So you’ve built your brand, you’ve designed your website, and you’ve launched your product or service. Next question: how do you get your ideal customers to notice you?
Some of the first ideas that come to mind will probably be paid advertising and social media, which are both great ways to generate traffic. But there’s another key strategy for brands to bring users onto their site – SEO.
It may feel like a lot of additional work behind the scenes, but SEO is absolutely worth the effort. It helps build brand awareness, improves your company’s online reputation and credibility, supports your paid marketing efforts, and more.
But what is SEO, exactly? The term comes up a lot in connection with online marketing, but it can be tricky to grasp just how much the term covers. This blog covers the building blocks of SEO and how it applies to your marketing strategy, so you can tailor your efforts for organic success.
What is SEO?
The process of getting traffic from free, organic, or editorial search results in search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s the opposite of paid advertising, where brands pay for search engines such as Google to advertise their websites on search results.
SEO involves optimizing a website or webpage to improve its ranking and visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher a website ranks in the SERPs, the more likely it is to receive organic traffic from users searching for relevant keywords and phrases.
SEO relies on unpaid visibility – meaning clicks that come from people searching a topic on a search engine, and getting your website as a search result. These visitors coming onto your website from searches are your “organic traffic.”
Why SEO Matters for Your Website
Google processes approximately 63,000 searches per second – which equates to about 5.6 billion searches per day. Each of those searches leads a user to a website that answers their question. Each click-through from an organic search to a website counts towards that site’s organic search traffic.
Organic traffic is a cornerstone of website performance. It comes at little to no direct cost for the brand since it doesn’t involve paying for visitors. Moreover, organic traffic is growing and has reached 53% of a website’s traffic in 2023 – with sites in the first position of search results garnering about 20.5% of clicks on average.
Search traffic is also a consistent yet passive way of gaining views on your website. So long as you maintain your pages and produce optimized content, you can gain a steady number of clicks per month.
The more traffic you get to your website, the more leads you’ll generate. More people will become aware of your product or service, which could lead to more purchases or subscriptions. This boosts your revenue and allows you to reinvest in more SEO or other forms of marketing.
Search Engines and How They Operate
If you’ve ever typed a question or phrase into Google, Yahoo, or Bing – you’re using a search engine. And search engines function by “crawling” through billions of website pages related to your search query, using tools called web crawlers, search engine bots, or spiders. These crawlers navigate the world wide web to index results connected to any topic.
During the crawling process, search engine bots follow links from one page to another, indexing the content of each page they visit and adding it to their database. This allows search engines to build an index of all the content on the web, which they can then use to respond to user queries and display relevant results in the SERPs.
The aim of every search engine is to provide the most relevant and informative results for every user. They do this by processing billions of URLs from billions of websites to find the most optimal pages, as ranked by the search engine algorithm. This way, even if these billions of websites feature overlapping or similar information, the first page will show the most authoritative and reliable results.
Google’s algorithm ranks websites according to a wide range of factors, including:
- Content quality: Google values high-quality, informative, and original content that provides value to users.
- Relevance: Google aims to provide users with the most relevant results for their search queries. Websites that are highly relevant to a particular search query are more likely to rank higher in the search results.
- User experience: Google considers factors such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, and ease of use when ranking websites.
- Backlinks: Google considers the number and quality of links pointing to a website as a measure of its authority and relevance.
- On-page optimization: Google considers factors such as the website’s title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags when ranking websites.
- Social signals: Google also considers social signals such as likes, shares, and comments as a measure of a website’s authority and relevance.
There are many other factors that Google considers when ranking websites, and the exact algorithm used by Google is constantly evolving.
Before Optimization: Setting Up Your Website
You can only create SEO content after you’ve set up your website. Setting your website up properly goes a long way towards supporting your SEO efforts and ensures you have a good foundation.
Proper site architecture impacts Google’s ability to find and index your site’s key pages, so it actually factors in your Google page rankings. If your website structure is disorganized and lacks context, then search engines cannot crawl and index your content – so they won’t know how to rank you.
Domains and platforms
If you’re still shopping for a domain name, be mindful of your selection. Keyword stuffing might seem like a smart way to rank on search engines, but it could do more harm than good in the long run, especially for brand recognition. For example, if you’re a marketing agency, don’t use “bestmarketingagency.com” as a domain – just your brand name will work fine.
Afterwards, you’ll need to decide on your platform. This can go one of two ways – either you build your site on a ready-made hosting platform (such as Wix or Weebly) or can build a custom platform with a CRM (such as WordPress or Drupal).
There are pros and cons to each, and you’ll need to weigh the features to see which best fits your brand’s needs. Custom platforms allow you more flexibility and let you add SEO plugins, but many platforms will have built-in SEO tools that will suffice.
User experience (UX) and interface (UI)
Search engines like Google want websites to provide a positive user experience. Google has several recommendations for good website UX and UI that will help your site rank better on its platform.
- Security – ensure you properly encrypt your website so that external parties cannot access your users’ data. This means using HTTPS and SSL/TLS, alongside any other necessary tools to protect your users.
- Mobile adaptability – More and more people use search engines and browse websites on mobile devices. Your pages should adapt smoothly to different screen sizes, and should be just as easy to navigate as well.
- Readability – This applies both to font type and size. Your content should be readable on all devices (and ideally resizable so people can adjust based on their preferences). Using a neurodiverse-friendly font helps with accessibility.
- No intrusive pop-ups and ads – Elements that affect a user’s experience and ability to navigate a page can harm the site’s rankings. Ads are oftentimes necessary for additional revenue, but its best to make them as unobtrusive as possible.
- Unique but accessible design – Websites that reflect the brand and its image mean they’re more memorable for users. They communicate what the brand stands for and what they want to represent. Companies can use innovative website elements to make themselves stand out – so long as it these don’t compromise accessibility for users with disabilities.
In addition to this, your website’s navigational structure should be intuitive and sensible. Users should be able to easily find content on your website, or navigate towards the specific page they need. Having a logical site structure also helps search engines index your pages and rank them.
Sitemap
Sitemaps are files that provide information on website pages, videos, files, and other elements. They are essentially an XML file that lists all the pages and elements on your website that you want search engines to index. A sitemap helps search engines crawl, index, and rank the pages of your site.
If you have a large website (with, say, hundreds of pages to index) or your site contains plenty of rich media content (images and videos), you’ll benefit from having a sitemap. But even smaller sites can take advantage of a sitemap to improve their chances of ranking on search engines.
Once you’ve completed your sitemap, you can submit it via the Google Search Console, Yahoo Site Explorer, and other tools so that these search engines can process your file and begin indexing your pages.
How SEO Works
Once you’ve got your website set up and your sitemap open for indexation, it’s time to get down and dirty with actual SEO. Gaining organic traffic and website authority involves five main factors that you’ll need to balance to achieve optimal results.
Keyword research
Your target keywords are the foundation of your website optimization. Without keywords, search engines won’t recognize your page as relevant while they’re crawling the web. And if search engines don’t find relevant content on your pages, they won’t feature your website – so you don’t gain any organic traffic as a result.
It’s essential to pick the most optimal and relevant keywords to include on your page. This way, search engines can match your website to a user’s search intent and suggest your page as a search result. Lacking relevant keywords is one reason why over 90% of websites receive 0 visits from Google.
To know which keywords to use, companies will need to do keyword research. This begins by imagining what words and phrases actual people will use to find your web pages. For example, if your business sells rare plants, some keywords you’ll need to hit include:
- Names of rare plants
- The phrase “rare plants”
- “Where to buy rare plants”
- “Rare plants in [location]”
Key factors for choosing keywords are search volume, relevance, and competition.
There are several websites that allow you to streamline your keyword research. There are Ahrefs, MOZ, SimilarWeb, Surfer, Google Keyword Planner, and Semrush – all of which have their pros and cons. These tools will suggest the best keywords and related terms you should use to optimize your website and match user search intent.
Content creation
One way to use keywords from your research is by creating SEO content. This can range from blog posts to product pages and everything in between. Optimizing your content allows your pages to rank on search engines, and the higher you rank, the more organic traffic you gain.
SEO content creation begins by choosing a “proven topic.” These are keywords with traffic and ranking potential, based on the results of your keyword research. You can use different tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to determine factors such as:
- Keyword difficulty (how difficult it is to rank for the keyword)
- Search volume (how many people search for that keyword per day/month)
- Traffic potential (how many clicks you could potentially gain locally and worldwide)
From there, you’ll need to determine the correct content type (blog, product, landing page, etc.), format (tutorial, white paper, guide, etc.), and angle (informative selling point or approach).
SEO content should be unique, trustworthy, and original in order to rank and gain traffic. This means that companies shouldn’t just recycle existing information, but build and expand on key ideas and provide a comprehensive overview of the topic at hand.
On-page optimization
On-page SEO refers to actions taken on the page itself to help search engines and users understand your content. Formatting, website details, URLs, and even images all count towards on-page SEO.
Some ways to optimize your web page for better rankings include:
- Using appropriate heading tags and subheaders
- Making your title tag concise and compelling
- Writing an attention-grabbing meta description
- Creating an SEO-friendly URL
- Adding alt text to your images
- Linking out to reputable external sources
- Including a section for featured snippets
This isn’t about mindlessly repeating keywords, which can actually harm your rankings in the long term. It’s about structuring your content and formatting to make it readable and easy for search engines to crawl and digest.
Link building
When other websites and pages link back to your SEO content, it prompts search engines to consider your website as “authoritative.” The search engines recognize that your pages are being cited as reliable sources of information, so they “reward” your website with higher search rankings.
You can passively wait for websites to link to your content, but you can boost your SEO by taking a more proactive approach – link building. There are several ways to build a repertoire of backlinks to your website, many of which involve reaching out to owners of other websites.
You can opt for techniques such as:
- Guest blogging
- Skyscraper emails
- Testimonials and case studies
- Link exchanges
- HARO and journalist responses
- Features and profiles
It’s important to note that these strategies aren’t guaranteed – it’s entirely up to the other party whether to accept your offer or link to your website. But if you show that your website and content can be an asset, and therefore is worth linking out to, you may just get a win.
Technical aspects
Lastly, companies need to optimize the technical aspects of their websites so that search engines can find, crawl, and index the pages. There are several best practices involved with optimizing technical aspects, including:
- Checking indexing on your pages
- Updating and reclaiming lost links
- Cross-linking with other pages on your site (aka internal linking)
- Adding schema markups
- Ensuring web safety through HTTPS protocol
It’s also essential to ensure your website is mobile-friendly and adapts well to mobile browsers.
Tracking SEO Metrics
With your SEO elements up and running, you’ll need to track and measure your SEO performance through several key metrics. Tools and solutions such as Google Analytics, MOZ, SEMrush, SimilarWeb, HotJar and more help you monitor these metrics so you can understand what’s working well and what isn’t.
Organic traffic
Many platforms let you track the amount of organic search traffic your site gains on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. Rising organic traffic is a solid sign that your SEO efforts are bearing fruit. There may be some dips as Google and other search engines roll out updates, which may prompt their algorithms to re-crawl and re-rank websites.
Keyword rankings
Google Search Console and other SEO tracking platforms show you how high or low your pages rank for the different keywords you use. The higher you rank on search engines, the more people see your website. Getting within the top 4–10 spots on Google is a win, but the best positions are within the top 1–3 since these pages gain the most clicks.
Share of voice
Share of voice is a metric that lets you track awareness of your brand on different channels versus your competitors. It was originally, primarily for paid advertisements, but brands can now track share of voice for organic traffic as well. It’s a good indicator of how well your brand is performing in organic searches versus brands offering the same products or services.
This is different from share of market, which is the percentage of a market controlled by a business in terms of revenue or customer numbers. It also includes referral traffic, direct traffic, and local SEO.
Other SEO Considerations
Besides online SEO strategies, you’ll also need to consider international and local SEO. In some specific cases and business types, it’s important to consider these factors in order to boost your website’s performance.
International SEO takes into account your rankings in other countries and languages. For websites that offer products or services that cross global borders, this can help expand your reach to customers who are not in proximity to your brand’s location.
Local SEO is essential for small businesses and franchises. This involves working with Google Maps and Google My Business to rank for searches such as “coffee shops near me” or “bookstores in Vancouver.” Boosting your local SEO rankings increases your visibility among users who are in proximity to your brand’s location, which could translate to more revenue and traffic physically and online.
Leveraging SEO for Your Brand
Creating a good SEO strategy for your website and brand isn’t just about doing everything. That’s an impossible goal and one that could do more harm than good. Instead, you as a brand should create your strategy based on your marketing or business goals – what is most optimal for your brand, what you have the budget and resources for, and what will give you the best return on investment.
Once you do have a good SEO strategy in place, it’s all about execution. Focus your efforts and allocate your resources to maximize your SEO productivity, whether that’s regularly publishing optimized blog content or fine-tuning your product pages. Then sit back and wait for your efforts to come to fruition – and if at first, you don’t succeed, keep trying!
If you need to come up with an SEO strategy for your brand, Kika is your solution! We offer SEO services, as well as content marketing and content writing services for your business. Leverage SEO for your brand to boost organic search traffic and keyword rankings, and gain more website engagement in the long term.
Contact us to book for free marketing consultation today – no commitments, just good advice.
