Wondering why your website isn’t drawing in Google traffic? SEO plays a big role in building your site’s popularity – learn what is SEO and how it works to boost traffic with our up-to-date guide for 2022.
Most businesses in 2022 have a growing digital presence, but for many CEOs and business owners, digital design and marketing is out of their wheelhouse. The jargon and strategies can be a little confusing, but learning a few basic SEO steps can help you build your business and reach the elusive #1 Google ranking faster than ever.
Putting a bit of effort into your website can help you see minimal results.
But much like every other aspect of marketing, learning SEO best practices to optimize your site improves them, and using an expert SEO agency maximizes your Google rank efforts.
If you want to grow your digital or brick-and-mortar business and maintain a competitive edge, you’ll need to put out smarter efforts than your fierce digital competition.
Learn more about SEO to help determine your next best steps and build an SEO strategy that works in 2022.
What is SEO in simple words?
“SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization, an approach to building a website and performing other marketing functions with one aim in mind – making your website as search-engine-friendly as possible.
How does SEO work?
When you use tactics to make your site more available to search engine bots that crawl every page on the internet, they index and categorize your page so it can better match your content with users that are looking for it.
Their complex algorithms analyze these index pages using 200+ different signal and factor measurements to determine the order that pages should appear in each query’s search results. Google and other engines update their algorithms every year, meaning the tactics that see the most success this year are very different than they were 10 or even 5 years ago.
For the most part, search engines are getting smarter with every algorithm update.
Google wants to provide the very best search experience possible for its users, which means you can use SEO to make your site’s intentions clearer. The more relevant and high-quality (in Google’s eyes), the higher you climb.
What is search engine marketing?
People search for trillions of different topics every year, intending to learn about an endless number of topics and new products to buy. If you learn how SEO works and play your cards right with the right SEO techniques, you can snag a bigger piece of the market.
Search engine marketing doesn’t aim to reach as many Google users as possible – it seeks to reach as many of the “right” users looking for content like yours.
Though you can pay for optimal ad placements in certain marketing funnels, you cannot pay for a higher Google SEO ranking – you have to earn it. If you outsource to the experts, they’ll do an SEO check and help implement the best strategies to help you move up the ranks, but you cannot directly buy positions as a marketing strategy.
The 5 Biggest Factors in SEO: On-Page & Off-Page SEO
#1: Keywords
One of the first mentions in SEO content is the ever-classic keyword strategy. By implementing the right “keywords,” you’ll help Google and searchers understand what your page is all about.
Consider a shoe retailer looking to improve its Google rank. They want users looking for shoes to find their website content, so they’re likely to repeatedly use the word “shoes” throughout their page.
But what if they want to rank for something more specific, like Steve Madden boots? If they add the term “Steve Madden boots” into their page, Google recognizes what they’re trying to sell, making them more likely to display the company’s website when a user searches for Steve Madden boots.
Keywords can be a potent SEO optimization tool that can quickly turn into a bad thing.
The days of stuffing as many potential keywords into your pages as possible and other bad SEO techniques are long over because it goes against Google’s ultimate goal – giving users high-quality content. Instead, you must naturally use keywords that don’t detract from your site’s overall quality but add to it.
You can use Google’s Keyword Planner and other keyword research tools to determine which keywords offer you the best opportunity to improve your ranks and plan your content accordingly.
You’ll see data on how many people search for a specific query and gauge how hard it will be to compete.
#2: Technical SEO
Google’s most extensive update last year was all about “Page Performance.” That means building a website that loads quickly, is compliant with core web vitals, and is mobile-friendly helps maintain and boost your ranking.
If users hop onto your website and leave before they get to the goods because they’re frustrated with the lack of functionality, you’ll ruin your chances at SEO and likely annoy potential customers along the way.
Using professional Ontario SEO designers to build your website and its content with lean code, fast-loading images, and SEO meta tags, you’ll significantly improve your ranking factors.
#3: Internal Linking
Google indexes every single page on your website, and you’ll notice over time that users are drawn to some more than others based on a number of factors. By creating links from your highest authority pages to new pages, you can help give an SEO boost to brand-new or underperforming content.
#4: High-Quality & Fresh Content
With every algorithm update, SEO writing has slowly become the best way to match your website to Google users’ intent.
As we already mentioned, using relevant keywords within your content will see significant results. But you also need to build a content strategy that speaks to your target market, creating exciting and engaging content that drives them to share on their own sites and social media platforms.
You’ll see some search queries favoring video content above text and vice versa. Match your content to the best-performing types on SEO Google Analytics so you can improve your odds at building and maintaining your rank.
No matter how great your content, you’ll need to practice SEO copywriting to update and release fresh content often. Otherwise, Google deems your page old and outdated, lowering your relevance SEO score.
#5: Backlink Building
Backlinks refers to any links from other websites back to your own, and they’re one of the more advanced SEO tools that see some big results.
Imagine a journalist on Time.com adding a link to your website in your article – not only will some of their readers find your website, but Googlebots take note of the link and see it as a vote of confidence toward your site.
The more high-quality websites that link back to you, the higher your domain authority and Google ranking jumps.
Creating backlinks for SEO can’t be bought or done in spammy ways because quality matters far more than quantity. Illegitimate backlink building is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make because Google will harshly penalize your website, and your rank will drop dramatically.
Can I do SEO for myself?
The importance of SEO can’t be underestimated, as it will make all the difference in how well your site performs to increase your audience and stimulate sales.
We’re not going to say that you can’t do it yourself, but it will be next to impossible to compete with a local SEO company unless you’re an expert. Learning SEO takes a lot of time that you likely don’t have – outsourcing makes sense for digital marketing to see the highest ROI possible.
Ready to enhance your Google rank? Get in touch with our marketing team for a free SEO audit and get a full walkthrough of the results you can expect from our SEO services in Toronto and Hamilton.
