotten.
Meta description and Meta Title
6. Mobile Friendly
I’ve made this mistake myself. Only caring about the visuals of the desktop version, but that is a mistake. 64% of all organic traffic to branded sites comes from Mobile. And Google differentiates searches between Mobile and desktop, so a high-ranked desktop page does not mean a high-ranked mobile page. With today’s tools, this usually isn’t an issue, but check through the site on your phone before you publish it.
7. Internal links
Internal links are links that go from one page of a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are important when Google’s spiders are crawling your page, and is used to create a hierarchy on the website with your homepage at the center. Usually, this hierarchy is created through categories and subcategories in the main navigation. It is also important to show ‘cornerstone’ content that is particularly important for you. Highlighting cornerstone blog content is done through having internal links from other posts, linking to the post you wish to have as the cornerstone content.
Conclusion
With so many different ranking factors, it’s hard to figure out precisely what will rank, but you have to think about the fact that Google always ranks the pages they determine to have the best answer to the searcher’s problems. Create content with more value than your competitors, in a more userfriendly way, and you have done the best you can on your on-site SEO.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO is simple to understand, but a much more significant challenge to get right. Off-site SEO is where you really have to get your planning going to promote your site on social media and create backlinks.
Backlinks
Backlinks are simply put external pages that link to another page. You can imagine backlinks as your online reputation, where every time someone links to your page, your reputation grows. In the online world, it’s called Authority, and the more Authority you have, the easier it is to rank highly on Search Engine Ranking Pages. Those links are either earned or editorially placed.
The earned links are when other sites link to any piece of content you have created, without any influence. Earned links are, in most cases, a result of the high-quality material you have made. Remember that long-form content had more backlinks? The earned links are closely related to your content strategy (next weeks’ topic, by the way) as links usually are directed to content that is newsworthy.
Quality matters
Just like in the real world, your reputation will increase more if someone with a high reputation, or Authority as we call it online, talks about you, than someone with a low reputation. If Brad Pitt spoke about you, chances are you’ll get famous. If some small-town man from Norway talks about you, it won’t affect your reputation a lot. And just like that, having a link from WSJ.com will give you a lot of Authority, while a link from some local blog will have little effect. The quality of your backlinks matters! Not only does the quality matter, but also the relevancy. You don’t necessarily want businesses that provide a completely different service to link to your page as it gives the search engine confusing signals about what your company does.
Using SEMrush Domain Analytics tool
Can I buy links?
Yes, you can. There are directories created just for this reason. Search engines have started to pick up on it, and if they see repeating patterns of behavior that can resemble link-purchasing, it will have negative effects on your search ranking. However, making agreements with other websites to have a link exchange where ‘I link to you, and you link to me’, is a safer and cheaper transaction than buying links. Another great way of doing it is to offer partners you use reviews where they link to your site. That way you both win.
Trends
There are always going to be changes in the way search engines rank pages. Their algorithms continuously change, but some trends are more obvious to follow than others. You don’t really have to care about them if you are in a start-up phase, but they should be back-of-mind when you create content to optimize an already useful SEO page.
Featured snippets
We talked about featured snippets as factors that change the way the SERP appears. To make it simple: Google provides you with a snippet of a text that is supposed to give you the answer to a question or problem without you having to click on a link and leave the search. It is getting critical, but it’s a tricky way of getting there. It would help if you had a proper SEO-baseline first.
So how do you facilitate for featured snippets? I provide you with a couple of extra resources that will help you when the time is right. But don’t think Featured snippets can’t have a positive outcome for your organic reach. Most featured snippets rank organically in the top 5 already, and 99,58% rank in the top 10, so thinking you’re going to skyrocket from page three is optimistic. But if you are in a spot on the first page where you don’t experience a lot of organic clicks, Featured snippets can be a way of climbing to the top spot. Be aware that only 8,6% of clicks go to the featured snippet, while 19,6% still goes to the first slot in the organic search. So if you already rank first, it is not the desired slot for you. If you are below #3, it can provide a great opportunity.
Voice search
Looking 2-4 years ahead, this can be a real winner. But not today. Today, too few are conducting voice searches other than asking for the weather or simple facts. However, Google is starting to facilitate for it to become a big thing. Featured Snippets are in many ways facilitation to make it easier to provide you with relevant answers when you ask for something through voice search. Featured Snippets are the search that the voice assistant will provide the searcher with, so the snippet will give you a double benefit when voice search gets big. But for now, don’t think too much about it.
Extra resources:
Free tools:
There are also some free external tools that can help you:
Moz Domain Analysis (Domain Analysis)
Neil Patel Ubersuggest (Content creation)
Answer the public (Keyword research)
Screaming frog (Website optimization)
If there’s anything, in particular, you want me to write about, don’t hesitate to reach out!