Your website may look beautiful, but if nobody can find it, it doesn’t matter how much time and effort you put into making it perfect. That’s where SEO comes in. If you’re ready to start ranking on Google and bringing more traffic and potential leads to your site, read on to learn how correctly using SEO will benefit your site, in 4 simple, battle-proven methods.
But first, let’s take a moment to understand what modern SEO is and why it's effective.
Understanding Modern SEO
You need to know something – there is a big difference between what SEO is commonly known as and Modern SEO that influences SERPs and brings client business, or should I say conversions or leads.
Modern SEO is a very intricate and data-driven process that requires SEO to have more knowledge on how users interact and how to provide a good user experience.
SEOs who are highly skilled know a lot of CRO and UX strategies and techniques that usually end up being implemented as a default on your website. This is a huge bonus for your business as you are essentially ticking boxes you didn’t even know existed.
Using data, a modern SEO will know and understand the strong and weak points of the site. This data is usually obtained through an SEO audit. You might have done one yourself, or gotten someone to do it for you. Usually, an SEO audit will contain Ranking data, Content Data, Technical Data and Tracking Data.
With this knowledge, the modern SEO will be able to put together a strategy for content, a strategy for service pages and define objectives.
Moving on, well look at a few proven ways you need to know about, especially if you want to hire an SEO specialist or if you’re doing it yourself.
#1 On-Page Optimizations
After auditing your website it’s time to do some keyword research, a process that a modern SEO will approach from many perspectives.
Usually, a collection of keywords is extracted from your webmaster's account, Google Search Console. The second set of data is collected regarding top-level keywords such as services, products, and other keywords using software such as aHrefs or SEM Rush.
Having refined our keywords we can begin tracking these keywords. We’ll talk about tracking later on, but for now just know it’s a bot that tracks your keywords in Google search result pages (SERPS) which lets you see what keywords you ranking well for, such as need improvement, and which have more serious ranking issues.
Finding “low-hanging fruit opportunities” is like finding gold nuggets in a river. It gives you a shot at getting results from month one. Low-hanging fruit keywords are keywords which are already ranking but are not ranking well enough to capture significant traffic. These are generally keywords ranking in positions 5-10. Oftentimes these keywords can be pushed up to positions 1-3, which capture the majority of traffic, with some minor updates and optimizations.
Right about now it’s time to begin making on-page changes. That means you should look at optimizing your heading structure (use of H1, H2, H3 and so on), how you write your titles and section titles and content. You want to be informative, friendly and helpful. It’s good to set a tone of voice and keep it so you don’t stray from your brand.
Images should appear on almost every page of your website. Furthermore, they must have a meaning and offer trust, social or conversion messages.
#2 Link building
Link building is the name the industry has given to the process of obtaining direct, followable links to your website. Your website is a business in a large city. You have to make yourself known, and the way to do that is by getting links. Like a node.
When you have lots of domains (businesses) linking to your website, and you also have a moderate amount of links pointing outwards, you will be considered an important part of the network. A large node.
There is even a metric for this called Domain Rating, which was coined by aHrefs, a tool we previously mentioned.
So lots of direct links >>> your website = High DR.
The caveat here is to grow organically. If you try to push lots of links in a very short period, it will be considered spam behaviour and 99% of you’ll be penalized in one way or another. That is something you want to avoid at all costs.
I recommend writing good quality articles and approaching your local newspaper for publishing a magazine or eMagazine / blog and presenting them the opportunity of working together.
Remember, what’s built well is built to last.
#3 Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the butter used to make the modern SEO cake, it’s a live wire. I’m being serious. A live wire.
I’m saying a live wire because when you start doing technical SEO you have two options: be average at best or get maximum results.
Let me break it down.
Technical SEO is one term for many tests and optimizations. The first part is the most basic, we'll call it maintenance. That’s finding out 404 pages, broken links, internal redirects that have no use, having SSL enabled and making sure you’re using a single protocol, it’s a choice between www or non-www.
The second part is where things get interesting, We’re talking website architecture, URL structure, internal linking, correct and up-to-date sitemaps, keeping the Core Web Vitals in check and looking at crawl budget, crawling errors and how to better optimize navigation.
The third part I recommend will likely require that you hire a specialist. It consists of using specially constructed JSON LD code based on a library that's called Schema.
Schema is like an encyclopedia for search engines. It’s like giving search engines a blueprint that they can read, in the form of Schema, which allows them to quickly and easily understand the context and specialization of the website. That's how it works, in the simplest terms.
Schema is very powerful if used correctly and accurately to categorize and organize your pages, from service pages, organization pages, product pages or articles from your blog.
A custom-built schema is very beneficial because it targets specific keywords and that can boost your rankings.
#4 Tracking Leads
Finally, we get to the fun part. Tracking! Why is it fun, you might wonder. Because that’s how you see your “fruits” from the work you just did.
Tracking is usually done in three ways. You track traffic, conversions and rankings.
The amount of conversions you get depends on the amount of relevant traffic your site gets, and how efficiently your site converts visitors to leads. These factors all contribute to how many leads you generate every month.
Tracking conversions allows you to go from 5 leads a week, that you’re not even sure where they came from – to getting 40 leads a month that you can pinpoint that came from your contact page, book now page or calls.
The second most important element after teaching conversions are rankings.
Rankings are a direct KPI of SEO work. The closer to position 1 or even zero (featured snippet) the better. It reflects how good your site is performing on searches done by users in which you and a large number of sites are competing for visibility. If you’re on page 1 you’re doing very well, trust me.
Conclusions
SEO success doesn’t happen overnight nor should it. As with any good thing in life, a good result is obtained through laborious processes and focus.
If you got the 4 bases we discussed covered, you are on the path to obtaining great results with your business or blog. Of course, in true SEO spirit, nothing is ever fully optimized, but sometimes it doesn’t have to be.
Always think about what you’re doing, because, unfortunately, SEO is not a game and a wrong move can tank several years of work. Build links naturally, create relevant content, and provide better or clearer answers to queries and you'll generate significantly better results.
Additional Reading:
- 139 Experts Reveal Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO [Leaderboard]
- What Google's Latest Update Reveals About the Most Important Ranking Factors
Brought to You By:
Propel Digital Media Solutions
Greater Toronto Area Business
(647) 697-8104
