What Is SEO? Meaning, Examples & How to Optimize Your Site

Where you rank on SERP matters; the first organic (unpaid) search result on Google receives 27.6 percent of clicks, according to Backlinko 1. A significant decline in clicks occurs for results on the second page, meaning that appearing on the first page garners more visibility. When you’ve optimized your website or e-commerce store, visitors are more likely to enjoy their experience. The table below shows the SEO strategy and its effect on user experience. Keep in mind, the above list of sub-buckets just gives a glimpse of the available ranking factors.

Next, you will learn about the key drivers of the search ecosystem and how SEO is related to social media. The lesson also brushes up on the pros and cons of SEO and how to avoid common outdated techniques. At the end of the lesson, you can learn more about potential careers in SEO.

Use the Google Search Console

An effective SEO strategy will not only give direction to your efforts but also help you focus on activities that offer the most benefit to your site’s visibility and search rankings. The more backlinks a web page gets from high-authority sites, the better its chances of ranking higher in the SERPs. These are keywords that get a significant amount of searches each month yet aren’t very competitive.

Understand what your company’s stakeholders want from search engine optimization and use those as a baseline for creating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals. While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Black hat strategies let you cut down the complexity of link building, for example. Keyword stuffing helps users to rank one page for many keywords without having to create more content.

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It involves using various techniques to improve your website to help both search engines and consumers better understand your website. This approach to search engine optimization involves focusing on the human audience that will be clicking on and reading the site’s content. On the other hand, white hat SEO is an effective approach to optimizing your website for search engines and building a sustainable business online. You want to be careful here as spamming sites with your link building is a quick and easy way to get your site banned from the search engines.

Search engines rely on web crawlers (or spiders) to explore the World Wide Web’s content. Crawlers then return this content to search engines, which they then index. SEO can help your website rank higher in search results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective. You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional.

• They’re also quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community.
• So, it’s important to identify any crawlability and indexability issues.
• One of the biggest mistakes people make with keyword research is that they only look at the numbers they see in the keyword tool.
• A specialized reader will explain the alt text to them so they have an idea of what the picture is about.

SEO means optimizing your website to rank for keywords and phrases relevant to your business. Per the latest SEO statistics, 50% of marketers say SEO provides a better return on investment (ROI) than any other marketing strategy. With results like that, it’s clear that SEO has the power to make real change for businesses. With PPC, you’ll bid on keywords and phrases that you want your website to appear for in the search engine results. While exploring SEO strategies, you might come across the terms search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’re wondering what these terms are and how they differ from SEO, we’ve got you covered.

(Bonus, she also writes for HubSpot!) She has nearly a decade of experience in digital marketing and SEO. Levy explains that‘s why it’s so important to use a keyword research tool that allows you to specify the geographic area you’re targeting. Samantha North, content strategy consultant and founder of Content Foundations and samanthanorth.com, shares her top four keyword research best practices with us below. Goodey explains that their intent is likely to research CRM software provider options and make a reasoned choice. Your content should help them do this, probably by reviewing and listing several options. “Search intent is the reason behind the user’s search term, and if your content doesn’t match that reason, it’s very unlikely it will rank highly in Google.

Ensure your content is well-researched, grammatically correct, and optimized for your target keywords. Use search engines, industry forums, and market research to compile these lists. Use keyword research tools to discover new ideas, variations, and long-tail phrases relevant to your business. Keyword research is the basis for any good strategy to get your website to rank higher on search engines like Google. To help ensure your website appears at the top of search results, you BHS Links must understand what criteria search engines use to evaluate and rank web pages. The indexed database acts as a library containing all the discovered pages, enabling search engines to retrieve relevant results quickly.

For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings. “White hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.