Are you looking forward to increasing organic traffic to your website? If that is the case with you then you must have stumbled upon SEO or broadly saying Search Engine Optimization.
If you want to get started with SEO and don’t know anything about it or have some basic knowledge but need an in-depth guide, then you have just hit on the right spot.
That’s because, here in this guide, I’m here to explain everything about SEO. I will help you understand the basics of SEO and take your business beyond the limits you have set for yourself.
SEO is a must for converting your website visitors into paying customers and for doing so, you would need the help of keywords.
For a successful digital marketing strategy, no business can solely rely on paid advertisements only and a larger portion of revenue is generated through organic traffic than is your non-paid traffic.
So, instead of wasting your precious time and hard-earned money on paid ads, let’s get started with ways of increasing your organic traffic and for that purpose, SEO is the key.
Before I move to “how SEO works” and “How you can develop an effective SEO strategy”, I will first help you understand what SEO is, and therefore, let’s quickly get over the definition and a brief overview of SEO.
I hope you find this blog post interesting, informational, and useful.
As an SEO expert with years of experience in the digital marketing industry, I can fully attest to the significance of SEO in boosting your site traffic and amplifying your revenue.
I am fully aware of the need to understand clearly the tactics and strategies of SEO for an effective and practical digital marketing strategy. To fully convey my message and share with you all my insights on SEO that I have learned after years of experience in the field, I have come up with this comprehensive blog post.
Here in this blog post, you will learn:
- What is SEO?
- Why is SEO Important?
- What are common Types of SEO?
- How SEO Works/ Mechanism of SEO?
- The impact of AI on SEO and its future.
What Is Seo?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of optimizing a website to improve its ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The ultimate goal of SEO like many other digital marketing tactics is to derive more traffic to the site and ultimately have increased revenue.
To improve the site ranking, you would have to improve its visibility on the internet or precisely SERPs, and to do so, you would have to employ various tactics and strategies of search engine optimization that include, keyword research, link building, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO etc. All of these tactics will help in making your website more visible to the search engine bots who will find your website accessible and will crawl freely on your website amplifying your site traffic.
To make it easier for you to understand, I can make it simple by summarising my way of optimizing a website that I have grasped after years of experience as an SEO expert.
- You can start by researching innovative and demanding keywords and implementing those well-researched keywords to create high-quality content that is relevant and informational for your target audience and visitors to your site.
- After content creation, you need to work on your website’s architecture to optimize it and build internal and external links.
- One essential element that many SEO professionals miss out on is providing a positive user experience to your site visitors and that’s what makes your visitors, paying customers.
Thus you should focus your SEO strategy on your target audience and satisfy all the demands of Google algorithms that will determine your website relevance and most importantly the content of your site.
To put it in a box, the Relevance and Quality of your website content are the two hallmarks affecting your site’s search engine ranking.
Types Of Seo:
There are three common types of SEO:
On-Page Seo: This refers to optimizing the content of a website to make it relevant and engaging for users and accessible for search engines, as well as optimizing the HTML source code of a webpage. This is done by incorporating relevant keywords in content, title tags, and Meta descriptions, and by using internal links.
Off-Page Seo: This involves building a website’s authority in the niche and improving its reputation. This is done by growing expertise in the field, developing trust among brand partners and customers and ultimately establishing authority.
All of these goals are achieved by off-site SEO tactics that include link-building and social media marketing.
Technical SEO: This refers to enhancing and improving the technical aspects of a website to make it more user-friendly and accessible for search engines. This is done by optimizing the loading speed of a website, its mobile-friendliness, and security.
Why Is Seo Important?
SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that has been in use for over a decade and has seen exponential growth over the years. SEO is increasingly becoming crucial for online and businesses alike as digital marketing has become an integral part of any business growth plan. The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought together yet another transformative phase and the world is going to face another technical revolution on a much higher scale than the previous decades.
Despite the changes and transformations of the industry, one thing is constant, is the need for effective marketing strategy through digital channels and that’s where SEO comes into the limelight. You have to undoubtedly keep on playing with keywords and content to make it more visible on online platforms and that will in return give you better traffic and better revenue.
This is what signifies the need for SEO for any business, better traffic and increased revenue.
As an SEO expert with extensive experience encompassing years in the field, I have seen numerous businesses grow from scratch to multi-million dollars only by making use of an effective SEO strategy and have also seen many firms struggle with their revenue and bounce rates despite implementing well-researched keywords and repleting their content with relevant keywords. This is all based on the efficiency and effectiveness of your optimization and the strategy you have devised for doing your site’s SEO.
To make it easier for you to understand the importance of SEO for any business, be it a small startup or a big enterprise, I have highlighted a few points that are listed below.
Improving Organic Traffic/ Ranking Higher On Serps:
The significance of SEO in two words can be explained by stating “Higher Ranking”. The ultimate goal of all strategies, be they effective or not, is to improve the website’s organic traffic ranking. The higher the organic ranking on search engines, the higher the website traffic and the greater the revenue it generates. The better ranking of a website translates into more leads and improves conversions which leads to increased sales thus adding an extra portion to your business revenue.
Search engine result page (SERP) ranking signifies the whole race of digital marketing and online visibility. Each moment passing is facing billions of searches happening on search engines and for a piece of information, product or service to be seen by more potential customers, it is important to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs).
This is because the intense competition in the market demands you to be ahead of the curve for surviving the intensity. It’s only survival of the best and for that purpose, pages with first-page ranking on SERPs will without any doubt outperform their competitors, not on the first page. Visitors will unknowingly assume the webpages on higher SERPs to be more credible, authoritative and accurate. Thus the improved ranking of a website thanks to SEO tactics will build brand trust and establish it as an authority in the industry.
A high-ranking website has a higher chance of being clicked on by potential visitors and it will lead to a better online presence, increased traffic, more leads and eventually more sales and revenue.
Improving Online Visibility:
In today’s digital age, online searches are the fastest and safest way to find all answers and solutions. No matter if you are looking for a new product (e.g. a smartphone/ watch), any nearby service (a car rental service/ booking tickets/ transactions) or finding some informational piece of writing on any desired topic, searching on the internet is the very first thing that pops in almost everyone’s mind.
To make your product, service or information seen and accessed by more people online, it is recommended to have more online presence. The higher the number of platforms your product or service is being displayed on, the more eyeballs will come across them and the chances of them being converted into your paying customers will be higher than ever.
So, to have better sales of your products and services, you must be visible on the web and for a website to be more visible than its competitors, it must be ranking high on SERPs.
SEO Mechanism:
The SEO mechanism or working of search engine optimization is based on devising strategies and making plans that help your website rank higher on SERPs. To start on our optimization journey the first milestone to be achieved is that of Keyword Research.
Keyword Research:
Keyword research is the foundation on which your whole building of SEO will stand and the more solid it is, the stronger and more reliable the end product you will obtain after SEO. You should begin by identifying the right keywords for your niche and always be relevant to your topic of interest. Keywords are the combination of words or phrases that are search prompts entered as queries on search engines by users.
As an SEO expert, I would recommend you go with innovative keywords that don’t have much content published on them as 20% of searches each year are novel and not related to any of the past queries.
Therefore, come up with fresh ideas that users are interested in, and for that, you can conduct market research and learn about your audience, their interests, and problems. They tend to incorporate those interests and problems into search queries with significant content to back their answers.
After identifying trending and popular keywords, it is time for you to implement and incorporate those keywords into content that will act as the answer to those search queries. You should try to come up with informational, shareable, and valuable content to back your keywords and have credibility among your visitors.
How SEO Works?
If you want to grasp the operation of SEO in a few lines by skimming across the content of any blog then you will find it to be all about On-page optimization, Off-page optimization, and Technical optimization. But if you want to establish an effective SEO strategy that can set you out on a journey of success and growth beyond imagination then you need to have a broader vision and see SEO as a combination of four elements.
- People
- Processes
- Technology, and
- Activities
Let me first brush past technical, on-page, and off-page optimization and then come towards these four elements to understand the workings of an SEO strategy.
On-page optimization is all about high-quality content creation that is relevant to the parent keyword under which you are publishing your content and its structure, and layout should be maintained to remain search-engine friendly or in other words, to be easily accessible by search engine bots.
Off-page optimization is about having authoritative websites linked with backlinks to your site to improve the credibility and reputation of your website. Backlinks are like citations you add to your content to give due credit and establish authority, build trust, and improve awareness of credible websites. To ensure that your website gets quality backlinks to connect to, you must add valuable and engaging content that other websites would want to link to.
Technical optimization is about maintaining the website’s loading speed and ensuring its security to give a user-friendly experience. It is also important for your website to be mobile-friendly as most of the online searches are carried out using smartphones instead of desktop systems.
Therefore, to have a higher ranking on SERPs, a website must be mobile-friendly, have credible, authoritative backlinks, and have relevant, informational content that users and search engines find accessible and worth giving a read.
Now coming towards the four elements, an effective SEO strategy works using all four elements and not skipping any of these.
The SEO tactics are as good as the person or team doing it. For this simple reason, different SEO experts have different views and different success stories. For a site to remain among the top sites, the professionals must ensure strategic and tactical operations of the site are completed.
After choosing the best SEO experts, it is time to devise the best action plans as the same person has different chance encounters with different sites and that’s because of the effectiveness of those differing strategies. You should work out a balance between several SEO strategies and ensure that all of them are implemented in the right proportions to achieve and maintain a high ranking.
Technology is the foremost and necessary element for any SEO-related tactics and most professionals spend their most time on this factor alone. The platforms and tools used for working out SEO strategies mark the technology involved and for a better and more efficient strategy go with the platform that has the maximum attention of your target audience.
The final and most important element is activities that mark the end product of your operations. The product your website is selling or the services it is offering determines the ultimate worth and credibility of your work. If it is a reliable and functional product or service, you don’t have to sugarcoat it as your consumers will do the promotion on your behalf and generate traffic for you.
Impact Of AI on SEO:
AI has already started to impact SEO in the last decade and it is only in the last few years that this impact is becoming more and more apparent. The recent release of GPT 3 and similar AI tools have made the debate heated and shifted the focus of the whole digital marketing industry on AI tools where everyone seems concerned with their jobs being overtaken by AI.
Well, there is no guarantee that AI will take over the digital market industry but it is sure to mark its way and make significant changes, precisely in the way things have been happening for ages.
- The prime example of this change is Voice search optimization which is changing the way, SEO strategies determine the ranking of a website. Voice assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are increasingly being used for voice searches and this has opened a whole new arena for voice search optimization.
SEO for voice searches is a new paradigm and a lot more complex and different than the traditional keyword and content relevancy gameplay. This demands experts to shift their focus on using long-tail keywords like conversational modules where they cater to the way people speak for searches.
- Machine Learning Algorithms (MLA) mark another significant impact of AI on SEO and these algorithms allow search engines to predict user preferences, determine their intent based on behavioural patterns, and deliver relevant search results with the highest accuracy and quality.
The AI will make search engines intelligent and smarter and thus SEO will become more complex and quality oriented.
The impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) has on search engines and SEO can be summarised in the following points.
Search Engines Are Smarter: Search Engines have become smarter and more sophisticated relying on the AI technologies at hand. They can understand natural language and therefore, the old paradigm of SEO skills where keyword stuffing worked for generating leads will no longer be practical as search engines are capable of understanding the content.
Therefore, websites must shift their focus to creating high-quality content rather than just implementing keywords and maintaining their density.
AI-Powered Search Results: Search Engines are now generating SERPs on the base of user preference and intent rather than mere relevancy of keywords. Smart search engines using AI are now best at predicting user behavior patterns and determining their intent by analyzing the engagement on search engines and behavior on websites.
It means that every user will have personalized SERPs based on their history of use, behavior, and preferences and thus the same strategy for SEO will no longer be effective for all.
Voice Search Optimization: The traditional SEO practices cannot alone suffice today’s search queries as a major portion of them is coming as voice commands. The voice assistant tools have made the increase in voice searches apparently to the naked eye and any website skipping on an optimizing search through voice queries cannot achieve a high ranking for long.
The increased voice assistant tools call for better SEO strategies incorporating voice commands for providing better and more relevant search results for voice searches.
Therefore, for any business to stay ahead of the curve, it has become integral to adapt and incorporate AI into its SEO strategy. Natural Language Processing (NLP), Predictive Analytics, and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms should be a necessary focus for any SEO strategy for advances and accurate results.
There should, however, be no doubt in anyone’s mind that AI cannot replace the human touch in SEO. It will have to rely on human expertise and creativity to come up with affectionate and relevant content that is and will remain the soul of any SEO strategy.
Future Of SEO And The Role Of AI In Shaping Its Future
It has been a long since AI revolutionized the way search engines determine the ranking of the website on SERPs. Most popular search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo are relying on artificial intelligence algorithms for determining the way websites are crawled and ranked on SERPs.
The manual interventions for ranking and crawling have long become out of the horizon and now search engines are using AI algorithms for predicting user intent, and preference and are crawling web pages at a faster pace than manual interventions by people on predetermined factors.
The involvement of AI in crawling and ranking has made the whole experience more user-friendly and the website needs to ensure that high-quality content is their first and foremost priority which is a great relief for users.
The future of SEO is shaped by several factors and the advancement in technology and the advent of artificial intelligence are by no means going to make it outdated. But rather these transformations will sharpen the saw and make the search engine optimization tactics and strategies more effective and instant.
SEO experts can have better analytic metrics for evaluating the efficiency of their SEO tactics and thus come up with data-driven decisions to take countermeasures for improving ranking on SERPs and have higher revenue due to a boost in sales.
AI-powered algorithms will make it easier for search engines to understand user intent and needs, therefore, those experts with SEO strategies aligned with user intent and their needs will find their website to be ranked higher than before.
The difference that AI and technological advancements will make in SEO is, in my view, the need for better quality, valuable, and relevant content. The credibility and quality of your content will determine how high it can be ranked and no one should ever forget the importance of relevancy for determining the visibility of their website on SERPs.
So, the SEO industry will see a major shift, in my opinion, from keyword to content optimization to ensure that their content matches the user intent rather than just relating to keywords.
Conclusion: Leverage The Power Of AI & Take Your Business To The Next Level Using Better SEO tactics
To sum it all up, I can assure you that SEO is a critical and crucial aspect of any modern-day digital marketing plan. It makes or breaks any business and is a must for brands and enterprises to improve their online visibility, build brand credibility, and generate higher revenues. For any business to be ahead of the competition and stay atop, SEO is the necessary evil that will help those businesses reach their goals rapidly and profoundly.
One thing that I would suggest to my readers is to know that SEO is not any make-rich-quick scheme but rather an ongoing process that demands continuous input and will generate enormous revenue over time allowing you to achieve your desires and fulfill your ambitions.
As AI continues to revolutionize the modern world and change the way search engines work, the need to incorporate AI into your SEO tactics is stronger than ever. You should try to stay updated with the latest developments in the AI world and the SEO industry. Come up with tactics and strategies based on AI and incorporate the latest tools and technologies to stay ahead of the curve. To achieve your market goal, you must align your content with user intent and make it high-quality to acquire the desired benefits.
In a nutshell, the need for SEO and its significance in modern times is not going to become obsolete with the advent of AI but rather it will continue to evolve. Thus it is crucial to stay informed and adapt your strategies to the changing landscape to survive and thrive in today’s competitive era.
If you have any queries regarding SEO or want to enhance your SEO skills. Feel free to contact me anytime soon. You can also visit Rankwdh for a reliable digital marketing partner where I am sharing my expertise and experience in helping my clients and partners achieve unhindered growth with efficient and effective marketing plans.
Rankwdh has many cost-effective packages to choose from and even if you are an established firm or a startup business, you can rely on our team of professional digital marketing experts to take your business to new heights.
Thank you for reading!