SEO: How to Improve Your Web Traffic

Imagine being able to optimize the way your customers can reach you on search engines? That’s right, you can with Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short. SEO focuses on driving up visibility of a brand in an organic search engine. MOZ describes it more poetically as “SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.” SEO is a very important aspect in digital marketing, it is a tool that can help grow your online audience, which is a common goal for all digital marketers.

SEO is a complicated subject for many marketers, but it does not have to be. SEO has two major functions: crawling while building an index and arranging a set list of relevant websites to the user. Crawling? Now that sounds a little crazy, what I mean by crawling is search engines will ‘crawl’ through web pages, PDFs, JPGs, or any other files through links. The link structure allows the search engines’ robots sort through the countless connected documents on the internet. Through this complex process, search engines find answers that will be of relevance and popular to the individual requesting the search. Relevance is determined by the search engine when finding a web page with the correct words, while popularity is demonstrated by whether if users click on the page or not. Search engines automatically assume that the more popular a page, it is has valuable material.

There are many other factors that go into popularity and relevance, search engines do not manual do all this work, it is all done with an algorithm. Algorithms are where it gets tricky, the equations are made up of hundreds of variables, also known as ‘ranking factors.’ Google’s Search Algorithms work by first analyzing the search words accounting for spelling mistakes, then match the search with pages with relevant information. Google ranks the useful pages with the algorithm to provide the best information to the user. While doing this all, Google considers the context behind the user’s search like the location, past search history, and their search settings when ranking the pages.

In SEO, there is link building, WordStream describes at the process of having other websites that link back to your brand’s website. Link building is all about driving traffic back to your webpage through referrals. Building links can be a useful tool because of the factor that Google’s Algorithms are always changing, but backlinks are consistent and guide the search engines on ranking factors. Backlinking flags Google that your site is quality, and thus websites with more backlinks usually have higher ranking in searches.

Here are some strategies on how build your links..

Create High Quality Content and Promote It. By having valuable information, people will want to reference and link it in their webpage. This is not an easy step, because having quality content is one thing, but being able to position it correct to spread the word is an important factor as well.

Reviews & Mentions. Again, this is apart of promoting your page, a business can do this through influencers in the industry. Influencers will be users on social media with a high following that could potentially be related to your target market.

Links from Partners. Make partnerships with related industries, and have links to your webpage on their website.

SEO is a helpful tool and a critical aspect for digital marketing, but it has posed some issues. Neil Patel wrote an informational blog about the issues surrounding SEO and how to solve them. Neil found that the top three common issues with SEO would be Referral Spam, Duplicate Content, and Improper Schema.

Referral Spam is when a site unrelated to your industry has a backlink to your site and is sending spam traffic to your site. This traffic is usually unwanted, in most cases the visitors are bots that visit your site. This is frustrating when analyzing your Google Analytics data. Neil suggests to block these known bots or block spam from the known domains one by one.

Duplicate content happens all the time, and Google can penalize your website for it. Google will only punish your website if you are publishing duplicate content to manipulate the search engine rankings. Even if this is not the case, it is good to resolve duplicate content because it can cause issues with the search engines. Neil explains it as the Google crawlers will go through different URLs and find matching content, this will decrease the crawler cycles, and the crawlers will be less likely to crawl over new content. You can solve this problem by always marketing your preferred URL, or by embedding the canonical or noindex tag.

The third most common issues in SEO is improper schema. Schema markup is helpful to google when finding valuable snippets, but when this turns into spam, it becomes difficult for the search engine result page to display meaningful results. Applying a schema to your landing pages will be perceived as spam to Google, and Google may penalize your website. If you do decide to use schema on your website, use Google’s Structured Data Implementation Guidelines to ensure that you will not be violating the terms, and then run the code through Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.