Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex process that requires a comprehensive understanding of the various components that make up the search engine algorithms. To maximize your website's visibility and rankings, it is essential to understand the four main components of SEO: keywords, user intent, technical SEO, and content optimization.
Keywords
are words and phrases used in website content that make it possible for search engines to find your site through the search engine. To ensure your page speed, crawlability, and other important parts of SEO are optimized for greater online visibility and higher search rankings, keyword research is necessary to determine the best user intent and find out what your audience is looking for.It is also important to consider how your audience searches for information. Subtle changes in keyword research can make or break an SEO strategy. The user intent behind the keywords is the next thing that is absolutely vital to the success of any SEO campaign. Variations in keywords can lead to a tenfold increase in searches leading to your landing page.
For fast-changing industries, it is important to integrate a quarterly or even bi-monthly keyword research task into your SEO process to stay up-to-date with market shifts in audience search behaviour. Additionally, major 404 error issues on the site can hurt crawling and indexing, so it is essential to make sure your site is functional and crawlable from the start. If you are using WordPress for your website, technical SEO should be something you can cross off your list fairly quickly. However, if you have a large, custom-built website with millions of pages, then technical SEO becomes much more important.
Much of what is considered "technical SEO" here is actually part of the design and development of your website. The trick is to make sure your developer understands the interplay between website design, development, and SEO and how to build an incredibly fast and mobile-optimized site. Your website should be optimized as a whole and at the individual page level. With solid technical SEO, on-page optimization is straightforward.
Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl and identify weak spots and methodically work on your pages. Your website is really a wrapper for your content. Your content tells prospects what you do, where you do it, who you've done it for, and why someone should use your business. Content should also go beyond these obvious brochure-type elements and help your prospects achieve their goals. Be sure to optimize all of your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio posts, and testimonials, not just the obvious service pages.
If you are doing content marketing, make sure it's a good fit for your marketing tactics. This type of natural linking should be the backbone of your link building efforts. Each of these three components - keywords, user intent, technical SEO, and content optimization - are directly related to how Google processes and organizes websites to determine their ability to rank in search.
