What is SEO Marketing? How to Grow your Business with an effective SEO strategy in 2024.

The basics of Technical SEO are probably the most important to include when building a business online. Technical SEO is what we consider the absolute must for any website. There are over a dozen different methods of Technical SEO that we will cover in another post, but here is what we consider the essentials. Firstly, always make sure your site is using an SSL certificate. Your certificate ensures that your site runs securely through HTTPS:// and not HTTP://. Google considers this to be a critical factor in their algorithm. Your SSL Certification needs to be a priority to ensure you are taken seriously in ranking. Once that’s done, you should focus your attention on your Local SEO. You improve your local SEO using Google Business Profile Manager and Bing Webmaster tools to connect your business to the local community. We recommend starting with Google and completing your profile there, then syncing Bing to it on a weekly interval. You want to make sure you sync your content often, as new or updated information appears on Google; just keep it to what’s reasonable. Local SEO is a far easier option to boost visibility than competing among national businesses at the startup level. Now that you have squared away your profiles and set up Google Search Console (GSC), you should check for Crawl Errors. It’s critical to make sure these platforms are not returning errors on your website, as this will negatively impact your ranking. Lastly, the most straightforward Technical SEO tactic is to upload your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console (GSC) and request a crawl for faster indexing. With these simple methods, you can keep your site at a minimum SEO compliance. Don’t forget to run monthly audits on your site to ensure it’s running smoothly.

Using powerful SEO tools such as ahrefs and semrush gives a deeper understanding of your online presence and SEO compliance. These tools evaluate your website and look through hundreds of factors from the basics of on-Page SEO, including meta tags like meta descriptions and title tags that are snippets of information used by the search engine results page (SERP). Meta tags are short content descriptors that help convey a page’s content to search engines. But it’s not all about the metadata; search engines also want to know your information is clear to your users from page titles, headings, and subheadings that display directly to the user. Lastly, an essential factor in on-page SEO is keyword phrases based on keyword research tools such as Google’s keyword planner. In the old days, you used to be able to load up your page with dozens of keywords and keyword phrases and get found. Modern SEO requires you to convey your direction. How do you want to be discovered? Essential keyword phrases are the roadmap to your discovery. Implementing key phrases and words throughout your page and within your title, h1, h2, and paragraphs guides your audience to your website. Safari Digital reported in 2022 that simply updating an existing title tag with one that’s SEO-optimized can increase page clicks by more than 437%.  The goal is to clearly define content as well as implement relevant keyword phrases related to your focus keyword outline.

Since 2020 Google has made several changes to its algorithm, which have affected SEO in a big way. One of the most significant changes is the need for fast page speed. Google ranks your website heavily based on your core web vitals and is very important for organic website ranking. Therefore, you must optimize your page experience to increase your page speed. There are several factors involved in what constitutes a fast website in the eyes of Google. Here are the top three, page experience related items that you should consider.

• Check Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This measures how well the page loads when Google users first click through. Ideally, you want your page load speed to be within 2.5s.
• Check First Input Delay (FID) – Measures users’ page experience through interactivity. Once a user clicks on a button or link, the page should process within 100ms to be considered a responsive page.
• Check Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This measures how often the layout of a page shifts. A webpage with a sound design is more user-centric as it offers a better user experience. A score of less than 0.1 is ideal.

Off-Page SEO encompasses everything that happens off of your website. You often want to consider this as it plays an integral role in your domain authority (DA). Promoting your site through white-hat link-building techniques can positively affect your DA score. Selecting reputable and high-scoring DA websites as your backlinks is a great way to improve your overall SEO and DA rank. In addition to link-building, it’s essential to identify your competition to make sure you’re comparing yourself to other businesses like yours. Moz has some great tools to help you understand where you stand and what you can do to improve your DA. One of the best ways to improve your domain authority is to create great content. If only it were that easy, right? Fresh, relevant, and professional content on your site is imperative to modern SEO. Great content shows search engines that you are an authority on the topic and a trusted source for information or services.

Content optimization is one of the more essential passes you can do for your SEO. Several factors contribute to a lower SEO score, such as slow page speed or keyword phrases that are no longer relevant. Some things to consider are the improper naming of images, the lack of alt tags, or slow content delivery due to the lack of a content delivery network (CDN) factor in your rank. However, these are only a few negative factors to consider when optimizing your content for the best possible performance and optimal SEO compliance. Outside of some of the more technical aspects of your SEO, we encourage you to claim your social profiles if you haven’t already. Social signals contributing to a page’s organic search ranking are another citation form, similar to backlinks. Your social presence is more important than you realize and should have cohesion between it and your website.

Google and search engines alike want to know you’re the authority of your business. Just throwing a website online that says that you can do something doesn’t mean that you can as far as ranking organically is concerned. Here is where we insert “content is king” well, that’s mostly true. The more content you add to your website blog, the better right? That’s somewhat correct, although new updates to Google’s algorithms look for lots of content and lots of “relevant” content that pertains to your business. In years past, some large companies have made this fundamental mistake by producing lots of content that is far removed from their business model and wasn’t entirely relevant. So when someone says they can write you a blog these days for 50 bucks to help you rank higher on Google, think carefully before taking this deal, as it can negatively affect your Google ranking without the proper methods. Content creators such as blog writers must genuinely understand your business to ensure they don’t derail your order. Have you ever seen a blog writer send you samples of their work, and as you read, it just didn’t make sense? Yeah, avoid this practice. They are likely just trying to rank you for keyword phrases and not relevance. Generally, this happens when they try to run keywords through AI blog writing tools without the context of your business. Check out this blog post: Does AI blog writing really work? If done correctly, AI-driven content creation tools and human creativity can be a beneficial and powerful combination of resources to get your business ranking on Google. Lastly, don’t forget to share these fantastic blog posts on social media, contributing to a solid reputation online.