SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the long-term process of improving your website's ranking with search engines.

A better ranking means that your web pages will be displayed higher in the search results when people look for answers. Being displayed higher makes it more likely that visitors will click through to your website.

Even though SEO practices improve ranking in all internet search engines, what really matters is a good ranking on Google, since it has such a huge predominance in global internet searches.

A long term strategy

In order to be effective, you need to view SEO practices as a long-term investment in keeping your website well positioned in the result list.

It's not a one-and-done strategy. You need to keep working at it by tracking your website's performance and tweaking web pages and SEO strategies based on the results.

To make your SEO effective you need to consider these key stategies:

Let's give a quick look at them one by one.

Content Marketing

Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand to improve your website's visibility and attract more organic traffic.

High-quality content is at the heart of both content marketing and SEO. By creating informative content that is relevant to your target audience you can attract more traffic to your website and increase the chances of people sharing and linking to your content. This can improve your website's search engine ranking (see also "Link building" below).

Once you've created high-quality content, it's important to promote it to your target audience through social media, email marketing, and other channels. This helps in attracting more traffic, increasing engagement, and ultimately improving your rankings.

Keyword research

Keyword research focuses on researching keywords and phrases that are frequently used by your target audience when searching online.

These are the words your audience types into the browser's search box to initiate a search. For example, they may be searching for phrases like NFL Draft 2023, or Is almond milk bad for the environment?.

You may think you know what your audience types in when searching for your products and services, but it's always nice to know exactly what search volumes different keywords may have.

There are a few tools that help in giving insights on what people search for. Three popular tools are Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.

Google Keyword Planner lets you enter keywords related to the products or services you are offering and shows average monthly searches for these keywords, as well as changes over periods of time.

It also estimates future trends, so you can have an idea of which words will likely be used in the near future.

The tool will present you with ideas for new related keywords that you may not have considered yet, but could be used by your audience in finding your products online.

On-page SEO optimization

On-page optimization refers to the process of optimizing individual web pages so they rank higher and get more traffic in search engines. Basically, we want to make it easy for search engines to understand the content of the page, and what our site is all about.

Focusing on optimizing a page for Google shouldn't be detrimental to the actual visitor's experience, though. Remember, we are creating content for people, not for search engines, and the best optimization technique is to create high-quality, informative, and engaging content targeted to our specific audience.

Common on-page optimization techniques include:

Link Building

Link building is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization. It involves having hyperlinks from other websites that point to your own website.

These hyperlinks are also known as backlinks or inbound links and are important because Google uses them to assess the authority and relevance of your webpages.

The idea is that if other websites link to your pages, it's a signal that your content is valuable and authoritative. This in turn improves your website's search rankings and increases its visibility in result pages.

Not all backlinks are created equal, though. Search engines value links coming from high-quality, authoritative, sites more than links from low-quality or irrelevant sites.

Link building tactics include:

Note that link building should be done according to Google Search Essentials guidelines, and avoid spammy or manipulative tactics such as buying links or participating in link schemes, which can result in penalties and even de-indexing from search engines.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a strategy that aims to improve a website's visibility in local search results, which are displayed to users when they search for products or services available in their geographical area.

Some factors that influence local SEO are:

Summary

We have looked at five strategies to improve your business website visibility through Search Engine Optimization. The strategies are:

These and other related strategies help your website rank high in search engine results when potential customers have a question about products or services you sell.

But remember, as anything else, Search Engine Optimization requires long term commitment to be effective.

Keeping track of your website's performance and tweaking your SEO strategies over time are the best ways to increase your website potential.