Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that helps website owners make their sites more visible in organic search results. In addition, when used correctly, SEO can drive more targeted traffic to a site and increase the likelihood of customers or clients actually making purchases.
To understand what makes an SEO strategy effective, it’s helpful to first understand how search engines work. In short, search engines “crawl” the internet, gathering up all of the information and metadata from all of the billions of webpages and storing it in a database called an index. When a user searches, the search engine looks through its index and returns results that it thinks are most relevant to the query. There are hundreds of factors that go into what gets displayed on an SERP, but they generally break down into five key categories:
Content – The most important aspect of a webpage when it comes to SEO is its content. This is because search engines look at the words and phrases on a page to determine whether it would be relevant for a particular search query. This means that incorporating keywords into the content of a web page can significantly boost its search engine rankings, thereby increasing the number of visitors it receives from organic search.
Metadata – The other major component of a webpage that impacts search engine optimization is its metadata. This includes things like page titles, headings, alternative text (for images), and meta descriptions. Including keywords in these elements can help a page rank higher for certain search queries, and it’s also important to use them in a way that is natural and user-friendly. For example, you don’t want to have the same keyword repeated in your title and headings over and over again, but you do want to be sure that your keywords are included in some form on every page.
Structured data – Structured data is a set of tags that search engines use to better understand the content on a web page. This category of SEO is important because it allows websites to appear in more specialized SERPs such as local, carousel, and video results.
Social media – It’s increasingly important for businesses to be active on their social channels. This is because search engines now show results from Twitter, TikTok, Quora, and YouTube in addition to traditional web pages when users perform a search. Therefore, optimizing social media content can help a business to appear in these additional SERPs and grow its overall visibility.
Technical – The final area of search engine optimization that matters is the technical aspects of a web page. This includes things like URL structure, internal linking, mobile-friendliness and usability, avoiding intrusive interstitials, and more.
While search engine optimization can dramatically boost a website’s visibility, it’s ultimately useless if the traffic that it receives doesn’t convert into paying customers or clients. As a result, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a vital aspect of any SEO strategy.