This in-depth practical guide to managing SEO will look at the basic steps to implement a solid and reliable SEO layer onto your web or e-commerce. We’ll be talking about basic stuff that will help you get started, make your website rank better, and stay on the top of search results. Also, it’s nice to know if you are already doing everything right or if there are still things you could change for better outcomes. It’s always good to get more approvals about SEO, even if you’re an experienced marketer. I’m sure everyone will find something interesting in this article.
To help you with that, we’ve put together a guide to managing SEO that even the newest of beginners could follow. During this guide, we’ll be covering eight steps to implement an SEO layer into your website or e-commerce.
If you have doubts about terminology, SEO, or web optimization, you can read the first article of our Web Optimization series titled: Why is web optimization so important.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Step 1: Define your target
To optimize your pages, you need to know who you are communicating with, analyzing your target audience’s search behavior. You need to understand their problems, what type of language they use when describing them, and how they look for solutions online.
If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience, it won’t be easy to create content that will resonate with them. So before you start creating content or optimizing pages, make sure you know the following:
- The demographics of your target audience (gender, age, location, etc.)
- The psychographics of your target audience (pain points, motivations, and goals)
- The main keywords that they use to look for information related to your niche*
*Tip: If you're not sure what keywords to target, check out Google Trends, which gives you an insight into search trends broken down by different countries and languages. It also lets you compare multiple search terms and see what people tend to search for at different times.
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Step 2: Define your goals
Although SEO tools, tricks, and strategies are many, goals are just so few. And I mean real goals, not conversions only. Among those goals are sales, lead generation, and brand awareness. In this guide to managing SEO, we’ll talk about the 5 most common objectives
Sales: The most critical metric is sales if you’re selling products or services. But it’s not just about getting people to your website; it’s about getting them through the checkout process as well.
Lead generation: If you’re selling a service rather than a product, lead generation might be the most vital metric for your business, instead of having customers buy directly off your website, as in the sales objective above. A lead is a person that has expressed the will to purchase the product you offer on a search engine through a transactional query but not necessarily from you. You need to find users in the moment of need to generate leads.
Conversion rates: How many people come in and leave without doing what you need from them? A conversion is when someone does something that you have defined as crucial for the success of your current marketing strategy. Every step of the way of your funnel can count as conversions. Improving your conversion rate is directly proportional to how many sales you have.
Conversions can be:
- Download an ebook
- Subscribe to the newsletter
- Submit your credit card information
Brand recognition: More visibility on search engines increases the chance of people remembering your brand. This will increase the likelihood of repeat customers and loyalty over time. Brand recognition makes your marketing campaign cheaper, increasing the conversion rates.
Increased traffic: As more people visit your site, your business will get more online exposure.
Make sure you select a pool of goals that are really representative of your business goals. SEO and business goals are directly connected.
*This goal selection will be paramount for the measuring step.
Step 3: Create a list of keywords
The keyword research process involves finding words that users use to search for information on Google (and other search engines). The more popular a keyword is, the more people search it, and these are the keywords you want to target with your content.
There are two types of keywords: short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords consist of one or two words with high search volume and high competition. These keywords have high demand, so positioning for these words is very difficult and resource-demanding. Examples of this kind of keyword are football, skincare, car rental, or any other term that refers to a generic service or product.
Long-tail keywords consist of three or more words, and they have lower search volume and lower competition. These keywords have much less use as search terms, which means positioning these terms is more viable short-term and without paid channels.
Both long and short-tail keywords are necessary for a successful SEO strategy; short-tail for the big chunks of searches and long-tail to capture those attractive niches for your business. If you sell footballs, you might want to position [football] + [location], resulting in “football on Dallas”, pinpointing those searches as very interesting for your business. So it’s best to start by targeting long-tail before moving on to short-tail keywords.
To start your keyword research, you can use the following tools:
Google Keyword Planner: a Google tool that allows you to obtain keyword ideas and get historical statistics such as search volume data for those keywords. One of the best out there.
SEMrush: A tool for competitive analysis of organic positions for any domain, keyword analysis, and backlink analysis. You can also assess relevant positions by country and see what your competitors are ranking for.
SEO Book Keyword List Generator: This tool allows you to generate lists of long-tail keywords from combinations of several words.
Ahrefs: A tool that allows you to analyze your websites and your competitors’ sites concerning keywords ranking and backlinks.
Some of these tools are free or have a free version, and others are paid, so using them should be aligned with your SEO budget.
Save the keywords list for later use once you have your keyword research done.
Step 4: Optimize your pages
One of the most important parts of this guide to managing SEO is to optimize your pages. That includes having a good user experience, user interface, and good technical elements (meta tags, structured data, etc.)
Let’s check a list of items you need to address to optimize your website pages.
Meta-title: is the title of your page and appears in search engine results. It should be under 60 characters long, including spaces. You can find it in the code of your website by selecting view-source in your browser and then looking for <title> tags. Good SEO practice puts your most crucial keyword on your page title.
Meta-description: is a two or three-sentence description on the search engine results page. It should be around 150 characters long, including spaces. You can find it in the code of your site by selecting view-source in your browser and then looking for <meta name= “description” content= “your meta description”> tags. Good SEO practice puts your most important keyword on your page description.
URL: also known as a permalink, is the Web address of this page. This should be as simple as possible, without any special characters or numbers, and include keywords from the title. For example, if you have a blog post about the best movies to watch on HBO Go during wintertime, your URL should look like www.yoursite.com/best-movies-hbogo-wintertime (Do not use underline for your URLs!)
Robots.txt: Tells web crawlers what to do with all the pages on your site. If you don’t have one, web crawlers will crawl your whole site by default, which may not be what you want if you’re selling products. Also, some pages should remain invisible to search engines, like thanks for your subscription page. You don’t want people to arrive there directly without subscribing to your newsletter or webinar. Those invisible pages should be represented on your robots.txt file.
Sitemap.xml: A sitemap is a single file that contains all your site URLs. A sitemap helps ensure that search engines can access all the pages from your site. Also, a sitemap makes it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your site. If you have an e-commerce website, you should definitely create a sitemap.xml file because it will help search engines find all your products. The sitemap also includes additional information about each URL:
- When it was last updated.
- How often changes.
- How important it is in relation to other URLs on the site.
This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Web admins can also use the sitemap to tell Google which pages they think are most important on their web.
Make sure to mention your robots.txt on your sitemap file so the search engines and other crawlers can easily find and access your website.
H structure: This is very important because it indicates the information hierarchy and the main page content. It’s divided into six levels, where H1 is the most important and H6 is the least. You should notice that each page can only have one H1 tag that defines its title, but you can use multiple tags for other levels. It is also essential to ensure you use the correct number of characters in your titles.
You can use an H1, H2, H3, etc. heading structure on each page, like a newspaper article:
- H1: Title of the page;
- H2: Subtitle of the page;
- H3: Subtitle of the section;
Links: Links play an essential role in SEO. They help Google understand how each page of your website relates to another and how they are all connected. This is often referred to as link equity or link juice, essentially “passed” from one page to another through links and determines each page’s importance in Google’s ranking algorithm. How much link equity each web page gets depends on its content and where.
The links should be easy to read so that users understand where they will be redirected when clicking on them. Also, avoid using ‘click here’ as link text, but instead use the keyword you want to rank for in search engines. Try not to use too many links per page because it can be confusing for users; otherwise, you could lose their attention and end up losing them.
You can address three types of links to have a good link structure:
Internal links: “Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman’s terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website”, as Moz says in their excellent article Internal Links.
As a rule of thumb, you should always try to make it easy for Google to find your important pages. One of the best ways to do that is by using a straightforward navigation structure. The easier it is for visitors to find what they’re looking for when they land on your website, the better. Internal links also help spread “link juice,” or authority, between pages — when one page backs up another with an internal link, it essentially says that the linked page is essential too.
Backlinks: Backlinks are a web page’s incoming links. When a webpage links to any other page, it’s called a backlink. Backlinks are essential for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites with good quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. This is one of the best ways to improve your website’s relevancy.
Broken links: Also known as dead links or broken HTTP status codes) indicates that the page or resource you’re visiting was removed, moved, deleted, or never existed. They worsen the website’s user experience and can negatively impact SEO.
Broken links generate error messages when clicked. They are bad for user experience and can hurt your site’s ranking in search engines. Links to broken content will lead to a bad user experience, so regularly check for any broken links and content. If you find any, update them or replace them with new content.
Image optimization: If your site is slow, this may be due to too big or too many images. They take much time to load and reduce the speed of browsing pages. It is therefore essential to optimize images as much as possible. For example, you can use Photoshop to resize images. Similarly, if you want to remove the background of an image, you can do it with the help of a tool like ImageMagick.
Search engines can’t read images — they can only read text. That means if you have an image with text in it, search engines won’t be able to “see” the text unless you associate it with the image using alt tags (short for alternative text). Alt tags are brief descriptions of what an image is about (for example, “a photo of a dog playing with a bone”). These aren’t always visible on web pages. Still, they’re always visible when someone hovers over an image and are used by people who use assistive software to access the internet because it reads aloud alt tags. Correctly describing your images and associating them with alt tags can help search engine results.
Custom 404: To avoid losing your visitors when they arrive on page 404, give them access to other links that could interest them on your site. This will also make it easier for search engines to index your website because these pages will be accessible. To find out if your site has 404 errors, you can use Google Search Console or Screaming Frog SEO Spider (a free tool).
Creating a custom 404 page is an essential aspect of usability and user experience. You will know what the user has been looking for, and you could offer them possible alternatives. This is a way to avoid them leaving your site without being able to locate what they seek. For this, you must provide an easy search field that allows them to find what they are looking for quickly and quickly. You can also offer links to different sections of your website or e-commerce so that users can easily navigate through it. Also include some basic information about your company, such as an address, phone number, and email address, so that users can contact you if necessary.
Favicon: This is the icon featured in the browser tab next to the website name. This is one of the first things visitors see when visiting your website. This little icon significantly influences the user experience, and it’s worth adding one to your site. To make it easy for users to recognize your brand, choose a favicon representing you (logo or pictogram).
Mobile friendly: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Almost all major search engines have already started giving more weightage to mobile-friendly websites than those which aren’t. They will not rank non-mobile websites as high as mobile-friendly ones, even if the latter have less quality content.
Google has announced that starting April 21st, 2015, websites that are not mobile-friendly will be penalized in Google search results. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile traffic, it will drop in Google search results when users search on their mobile phones. Therefore, ensure your website looks good on all devices by testing it before launching it live.
Analytics Tool: Analytics tools allow you to track your website visitor’s activities, such as who visited your web page when they visited and where they found your web.
Step 5: Create quality content
We can’t create a practical guide to managing SEO without talking about the king of all; content. Quality content is at the heart of SEO. And, if you’re an e-commerce merchant, that means product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts (if you have one). The key here is to create relevant and valuable content for your customers. That doesn’t mean it has to be in-depth or complicated; it just needs to offer value in some way — for example, by answering a question or addressing a need.
If you’re working on your site’s copywriting and find yourself stuck, try looking at what other businesses or sites do. If something worked well for them, the chances are good that it would work well for you as well. This doesn’t mean you should copy their content word for word — Google will penalize duplicate content.
Publish great content that people want to read, share and link to. Good content takes time and effort to create and needs consistent action to promote it online through social media, email marketing, and guest posting. Use keywords appropriately. Keywords are still relevant, but overuse them at the expense of readability, and you’ll be penalized by Google for “keyword stuffing.”
One of the best (and fastest) things you can do to generate quality content is to have a Blog and a newsletter. You can distribute an enormous amount of content and links through those channels. Still, you can segment precisely who is reading the content and when, which allows you to segment by content, price, geography, interest, and any other way you need.
There are several tools you can use to create good articles and newsletter copy:
Hemingway Editor: If you’ve ever read any Ernest Hemingway books, you know the author was known for his short, direct writing style. This free editor is a lot like Hemingway in that it strips away the frills and forces you to focus on the essentials. Hemingway Editor is a free online tool that helps you analyze your text to find complex sentences and provides other writing suggestions to improve your writing style and overall copy quality. It highlights passive voice, adverbs, too complicated or long sentences, and hard-to-read text in red. You can also see word counts at a glance and readability scores.
Web: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
SpellCheckPlus: Checks your spelling as you type and gives suggestions for misspelled words. It also makes grammar suggestions based on context. The free version of SpellCheckPlus offers limited functionality (like no plagiarism detection). But if you can live without those features, it’s a free online spelling and grammar checker. It has a simple interface that makes it easy to use. Copy and paste your document into the box, click on the ‘Check Text’ button, and it will automatically find errors and offer suggestions on how to fix them.
This tool gives you a lot more than just a spell checker. SpellCheckPlus can scan your text for word choice issues, punctuation problems, and improper grammar usage with just one click. It’s also great if English isn’t your first language because it helps improve word choice and phrasing. Even if English is your first language, it’s nice to have a fresh set of eyes to review your copy when you’re unsure how effective it is.
Web: https://spellcheckplus.com/
Grammarly: This is one of the best grammar checking tools to help you write clear and flawless copies across all platforms. It is available as an extension for major browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari, and mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.
Grammarly is a powerful tool that helps you check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. It also provides suggestions to improve your writing style. You can use the free version of Grammarly in your browser when writing emails or blogs posts. If you want more features like vocabulary enhancement suggestions, you can get the premium version for an annual fee of $29 per month (billed annually). The premium version also has a plagiarism detector that compares your text against billions of web pages and highlights duplicate content.
This one is a personal recommendation for you. We use it on Scalater and it works just wonderful.
Web: https://www.grammarly.com/
Ginger Software: Another excellent tool for spell checking and grammar mistakes. It offers a free online grammar checker tool and paid desktop software with additional features like a dictionary and translator. It’s available as a web app and mobile app, making it easy to use wherever you are.
Web: https://www.gingersoftware.com/
As a side note: Some of these apps are very novel, and as such, they are fallible. Always reflect on the suggestions and changes it provides you. It’s easy to alter your writing style regularly after using a spell checker app.
To distribute the content, you can use the following apps:
HubSpot: An all-in-one email marketing tool created for all types of businesses, from minor to enterprise level. It has CRM, sales, ad management, social media publishing, contact management, etc. It allows you to create various types of emails (such as newsletters, transactional emails, or abandoned cart reminders). Moreover, it offers an easy-to-use drag and drops editor for advanced personalization and segmentation. HubSpot also provides integrations with other platforms such as Shopify, Salesforce CRM, WordPress, and Facebook.
It has no free plan but offers a 14-day free trial. Users get access to a free SSL certificate and an advanced analytics dashboard.
HubSpot is one of the most popular email marketing tools.
Zoho Campaigns: This is an automation tool that allows you to create engaging emails without writing a single line of code. It also helps you design mobile-responsive campaigns and send them via your customers’ preferred channel (email or SMS). Besides that, Zoho Campaigns offers a variety of customizable templates. It’s available in free and paid versions.
Web: https://www.zoho.com/campaigns/?zredirect=f&zsrc=langdropdown&lb=es-xl
Omnisend: This is an e-commerce email automation tool designed specifically for online stores. It helps you build meaningful relationships with your customers by sending personalized emails based on your website’s purchase history and behavior. You can also use Omnisend to send transactional emails, such as abandoned cart or re-marketing.
Web: https://www.omnisend.com/
MailChimp: A popular email marketing software. It is excellent for beginners as it is easy to set up and provides an intuitive user interface. It also offers good reporting functionality that helps you understand your audience and optimize your campaigns.
Step 6: Measure Results
Measuring results in SEO can be tricky. While you may know that some of your efforts are paying off, it isn’t easy to know precisely how they’re working and whether they’re worth the investment. Measuring results often involves tracking metrics like the number of visitors to your site, how many of those visitors are new, how many pages they visit, and how long they spend on your site.
There are many ways you can measure your site’s performance and rank in search engines, including:
- Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic you’re getting from organic searches.
- Checking your site’s search engine ranking through tools like MozBar or SEMrush
- Conducting keyword research with tools like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Here are several indicators that you can use to determine whether or not your SEO is working, again, depending on your predefined goals.
Speed: If your web pages take too long to load, the optimization has not worked well. You can check your web pages’ speed here.
Rankings: Check your rankings for the keywords or phrases you optimized for in search engines like Google. You can use tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your rankings over time.
Search Engine Indexing: You’ll want to ensure that all the pages on your site appear in search engine indexing to appear in search results. You can view this information by going to Google Search Console, where you can see a list of indexed pages on your site and discover which ones aren’t indexed yet.
Traffic: If there is an increase in traffic from organic search results, your SEO campaign is working. You should see an increased ROI from organic search as well.
Conversions: The last indicator of successful SEO is increased conversions through contact forms, newsletter signups, or purchases through the website. This can be seen by comparing the number of conversions.
Click-through Rate: The click-through rate measures the ratio between the number of times an ad was clicked and the number of times it was shown. This metric is important because it gives you an idea of whether or not someone likes what they see enough to click through to learn more about what you have to offer. For example, suppose you see many impressions but very few clicks. In that case, the content might not be too attractive, or your CTAs aren’t working correctly.
Visitors to Your Site: The number of visitors to your site is one of the most important metrics to track. If there is a significant increase in traffic after implementing an SEO strategy, your strategy is likely working.
New Visitors: A change in traffic can also be attributed to new or returning visitors. New visitors have never visited your website before. In contrast, returning visitors are users who have visited before but not within 30 days.
You can track this metric by using Google Analytics or other analytics tools that offer this feature (e.g., Moz).
Step 7: Keep up with evolving search trends and algorithm updates
SEO is a constantly evolving field. Last year, what worked for you might not work for your website this year. You need to keep up with evolving search trends and algorithm updates.
Search engines like Google constantly change their algorithms, and businesses need to adapt to stay competitive. These changes can affect the rankings of your web pages, so it’s vital to know about them and plan for the future.
As Search Engine Journal states:
“In its early years, Google only made a handful of updates to its algorithms. Now, Google makes thousands of changes every year.
Most of these updates are so slight that they go completely unnoticed. However, on occasion, the search engine rolls out major algorithmic updates that significantly impact the SERPs”.
Google Major Updates
Only as a reference, I’ll leave here some of the most critical Google Updates since 2011
- Panda: In 2011, Google released its first Panda Update. It tried to diminish those websites purely created to rank in the search engines.
- Penguin: A year later, Google dropped the first Penguin Update. It mainly looked at the links websites got from other sites.
- Hummingbird: In August of 2013, Google released Hummingbird. This update laid down the groundwork for voice search.
- Mobilegeddon: In 2015, Google introduced the mobile update, dubbed Mobilegeddon, by the industry.
- Possum: In September of 2016, the Possum update applied Googles’s local ranking filter changes.
- Mobile-first index: In 2018, Google switched to its mobile-first index, which means that rankings are now based on the mobile instead of the desktop version of the site.
- Medic, or Query Intent Update: Google released a new update in the same year.
- BERT: In 2019, Google released a natural language programming model called BERT.
Of course, there is no need for you or someone in your team to know this, but someone in your organization must know the latest about SEO and Search Engine Updates.
An excellent way to make sure your site stays up to date with these changes is by doing periodical SEO checks on your page and reading blogs about Search Engines and SEO (like this one)
SEO checker tools
Some tools you can run on your web to acquire precise SEO readings are:
Yoast SEO Plugin: This plugin is designed to help you optimize your site’s content for Google searches. It analyzes how well your site is set up for both users and search engines. You get recommendations on how to improve your site’s readability, keyword density, and more. The service gives you a score based on how well your site meets its recommendations, so you know where your best opportunities lie.
Web: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool: This tool from Screaming Frog helps you analyze any page’s “technical” SEO issues. It lets you check for things like duplicate content, broken links, redirects, and more. You can use it to crawl a single page or an entire site. It will uncover missing metadata, incorrect image tags, and much more.
Web: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
SEO Site Checkup: This free analysis tool will tell you how well optimized a particular web page is for a specific keyword or phrase in seconds. Just enter the URL of the page and the target keyword or phrase, and the tool will show you how well optimized that page is for that.
Web: https://seositecheckup.com/
Siteliner: It is a technical SEO tool that allows you to check if there are any problems with the structure of your site, such as duplicate content, broken links, redirects, etc.
Web: https://www.siteliner.com/
Woorank: It is an excellent SEO tool that allows you to perform an in-depth analysis of the health of your website. You can check the status of your optimization for mobile devices, find keywords, and see how well they work for you.
Step 8: Refine and repeat
SEO is a continuous process that never ends. Once you’ve completed the first three steps, it’s time to “refine and repeat” the process we’ve learned in this article. You may need to revise your keywords, add new ones, improve your content strategy, create new pages on your site, check backlinks from other websites, or even reconsider your site structure.
Make sure you keep an eye on Google Analytics data to measure the success of your SEO efforts. You’ll be able to see which pages are getting more traffic and analyze where that traffic is coming from. Once you’ve completed all the steps, it’s time to “refine and repeat” the process we’ve learned in this article.
If you want to stay ahead of the game, try creating a monthly SEO checklist with tasks such as:
- Checking analytics data (including keyword rankings).
- Trying new keywords for existing pages.
- Creating new content for your website or blog.
- Building links using different methods than before
What to Avoid
The world of SEO is not all that it seems. In this guide to managing SEO, we would like you to understand that some SEO strategies are good, some are bad, and some are downright ugly. This section looks at the black hat SEO techniques you should avoid.
If you’re unfamiliar with black hat SEO, in this practical guide to manage SEO, we’ll tell you. It’s a set of techniques to boost your rankings by tricking search engines. They have one thing in common: they do not conform to Google’s guidelines for web admins. But even though Google says they’re against their guidelines, black hatters are still trying to find ways around them. Here are some of the most dangerous but effective black hat techniques for ranking your website higher on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Keyword stuffing: Overloading a page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in the SERPs. Often these keywords appear in a list or group or out of context (not as natural prose).
Cloaking: This black hat SEO technique involves showing different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. The goal of cloaking is to manipulate search engine rankings by presenting other content to search engines than what’s shown to users. This technique is also known as bait and switch.
Sneaky redirects: Redirecting is the act of sending a visitor to a different URL than the one initially requested. There are many legitimate reasons to redirect one URL to another, for example, when moving your site to a new address. However, some redirects deceive search engines or display content to human users different from that made available to crawlers.
Duplicate Content: Duplicating content from another website is another big no-no — essentially plagiarizing someone else’s work for your own gain. It can also happen accidentally by having duplicate versions of the same page (i.e., http://domain.com/page and http://www.domain.com/page ). Most search engines have measures in place to detect duplicate content and will penalize websites that use it.
Link Farms: Link farms are websites created specifically to link back to another site or sites — usually part of an attempt to artificially inflate a site’s ranking by boosting its link popularity scores
It is essential to avoid black hat SEO techniques at all costs because they can lower your ranking by Google.
Another critical subject to avoid is the agencies that ensure pole positions on the SERP. There is no way, and I mean, no way, to ensure you’ll be in the first, second, or third position on the result pages for any given keyword whatsoever. Google algorithms are so complex and sophisticated that not even Google’s employees understand the entirety of the algorithm. Much less some agency working with Google or Bing as an external tool. If someone promises you that, you should mistrust them immediately. Plus, as results in SEO are only apparent over time, it’s impossible to check that the strategies and tactics are performing optimally in the short term.
Best Practices to Manage SEO on your Website
Have allies
The primary way to improve your position in the rankings is to obtain natural backlinks from other websites. The more high-quality links you have, the better your positioning will be. So it’s important to have allies who are willing to link back to you and even recommend your products or services.
It would be best to consider having a link exchange policy with your partners, suppliers, customers, and even friends who have websites. Each time a visitor comes from one of these links, Google considers when positioning your website in its search engine results.
Invest in good content instead of quantity
The first rule of SEO is that you can’t win without quality content. If you’re creating much content, but it isn’t high quality, it won’t help your rankings. The days of publishing as much content as possible are over. Today’s audience wants quality over quantity because everyone is trying to get their attention. If you’re going to publish a blog post or video, make sure it’s good enough that people will want to share it with others. Search engines prefer a few good content pieces over dozens of less valuable articles. A well-written 500 words article will always work better than an article of 1000 words full of spelling mistakes and poorly developed ideas.
Have someone in charge of SEO
The search engine algorithms are constantly changing at an ever-increasing speed, so it’s essential to have someone in charge of SEO on your site who stays up to date. Many blogs and other resources can help you keep abreast of the latest news and practices.
It’s best not to have just one person manage all website aspects, including SEO. If there isn’t a dedicated SEO specialist on your team, hire someone with experience in both.
It should be someone who understands how SEO works — but isn’t afraid of creativity, either! You need someone who can bridge the technical side of SEO and the creative side of marketing and branding.
Search engine optimization is a job that needs to be done every day. That’s why it’s essential to have someone in charge of that task — even if they only spend a few hours per week on it. It’s also a good idea to give them some latitude to hire freelancers or outsource small tasks as needed.
Do not try to deceive Google.
We must remember that it has nothing to do with cheating Google or any other search engine when talking about SEO. The search engine works by analyzing millions of pages on the internet and classifying them according to relevance and quality. It then uses this information to show users what they’re looking for, sorted from most to least relevant. If a website wants to be found by Google, it should offer information valuable for users and follow specific guidelines that ensure the quality of content.
Creating multiple pages with similar content will only harm your site’s ranking. Don’t try to hide keywords or backlinks through tricks like white text on a white background or tiny font sizes. These techniques will get you penalized if not banned from Google. Search Engines aren’t stupid; they are very good at catching people out who are trying to trick it into thinking their site is more important than it actually is or has more content than it actually does.
SEO is about adding value for users. It’s not about “gaming” with the search engine by buying links or trying to manipulate algorithms in some other way. If you focus on creating helpful content, the search engine will reward you with high rankings. It’s as simple as that!
Use the right SEO Tools.
SEO can be extremely daunting, especially if you run a large website. This is because SEO is a complex process involving many technical aspects involving many different elements, from website speed to keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and more.
Due to how search engines work and the effect that mistakes can have on your site’s rankings, it’s essential to use the right tools to succeed in your SEO campaign. If you don’t have the right tools or proper knowledge of SEO, you might make your site worse than it was before your started. The best way to deal with these complexities is to use tools that can help you perform detailed analysis and provide valuable insights.
Fortunately, several tools are available today to help you with every aspect of your SEO campaign. These tools will help you up to your game and rank higher in search engines, from in-depth keyword research and content optimization to backlink management and website audit solutions.
The best part is that these tools are designed specifically for SEO, which means they’re built according to the current algorithm changes of search engines like Google. When you use an optimized tool for search engines ranking factors like relevance and authority, you can be sure that you’re getting the most accurate data possible.
It is vital to know how to choose them well to match your needs and expectations. Always select based on your needs instead of popularity or price.
If you're interested in Web Optimization, maybe you'll be interested in reading about the 10 Best Apps for Small Business for 2022. We know you'll like it!
Listen to your customers.
The keywords people use when searching for something online have changed over the years. Plus, search engines now consider how people interact with the page before and after clicking on it in their search results, which means that listening to your customers is more important than ever.
You can become an expert in SEO by investing time in learning about this topic, but the best results will always come from listening to what
Listen to your customers. Pay attention to popular search queries and use them as inspiration for new blog posts or pages. You can find these in Google Search Console under Search Analytics (for the web version) or in the Queries section (for the mobile version).
Listen to your customers. For example, if you’re a shoe retailer, and people are searching for “blue heels” and landing on your site, but they aren’t immediately finding the products they want, you have a problem — and not just an SEO problem. That problem might be that your site isn’t directly showing the right products or a terrible user experience, and people are leaving quickly. Fixing these problems will help you rank higher in search results and help you sell more products.
A Practical Guide to Managing SEO Conclusion
Managing your website SEO has become an important marketing tool in a business’s arsenal and that is why we wrote this Practical Guide to Managing SEO. SEO can serve as an extension of your business’s traditional or digital marketing tactics. With SEO, you can gain customers looking for services or products like yours. It is becoming critical for business owners to understand search engine optimization to gain an advantage over competitors that do not understand it yet.
By following the steps in this article, you’ll have taken the first step toward, hopefully, improving your website’s SEO. But it doesn’t end here. Optimizing a website or e-commerce store is an ongoing process that never stops. After reading this article and taking those steps, you need to keep track of where you are to adjust as needed. For example, if your website is still not showing up for specific keywords you want to rank for, you need to find out where the problem is and work on fixing it. That’s how you succeed with SEO—you keep working at it until it works for you.
So, now you know how and what to do with your website’s SEO. Keep in mind that these are just some of the most common tips, while others are out there. That being said, if you’re unfamiliar with SEO on your website, it might be best to consult the help of an expert. After all, no one can afford to ignore SEO any longer.
Thanks for reading our Practical Guide to Managing SEO. Doing so means that you are looking for knowledge about managing SEO for your website or e-commerce. We hope that our article has been helpful to you, and we thank you for your interest in our Magazine!
Don’t miss the next piece on our Web Optimization series all March. It will be as good and exciting as this one!
Here’s a link to the previous article of the series: Why is Web Optimization so Important.
