Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Since organic search is one of the ways through which people discover content online, higher rankings can translate to higher organic traffic to a website.

SEO includes both technical and content practices aimed to align with the best search engine algorithm needs. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks.

In other words:

SEO is all about improving a site’s rankings in the organic (non-paid) section of the search results.

The main benefit of ranking for a specific keyword is that you can get “free” traffic to your site, month after month.

Here are the topics that we’ll cover in this complete guide to SEO:

• How Search Engines Work
• How SEO Works
• Organic vs. Paid Results
• Why Is SEO Important?
• Customers and Keywords
• SEO-Friendly Content
• High-Quality Content Examples
• On-Page SEO Basics
• Intro to Technical SEO
• Link Building Basics
• Search Intent
• Emerging SEO Trends

How Search Engines Work

Now it’s time to learn how search engines like Google actually work.

How did you land on this result? Chances are you keyed in the search ‘What is SEO?’ or something along those lines, and the search engines did the rest.

When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the “best” result.

Specifically, Google scans its index of “hundreds of billions” of pages in order to find a set of results that will best answer your search.

How does Google determine the “best” result?

Google remains coy about its ranking metrics but based on expert research and a few hints from the search engines; crawlers or bots are used to gather information available on the internet. By using website navigation, read internal and external links, the bots understand the context of a page, and the search engines offer the pages with better visibility as best results.

Even though Google doesn’t make the inner workings of its algorithm public, based on filed patents and statements from Google, we know that websites and web pages are ranked based on:

Relevancy

If you search for “chocolate chip cookie recipes”, you don’t want to see web pages about truck tires.

Search relevance refers to the measure of the accuracy of the relationship between the search query and the intended search result. Domains with accurate, rapid, and relevant results get prominence from the search engines and hence rank top.

That’s why Google looks first and foremost for pages that are closely related to your keyword.

However, Google doesn’t simply rank “the most relevant pages at the top”. That’s because there are thousands (or even millions) of relevant pages for every search term.

For example, the keyword “cookie recipes” brings up 349 million results in Google:

Importance of Search Relevance

Imagine landing on a site and it provides a clear mismatch between your expectations and the search result. It implies such a site is both unprofessional and unreliable.

Statistica indicates a whopping 68% of people are unwilling to return to a site with poor search experience. In this regard, aim to build personalized, highly relevant, and target-driven content that meets search intent.

So to put the results in an order that bubbles the best to the top, they rely on three other elements of their algorithm:

Authority

Authority is just like it sounds: it’s Google’s way of determining if the content is accurate and trustworthy.

Authority refers to the overall influence and reputation a domain bears in a specific niche. Google considers the authoritativeness of a website based on its wider acceptance in the target niche.

The question is: how does Google know if a page is authoritative?

They look at the number of other pages that link to that page:

(Links from other pages are known as “backlinks”.)

In general, the more links a page has, the higher it will rank:

(In fact, Google’s ability to measure authority via links is what separates it from search engines, like Yahoo, that came before it.)

Importance of Authority

A website derives its authority from its ability to offer value. In short, other niche players know your background, accept your unique views, and look up to you as a thought leader.

This way, other domains easily connect to your domain through backlinks. Google interprets this as a vote of confidence and is likely to assign higher rankings.

Usefulness

Content can be relevant and authoritative. But if it’s not useful, Google won’t want to position that content at the top of the search results.

Time and again, Google has been unequivocal in calling for ‘quality over quantity’ for best search results. Usefulness refers to providing engaging, relevant, and valuable information to website visitors.

In fact, Google has publicly said that there’s a distinction between “higher quality content” and “useful” content.

For example, let’s say that you search for “Paleo Diet”.

The first result you click on (“Result A”) is written by the world’s foremost expert on Paleo. And because the page has so much quality content on it, lots of people have linked to it.

However, the content is completely unorganized. And it’s full of jargon that most people don’t understand.

Contrast that with another result (“Result B”).

It’s written by someone relatively new to the Paleo Diet. And their website doesn’t have nearly as many links pointing to it.

However, their content is organized into distinct sections. And it’s written in a way that anyone can understand:

Well, that page is going to rank highly on the “usefulness scale”. Even though Result B doesn’t have as much trust or authority as Result A, it will still perform well in Google.

(In fact, it may even rank HIGHER than Result A.)

Google measures usefulness largely based on “User Experience Signals”.

In other words: how users interact with the search results. If Google sees that people really like a particular search result, it will get a significant ranking boost:

Importance of Usefulness

Most businesses scramble for top rankings on SERP; through paid or organic traffic. High rankings attract interest and get more visibility, resulting in high conversion rates and brand authority.

Usefulness underlines the value of organic traffic in fully satisfying search intent. Organic traffic in itself shouldn’t be the end goal.

What do you want the site visitors to do? Buy a product, follow a recipe, or seek your services? Meeting these goals requires you to offer usefulness aligned with the user intent.

My #1 SEO Tip for Higher Rankings

Create a website that people love!

Search engines are designed to measure different signals across the Web so they can find websites that people like most. Play right into their hands by making those signals real and not artificial.

And now it’s time to put this stuff into practice with a step-by-step SEO tutorial.

How SEO Works

SEO works by optimizing your site for the search engine that you want to rank for, whether it’s Google, Bing, Amazon, or YouTube.

Specifically, your job is to make sure that a search engine sees your site as the overall best result for a person’s search.

How they determine the “best” result is based on an algorithm that takes into account authority, relevancy to that query, loading speed, and more.

(For example, Google has over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm.)

In most cases, when people think “search engine optimization”, they think “Google SEO”. This is why we’re going to focus on optimizing your site for Google in this guide.

Organic vs. Paid Results

Search engine result pages are separated into two distinct sections: organic and paid results.

Organic Search Results

Organic search results (sometimes referred to as “natural” results) are natural results that rank based 100% on merit.

In other words, there’s no way to pay Google or other search engines in order to rank higher in the organic search results.

Search engines rank the organic search results based on hundreds of different ranking factors. But in general, organic results are deemed by Google to be the most relative, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages on the subject.

I have more details on how search engine algorithms work later on. But for now, the important thing to keep in mind is:

When we talk about “SEO”, we’re talking about ranking your website higher up in the organic search results.

Paid Results

Paid search results are ads that appear on top of or underneath the organic results.

Paid ads are completely independent of organic listings. Advertisers in the paid results section are “ranked” by how much they are willing to pay for a single visitor from a particular set of search results (known as “Pay Per Click Advertising”).

SEO vs. SEM

Briefly, SEO focuses on acquiring traffic from organic search results through website optimization. On the other hand, SEM combines both SEO and paid search marketing, specifically PPC, to generate traffic from search engines.

Find2Digital covers this extensively through s detailed guide on the key differences between SEO and SEM.

Why Is SEO Important?

In short: search is a BIG source of traffic.

In fact, here’s a breakdown of where most website traffic originates:

As you can see, over 60% of all traffic on the web comes from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube. All in all, search accounts for 10x more traffic than social media.

Let’s illustrate the importance of SEO with an example…

Let’s say that you run a party supply company. According to the Google Keyword Planner, 110,000 people search for “party supplies” every single month.

Considering that the first result in Google gets around 20% of all clicks, that’s 22,000 visitors to your website each month if you show up at the top.

But let’s quantify that – how much are those visitors worth?

The average advertiser for that search phrase spends about 1 dollar per click. Which means that the web traffic of 22,000 visitors is worth roughly $22,000 a month.

And that’s just for that search phrase. If your site is SEO-friendly, then you can rank for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of different keywords.

In other industries, like real estate or insurance, the value of search engine traffic is significantly higher.

For example, advertisers are paying over $45 per click on the search phrase “auto insurance price quotes.”

Customers and Keywords

Before you start to dive into the nitty gritty of title tags and HTML, it’s important not to skip an important step:

Customer and keyword research.

Here’s where you conduct keyword analysis to figure out what your customers search for… and the exact words and phrases they use to search. That way, you can rank your site for things that your customers search for every day.

Sound good? Here’s exactly how to do it.

Customer Research

If you already run an online business you probably have a good idea of what your target customer looks like.

(Also known as a “Customer Persona”.)

Here’s an example:

This type of customer research isn’t just to help you create products that people want. It’s also a super important part of SEO and content marketing.

I’ll explain…

To succeed with SEO, you need to create content around topics that your customers search for by conducting an in-depth keyword analysis.

And unless you know who your customer is, it’s almost impossible to understand the types of things that they search for (more on that later).

The best way to dig deep into your target customer? HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool.

This nifty-free tool helps you create a customer persona, step-by-step. At the end of the process, you’ll have a detailed avatar that you can refer to again and again.

Nice!

Finding Keywords

Now that you have a customer personal, it’s time for the next step: keyword research.

Here’s where you drill down into the exact words and phrases (search queries) that customers type into the search box.

In general, keywords tend to fall into two main buckets: keywords people use to find what you sell (Product Keywords).

You also have keywords your target audience uses when they’re not specifically looking for what you sell (Informational Keywords).

How about an example?

Let’s say that you run an eCommerce website that sells tennis shoes.

Your bucket of product keywords would be things like:

• Tennis shoes free shipping
• Nike tennis shoes
• Tennis shoes for flat feet

On the other hand, Informational Keywords are things that your audience is interested in when they’re not necessarily searching for shoes:

• Second serve tutorial
• How to stop unforced errors
• Proper backhand form
• How to hit a topspin serve

To succeed with SEO, you want to optimize pages on your website around both types of keywords.

That way, when your customer searches for your product, you show up in the search engine results.

And for keywords that your customers use when they’re NOT looking for your product or service, you show up for those too.

Keyword Research Tips

Here are a few tips to help you find keywords.

First, use Google Autocomplete.

You’ve probably noticed this feature already.

Whenever you start typing something into Google, you get a bunch of search suggestions:

I recommend typing keyword ideas into Google and jotting down any suggestions that come up.

Second, type words and phrases into Answer The Public.

This free tool is GREAT for finding informational keywords.

For example, if you run a blog about the Paleo Diet, you’d type “paleo diet” into ATP:

And it will pump out questions that people ask about that topic.

For example, one question I found was “Will paleo diet increase cholesterol?”.

That question is an awesome topic for a blog post or video.

Next, use a keyword research tool.

Keyword tools can help you figure out how many people search for each keyword and how difficult it will be to rank on the first page of Google for that term.

In other words, they can help you choose the best keywords from your list. There are a million and one keyword research tools out there.

Here are a few I recommend checking out:

• SEMRush
• KeywordTool.io
• Keywords Everywhere Extension
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Seed Keywords

But the best all-around free keyword tool is Google’s Keyword Planner.

Even though Keyword Planner was designed to help people with Google Ads campaigns, it can still help you find keywords for SEO.

All you need to do is enter a product keyword or informational keyword into it.

You’ll then get data on that exact phrase (like average monthly searches)… and a list of related keywords.

You can use the average monthly searches you get in the GKP to figure out which keywords get tons of searches… and which keywords don’t get searched for very much.

Finally, if you’re new to SEO, you want to focus on long-tail keywords.

Why?

Because long-tail phrases are less competitive.

Once you get the hang of SEO, you can start targeting more competitive keywords. But when you’re just starting out, stick to long-tail terms.

For example, when I started my blog, almost 100% of the content I put out was designed to rank for long-tail, informational keywords, like “How to get high-quality backlinks”:

As my site’s authority increased I went after shorter phrases that were more competitive, like “backlinks”:

If you want to see the exact process that I use to find keywords, I recommend setting aside a few minutes to watch this short video:

Types of SEO

1. Content Optimization

It’s no secret that SEO and content are closely linked.

In general, the better content you put out there, the higher you’ll rank. It’s (obviously) not that simple. But it’s a good rule of thumb to follow as you write content for SEO.

With that, here are more details on how to create SEO-friendly content.

It’s no secret that SEO and content are closely linked.

In general, the better content you put out there, the higher you’ll rank. It’s (obviously) not that simple. But it’s a good rule of thumb to follow as you write content for SEO.

With that, here are more details on how to create SEO-friendly content.

Creating Content for Product and Service Pages

Content for product and service pages should still be high-quality. But that doesn’t mean that you want your product pages to read like blog posts.

In fact, the main goal of your product pages should be to convert browsers into leads and customers. That’s why you want your product pages to focus on the features and benefits that your product offers.

For example, look at the Baremetics homepage.

In many ways, even though this isn’t a blog post or article, it’s still high-quality content. As you can see, the well-designed page and outlines key product features.

So someone searching for a Product Keyword like “revenue forecasting software” would get a lot of value from this page… even though the main goal of the page is to get you to sign up for a trial.

Bottom line? Make your product page content as helpful as possible. But don’t forget that conversions should be your #1 goal.

Creating High-Quality Blog Content

When most people say things like “content is king”, they’re talking about the type of insanely useful content that gets published on blogs.

(In other words: not content that you’d find on most product and services pages.)

And there’s no doubt that producing awesome content can help improve your Google rankings.

In fact, HubSpot found that businesses that publish content on a regular basis get 350% more traffic than those that don’t put as much effort into their content marketing.

I’m living proof that this approach works.

Thanks to a commitment to publishing high-quality content, my site gets 553,682 search engine visitors every month:

And I wouldn’t get NEARLY as much traffic if I just slapped up a bunch of product pages and hoped that Google ranked them. That’s not how SEO works in 2021.

To succeed with search engine optimization today, your site needs to put out AMAZING stuff on a consistent basis. Anything less simply won’t cut it.

In fact, the latest stats from WordPress reveal that 70 million blog posts come out every month:

And that’s just WordPress. People also publish millions of posts on Medium, Shopify, and other platforms.

Bottom line? For your content to stand out (and rank) in 2023, it needs to be exceptional. Otherwise, it’s going to get buried by the millions of posts that come out every single day.

High-Quality Content Examples

Now I’d like to share a few examples of the type of high-quality content that’s working really well in 2021.

Complete Lists

Complete Lists are where you compile a comprehensive list of tips, items, techniques, recipes… or just about anything you can think of.

These are valuable because you’re curating items from lots of different sources. So instead of having to read one post with 20 tips and another post with 15 tips, your content gives people everything they need on a single page.

For example, I published this list of 170+ link building strategies on my blog a while back:

Thanks to my Complete List, you now have one-stop shopping for all things link building.

And because my content provides so much value, 935 different websites have linked to it.

This post also brings in over 4,500 targeted visitors to my website every month.

Pretty cool.

Step-By-Step Guides

Detailed step-by-step guides are as old as the internet itself. And they can still work GREAT.

For example, this SEO strategy guide on my blog has done really well.

I made sure to go into super-duper in-depth on every step.

That way, my content stood out from most other SEO strategy posts that left out key details.

So yeah, you want each step to be SUPER detailed. That way, your content will stand out from the other step-by-step guides already out there.

This single page generates 2,771 organic search visitors every month:

Content With Data

BuzzSumo reviewed 100 million posts as part of their “Content Trends Report”.

They found that it’s harder than ever to get people to share and link to the content. Why? The amount of content that’s come out since 2015 has exploded, making it harder to stand out.

On a more positive note, they discovered that “authoritative research and reference content continues to gain links.”.

In other words: content with data is still working really well.
I’ve noticed this with the content on my blog.

For example, in 2016 I published these two blog posts:

Which do you think did better?

To date, my case study has 603 links:

But my data-driven guide has 22.5K links:

That’s the good news. The bad news is that creating this type of data-driven content can be really tricky.

But if you’re up to the challenge, this article will show you how to get started with original research content.

Complete Guides

Complete guides are similar to the Complete Lists that we talked about earlier.

The big difference is that with a Complete Guide, you’re not necessarily outlining a massive list of tips or examples. Instead, you’re covering every angle there is on a given topic.

Yes, you still want to cover actionable strategies. But the main goal is to give someone everything they need to know about a topic on a single page.

For example:

I mentioned my Complete List of link-building strategies earlier.

For someone looking for a massive list of actionable techniques, this is a great piece of content. But what about someone who wants to understand what link-building is? Or why building backlinks is important for SEO?

My list post wouldn’t help them.

That’s why I also created a thorough guide to link building.

Yup, this guide does contain a few strategies. But the focus is to help people fully understand the topic “link building”.

Pro Tip: Cover new, trending topics to boost the odds that your guide stands out.

For example, this guide to the Ketogenic Diet came out in 2013… just as the keto movement was starting to gain traction.

Because this guide was one of the first of its kind, hundreds of bloggers in the Paleo space linked to it and shared it on social media.

Visual Content

One industry study found that one form of visual content (infographics) was an ideal content format for getting links.

Of course, infographics aren’t the only way to create visual content. There are videos, flowcharts, screenshots and more. You even have combinations of different types of visual content, like “Instructographics”.

If you’re ready to get started, I recommend reading this list of visual content ideas and examples.

2. On-Page SEO Basics

On-page SEO is making sure Google can find your web pages so they can show them in the search results. It also involves having relevant, detailed, and useful content for the search phrases you’re trying to show up for.

Specifically, Google scans your page for specific words and phrases.

And when it sees the same term over and over again, Google says: “This page must be about this keyword!”.

That’s why it’s important to use your target keyword on your page… without going overboard.

(More on that later.)

For now, let’s cover how to optimize your site’s on-page SEO.

Install Yoast

If your site runs on WordPress, I highly recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin.

No, Yoast isn’t a magic button that will automatically optimize your site.

But Yoast makes it easy to set up your page’s title and description tag.

It also has a ton of other features to help optimize your site as a whole.

If your site runs on another platform (like Shopify or Wix), they’re bundled with SEO features that Yoast has.

Use Your Keyword In Your Title Tag

The #1 rule of on-page SEO is this:

Use your keyword in your title tag.

Why is this important?

Well, when it comes to on-page optimization, your title tag is the most important part of your page.

Think about it this way:

Your title tag summarizes what your page is all about. When you use your keyword in your title tag, it tells Google that your page is about that keyword.

For example, I published this list of 17 SEO tips a while back.

And my target keyword for that page is: “SEO Tips”.

This is why I made sure to include that exact keyword in my title tag:

Optimize Your Meta Description For Clicks

Your meta description isn’t nearly as important as your title tag.

In fact, Google has said that they don’t pay much attention to your description (or meta keywords).

So why should you bother creating a description?

Because people use your description to figure out whether or not to click on your result.

For example, check out this description from an important page on my site:

See how I really sell my content? That enticing description “steals” clicks from the sites ranking above me. Which (obviously) brings in more traffic to my site.

Pro Tip: Use your main keyword in your description. When someone searches for that term, Google will bold your keyword… which helps your site stand out even more in the SERPs.

Use Keywords In Your Content

Next, you want to include your keyword on your page a few times.

That way, Google will be confident that your page is really about that topic.

For example, for the SEO tips post I mentioned earlier, you can see that I include that keyword in the first 150 words:

I also sprinkled that keyword a few times throughout the content.

In total, I used my main keyword 6 times in my content. And considering that my content is over 3,000 words, that’s not a very high keyword density. But it’s enough for Google to get the gist of what my content is about.

One thing to note is that you don’t want to go overboard and use your keyword 100x on every page. That’s a black hat SEO strategy called “keyword stuffing”, which can get your site penalized.

Bottom line? Include your main keyword on your page a handful of times. It’s no big deal if you go a little over or under that amount. But if you intentionally stuff keywords in your content, you’re actually doing more harm than good.

Use Synonyms and Variations

Make sure to use synonyms and variations of your target keyword throughout your content.

This can help your single page for dozens of different keywords.

For example, check out this post from my site.

Because I include my keyword in my title tag and throughout my content, it’s no surprise that I rank in the top 3 for that term:

But I also include lots of variations of my keyword… along with what are known as “LSI Keywords”.

(LSI keywords are basically terms that are closely related to my main keyword.)

For example, I include LSI keywords like “outreach tools” and “backlink analysis” in the post.

How about another example?

Let’s say you just published an article that’s optimized around the keyword: “digital marketing tips”.

Well, you’d want to use variations of that term in your content like:

• Internet marketing tips
• Blogging tips
• Beginner marketing tips

Pro Tip: Find variations of your keyword in Google and Bing Suggest. Just type your keyword into the search bar and check out the suggestions.

See any that make sense for your content? Use ‘em!

Optimize Images

Unlike a text-based article, search engines have a hard time understanding what’s inside an image.

So they rely on your image’s filename, alt text, and title to figure out what an image actually is.

And if you run a site with lots of images, image SEO is SUPER important. Otherwise, Google will have a hard time understanding what’s on your page.

With that, here’s how to optimize your images:

First, give your image a descriptive filename. For example, check out this screenshot of the number of comments one of our guides got.

We used the filename: mobile-seo-guide-comments.png.

Simple.

Next, use an image alt text that describes your image.

Finally, give your image a title. I wouldn’t sweat this step as much. I just copy and paste my alt text here.

User Experience

You can have a webpage that’s optimized PERFECTLY for SEO.

But if it looks like this?

It’s not going to rank for very long.

Even though User Experience is subjective (which makes it hard for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to measure), it does indirectly impact your SEO.

After all, if your site is hard to use, people aren’t going to share it. And without links and shares, your chances of ranking in Google are pretty much zero.

If you want to learn more about UX, this guide is a great starting point.

Content Quality

You’ve probably heard that “high-quality content” is important.

And it is.

The thing is though like I talked about earlier, high-quality content isn’t enough.

For your content to rank in 2023, it needs to be nothing short of AMAZING.

It also needs to meet the needs of the people that search for your target keyword.

For example, check out this step-by-step SEO audit checklist on my blog.

It includes super detailed steps:

Dozens of high-res screenshots:

In general, it’s exactly what someone searching for “SEO audit” would want to read.

I covered most of the basics of on-page SEO in this section. But if you feel like you have a handle on the basics and want to go advanced, check out this video on-page SEO tutorial:

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a HUGE topic.

The main goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engines can easily find, crawl, and index all of the pages on your website.

But in recent years, technical SEO has expanded to include topics like site loading speed, mobile optimization, and more.

To be honest, most site owners don’t need to worry that much about technical SEO.

(Especially if your site runs in WordPress.)

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore technical SEO altogether. One wrong move and your entire site could get deindexed.

With that, here’s an overview of how to get your technical SEO in order (no coding skills required).

Verify Your Site With The Google Search Console

From indexing to rankings, Google Search Console is a dashboard of your site’s health and performance in Google.

(Fun Fact: Bing has their own version of this tool called Bing Webmaster Tools.)

To use Search Console, you’ll need to verify that you’re the owner of your site (Google calls sites “Domain Properties”).

When you do, you’ll get access to an awesome tool that shows you how many people see and click on your site in Google’s search results:

But that’s just scratching the surface.

The GSC is packed with helpful features that allow you to submit your sitemap directly to Google, see how many pages are indexed, and lots more.

Use an SEO-Friendly URL Structure

Most people don’t put a lot of thought into their URLs.

And it leads to weird-looking URLs like this:

As it turns out (just like your domain name) URLs are a key part of your site’s SEO.

When it comes to URLs, make sure that:

• Your URL structure is consistent. That way, Google knows which category your pages fall under. For example, if you have a category URL like website.com/coffee, make sure that any coffee-related pages fall under that category: website.com/coffee/french-press. If you don’t use category pages, you can have all of your URLs just website.com/page-name.
• Use keywords in your URLs. No need to keyword stuff. Just make sure that your target keyword shows up once in your URL. For example: website.com/your-keyword.
• Avoid junk. Shorter URLs tend to rank best in Google.

The question is:

Should you go back and change your existing URLs?

It’s obviously up to you. But I usually recommend that people leave their URLs in place… even if they’re not ideal. Instead, just focus on creating SEO-friendly URLs for future pages that you publish.

But if you do decide to optimize old URLs, make sure to 301 redirect the old pages to the new URLs. And if this new structure results in multiple pages with similar content, implement canonical URLs.

Measure and Optimize For PageSpeed

A slow-loading website isn’t just annoying for users. It can hurt your SEO too.

In 2018 Google announced a new “Speed Update”.

As the name suggests, this update started to penalize web pages that load slowly on mobile devices.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t make you guess whether or not your site is slow.

You can check your page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Not only does it give your page a 0-100 speed rating…

…but a laundry list of things you can do to speed things up.

As you can see, I have some work to do. 🙂

(Note: Depending on the suggestions you get, you may be able to improve your site’s loading speed with a number of WordPress plugins. If not, you may need a developer to tweak your site’s HTML.)

Setup HTTPS

Google gives a slight edge in the search results for websites that are secure with HTTPS.

In fact, according to Mozcast, 98.5% of first page results are secured with HTTPS encryption.

And Google Chrome has started to display a big warning when you visit a site that’s not secure.

So if your site isn’t secure, I recommend setting that up ASAP.

The only issue with moving to HTTPS is that your pages suddenly have different URLs. So it’s REALLY important that your pages all redirect to the same URL.

If you need a hand with this process, I recommend checking out this checklist.

One question a lot of people ask me is: “Will switching to HTTPS improve my Google rankings?”.

My answer: “Maybe”.

I don’t think that HTTPS is a super important ranking factor. In fact, Google has referred to HTTPS as a “tiebreaker”.

So if you rank #8, moving to HTTPS might move you to #7.

For example, we moved the entire Backlink website over to HTTPS in late September 2017.

And our organic traffic the next month was pretty much the same compared to before the switch:

Site Architecture and Internal Linking

When your site is brand new and only has 5 pages, website architecture doesn’t matter all that much.

But when your site grows to hundreds or even thousands of pages, how your site architecture is set up can make a big difference.

First, you want to create an organized structure (also known as a “hierarchy”) that organizes your pages into categories.

Then, you want to use point internal links to high-priority pages on your website.

That’s pretty much it. The only other thing to keep in mind is that you want your internal links to have keyword-rich anchor text.

So if you’re linking to a page on your site about cold brew coffee, don’t use anchor text like “click here”. Instead, make sure that your anchor text contains a keyword, like “this cold brew coffee guide”.

Pro tip: Link building needs to be systematic and strategic. Whether doing it internally or externally, it’s imperative to keep conducting a backlink audit to weed out any issues that can derail your SEO strategy.

Optimize For Mobile

Mobile optimization has gone from “nice to have” to “an absolute must”.

That’s because Google’s algorithm is now mobile-first. This means that the mobile version of your website is the “main” version Google sees.

So if your site loads quickly on desktop, but loads slowly on mobile, Google will consider your site slow.

If you verified your site in Search Console, you can see whether or not your site has any mobile usability issues.

If not, you can use the “Mobile-Friendly Test” tool from Google.

And if you find that your site isn’t mobile-friendly, that’s an issue that should shoot to the top of your priority list.

Pro Tip: Make sure that you don’t use “Interstitial Popups” for mobile search visitors. Google has said that using these types of popups can negatively impact your rankings.

Track Results in Google Analytics

How do you know if all the effort you’re putting into SEO is actually working?

Believe it or not, you can largely answer that question with a single tool: Google Analytics.

Here’s how Google Analytics can help your SEO campaigns go smoothly:

• You can easily track (and visualize) changes in organic traffic over time. If you see a chart like this, you’re probably on the right track.

• You can identify which pages bring in the most traffic from search engines. That way, you can double down on what’s working.
• Google Analytics makes it easy to track how website visitors interact with your site. Metrics like bounce rate and pageviews help you understand if your content is meeting the needs of Google searchers.

Plus, you can even set up conversion tracking in GA. That way, you can see if the traffic that’s coming in from SEO is actually converting into leads and sales.

4. Link Building

The goal of link building is to get other websites to mention (and link to) your website. This is also known as “Off-Page SEO”.

Even though backlinks have been the backbone of Google’s algorithm since day one, they’re still SUPER important.

In fact, Stone Temple Consulting (now Perficient) has been analyzing the same set of search results since 2016.

And they discovered that links are still strongly correlated with first page Google rankings.

Bottom line? Links are a massively important part of search engine optimization. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

With that, here’s a quick primer on all things link building.

Link Authority

Not all links are created equal.

Specifically, links from trusted, authority sites will pass more PageRank to your site than a link from a small, low-authority website.

There are two main ways of measuring authority: Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Domain Authority is the site’s authority as a whole. So even if a specific page doesn’t have a ton of links pointing to it, the Domain Authority means that the page still has some authority to throw around.

Page Authority is the authority of a specific webpage.

If you want to dive deeper into link authority metrics, I recommend this video from Moz.

Obviously, you want links from authority pages on high-authority websites. The only rub is that these links are EXTREMELY hard to get.

Focus On Links From Relevant Websites

As you start to build links to your website, keep one cardinal rule in mind:

“Get links from relevant websites”.

That’s because links from sites related to yours pass more SEO value than links from sites in other industries.

Plus, links from relevant sites show Google that your links are legit. After all, it looks REALLY unnatural if most of the links pointing to your baking site come from video game blogs.

(Note: It’s perfectly OK to get a few links from unrelated websites. But if these links make up the bulk of your link profile, you have a problem.)

For example, here’s a link to my website from Moz:

Moz covers SEO. My site is also about SEO. To Google, this is a link from a super-relevant website.

That said:

“Relevant” doesn’t necessarily mean that the site has to be on your exact topic.

For example, some time ago I got linked to from this website about web design.

Even though “web design” isn’t exactly the same thing as “SEO”, it’s still related. So that link still counts as a relevant backlink.

HOW do you get other people to link to your website?

Before we dive into techniques, I need to cover black hat and white hat SEO.

White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO Techniques

One of the first things you’ll notice;

In fact, when I first got started in SEO way back in 2009, black hat SEO was SEO. Shady link building tactics were all the rage because they worked.

Today? These sorts of shady link-building tactics don’t work nearly as well as they used to. Plus, they get your site slapped from Google’s search results entirely.

That’s why I don’t recommend black hat SEO. It’s not worth the risk.

How do you know if a specific link-building strategy is black or white hat?

• Review Google’s “link schemes” list. This is a regularly-updated list of things that Google considers shady.
• Did you pay for the link? No matter how you slice it, directly paying someone for a link is always against Google’s guidelines.
• Was the link “earned”? In other words, did someone link to your site because they thought it was worth linking to? If so, you’re good.

To be clear:

Black hat SEO isn’t just about link building. Many other black hat approaches have nothing to do with links (like doorway pages).

But in most cases, when people say “black hat SEO”, they’re referring to black hat link building.

With that, let’s cover a few white hat link-building strategies that I use and recommend.

Backlink Audit

Sometimes, spammy, irrelevant, and low-quality backlinks find their way to your domain, and can negatively affect your ranking. However, a backlink audit allows you to monitor, filter, and regulate backlinks to your site for improved search ranking.

Read through Find2Digital’s step-by-step backlink audit article to better understand which links point to your website, and whether they negatively your rankings.

The Skyscraper Technique

If you’re new to SEO and content marketing, I recommend The Skyscraper Technique because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of creating content that bloggers and journalists will be likely to link to.

That’s not to say this process is easy. Far from it. In fact, this approach takes a ton of hard work.

But the reason I recommend starting here is the fact that Skyscraper content is relatively straightforward to create and promote.

In fact, a while ago, I got 766 links to ONE Skyscraper post:

If you want to try it, here’s a case study that will walk you through the steps:

Linkable Assets

“Linkable Asset” is a catch-all term for anything that people will happily link to.

And this goes WAY beyond “great content”.

That’s because there’s so much “great content” out there already. And publishing yet another “10 Tips for Weight Loss” post isn’t going to push anyone to link to you.

Instead, I recommend creating content that’s specifically designed to get links.

Here are a few examples of Linkable Assets you can create:

• Industry study
• Myth-busting article
• Visual guide or resource
• Free tool
• Curated list of tips, examples or resources

For example, a while back I published SEO Tools: The Complete List.

I knew this would be a helpful resource for my readers. But I also realized that this post would be a Linkable Asset that bloggers in the SEO world would want to share with their audience.

And I was right. That page has been linked to 10.2k times to date.

(Not to mention 19k times shares on social media.)

To be clear:

Your Linkable Asset doesn’t necessarily have to be some mega list or guide.

In fact, this relatively simple infographic I made a few years ago now has 8.8k total backlinks.

Why did it do so well? Unlike most other guides to optimizing content, my post was highly visual.

Which made my guide a highly valuable resource that people were more than happy to link to.

And if you want to learn even more about backlinking, here’s a video that outlines some of my favorite strategies for 2021.

5. Search Intent

Search Intent (also sometimes called “User Intent”) is the primary reason that someone performs a search. As it turns out, there are four main types of Search Intents.

And understanding search intent is a BIG part of succeeding with SEO in 2024 (and beyond).

For example, let’s say that you want to go grab some Thai food for dinner.

Well, you might search for “Thai food Boston”.

Your intent is transactional. You’re looking for a place to eat.

But let’s say that you want to make a chicken curry at some. You’d probably search for something like “Thai chicken curry recipe”.

In that case, your search intent is informational. You want information on how to make that dish.

And the better you can align your content with search intent, the higher you’ll rank in Google.

Case Study: How Search Intent Boosted My Search Engine Traffic

A while back, I improved the organic traffic to one of my pages by 219%.

And I didn’t build ANY links to that page. The 219% boost was a result of me better aligning my content for search intent.

Here’s the full story:

In 2013 I published this guide to keyword research.

Because keyword research is such a massive topic, I broke the guide down into different chapters:

Each chapter was a different page on my site. This structure was GREAT for anyone that landed directly on the “homepage” of my guide.

But let’s say you did a search for “keyword tools”. And you landed on this page:

You’re probably going to think: “Chapter 6?”. I just want a list of tools… not a multi-chapter guide.

And that’s one of the reasons that the page didn’t rank well in Google.

So last year I decided to better align the page with search intent.

First, I scanned the first page results for my target keyword:

And I realized that my page didn’t list nearly enough tools. Most people that search for “keyword research tools” want a list of 10+ tools. But my page only outlined X tools.

Next, I tweaked the page so it would match user intent.

Specifically, I turned the page from a chapter in my guide to a full-fledged post.

And I expanded the number of tools to 15.

These relatively simple changes significantly increased organic search traffic to my page… and landed me a #1 ranking:

6. User Signals

You might be wondering:

How does Google know if a page is a good fit for someone’s User Intent?

As it turns out, Google closely monitors how people interact with their search results.

And if they notice that searchers are skipping over your result to click on another result, Google will see your content irrelevant for that search… and downrank you.

In fact, marketers like Larry Kim have been able to link organic click-through-rate to Google rankings.

In my opinion, CTR isn’t nearly as important as something called “Pogosticking”.

I actually wrote an entire guide to Pogosticking here.

But if you want a quick overview, Pogosticking is when users bounce around the search results to find something that helps them.

And if Google notices that people tend to bounce back from your content to the search results, that’s a really bad sign.

How to Optimize for User Signals

Your first step is to make sure that your content aligns with the search intent of your target keyword.

If your content isn’t a good fit for what that person wants, Google WILL notice.

Once you have that in place, here are some other things you can do to ensure that Google searchers love your content:

• Use a no-nonsense intro. So instead of “This topic is important because of X, Y, Z, go with: “Today I’m going to show you how to X”.
• Use images and graphics. Images are much more visually engaging than an article that’s 100% text. And they’re especially important for long-form content.
• Add internal and external links to your page. That way, people can learn more about topics that you cover in your article… without having to bounce back to the SERPs.
• Improve your loading speed. Slow-loading sites have = a higher bounce rate. In fact, Pingdom found a direct relationship between page load times and bounce rate.

• Make your content super readable. Use big fonts (I personally recommend 17px). Try bullets and numbered lists. And use H2 and H3 subheaders to break your content up into neat sections.
• Keep your content current and up-to-date. I’ve found that a significant update to old content results in a “Freshness boost”. Plus, users always want to read new stuff that’s 100% relevant right now.

Emerging SEO Trends

Let’s cap off this beginner SEO tutorial with a handful of emerging trends in the digital marketing world.

To be clear: I only recommend working on these things once you have a handle on SEO fundamentals. But if you’re ready to get more advanced, this section is for you.

Schema Markup

A search engine ranking factors study found zero correlation between using Schema markup and first page rankings.

Some people interpreted that result as: “Schema doesn’t work!”.

And sure, if you think that adding Schema markup to your page is going to improve your organic rankings, you’re going to be disappointed.

One thing to keep in mind is that using Schema the right way can increase your organic click-through rate. So even though you might not get a rankings boost, Schema CAN help you generate more organic traffic.

For example, look at these search results:

Which one stands out? Obviously, the one with review stars!

And review stars (and other types of “Rich Results”) are only possible if you use Structured Data in your site’s HTML. So if you want your site to stand out in the SERPs, I recommend giving Schema a shot.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (short for “Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness”) is something that Google has put more and more emphasis on over the last years.

Why?

It’s simple: Google wants to be 100% confident that the content in the search results can be trusted.

There’s a lot of controversy in the SEO world right now about E-E-A-T.

But the bottom line is that, for Google to give your site a high E-A-T rating, it needs to be considered a trusted authority in your industry.

For example, Wikipedia probably has the highest E-A-T rating of any website on the planet. The content is written and edited by thousands of people (many of which are experts in their field).

When it comes to improving E-A-T, there really are no shortcuts. If your site puts out generic content written by random freelance writers, it’s going to be hard to establish E-A-T.

But if you put out high-quality content written by respected experts, your E-A-T is going to be in good shape…

Plus, like most things in SEO, even E-E-A-T is influenced by links. In fact, Google recently confirmed that PageRank is a big part of establishing E-E-A-T.

Voice Search SEO

It’s no secret that the number of people searching with their voice has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years.

Google has even reported that nearly half of all adults use voice search everyday.

And it’s growing fast.

When I talk about voice search a lot of people ask me: “What’s the point of optimizing for voice search? Even if I ‘rank’ #1 in Google Home, no one’s actually visiting my website.”

And it’s a good question.

My reply?

Voice searches aren’t just for smart speakers, like Amazon Alexa.

In fact, according to Search Engine Land, 1 in 5 searches done on mobile phones are voice searches.

In other words: more and more people are bypassing their keyboards in favor of their voice. And it’s impacting mobile and even desktop searches.

Bottom line? Voice search is one of the most important trends in the world of SEO and digital marketing. Especially when it comes to local SEO.

As more people start to search with their voice, publishers will have to figure out ways to create and optimize content specifically for voice searches.

If you want to start optimizing for voice search, I recommend reading “Voice Search: The Definitive Guide”.

Core Web Vitals

In the summer of 2021, Google rolled out a “Page Experience Update“.

This update took into account what Google calls Core Web Vitals: a set of factors considered important for user experience.

While it’s unclear how big of an impact Core Web Vitals have on rankings, it’s definitely worth optimizing for.

You can see your site’s Core Web Vitals report in your Search Console account:

Optimize YouTube Videos

YouTube is the second most popular website in the world.

Unlike other social media sites (like Twitter), YouTube is also a massively popular search engine. This means that SEO is super important for ranking on YouTube.

Plus, according to Sistrix, YouTube videos are now becoming a bigger part of Google’s search results too.

Sure, YouTube videos have been in Google’s search results for years. But over the last 18 months or so they’ve taken up more and more SERP real estate… significantly above the fold:

This means having a presence on YouTube is an absolute must for SEO in 2023.

If you’re new to YouTube SEO, this video will catch you up on the basics.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to SEO. In this guide, I wanted to go beyond a simple definition of search engine optimization. And actually, give you a few concrete steps to get started.

As you can see, there’s a lot to learn about SEO. But considering how much targeted traffic SEO can bring, it can be totally worth the time and effort.

So I recommend getting started with the basics: make sure that search engines can fully crawl your site. Then start creating keyword-optimized content. Finally, use outreach to get backlinks.

Those three steps are the foundation of SEO.

And once you feel like you’ve mastered those, start looking into more advanced stuff, like YouTube SEO and voice search.

The post What Is SEO? appeared first on Find2Digital.

Search Engine Positioning

What is Search Engine Positioning?

Search engine positioning is the continuous practice of optimizing web pages in order to achieve higher (or more numerous) results in search engines for specific keywords.

In other words:

Search engine positioning is a subset of search engine optimization that focuses on achieving higher rankings for specific pages (as opposed to working on sitewide technical SEO improvements or choosing keywords to optimize for).

We also discovered that moving up just one spot can improve CTR by 30%.

That said, search engine positioning only about getting higher Google rankings.

That’s because the Google SERPs aren’t just a list of 10 blue links anymore.

Instead, Google’s first page now contain lots of “SERP Features”, including:

• Featured snippets
• “People also ask” boxes
• Knowledge graphs
• Top stories
• Video results

For example, take a look at this SERP:

You’ve got a large Featured Snippet box at the top of the page. Video results. And more.

Which means that improving your search engine positioning isn’t just about moving up a few spots.

It’s also about maximizing your “SERP real estate”.

This means ranking as high as you can.

But it can also involve ranking multiple times on the same page.

Or getting rich snippets so that your site stands out from the rest of the pack.

With that, let’s cover exactly how to maximize your search engine positioning in Google.

Step #1: Re-Optimize Your Existing Content

Your first step is to make sure that your current pages are 100% optimized for SEO. Especially pages that are already ranking on the first or second page.

Why is this important?

Well, Google already thinks your site is a relevant result for your target keyword.

(Otherwise you wouldn’t be anywhere near the first page of the search results)

So all you need to do is make some on-page SEO and UX improvements to that page. And you’ll be primed for higher rankings.

The Search Console is the best way to find pages that need a little boost.

First, login and go to your website’s “Performance” section.

And sort the “Queries” by position. Then, scroll down until you see keywords that have an average position of about 8.

You want to work on those pages first.

(If you’re not sure which pages on your site rank for those keywords, click on the keyword. Then, hit the “pages” tab).

Now that you’ve found the right pages to work on, what’s next?

It depends a lot on the page. If you think that it’s not keyword-optimized super well, then you probably want to focus on on-page optimization.

Or maybe your content is a little outdated. Then you want to make that content up-to-date.

Or let’s say that your content’s UX isn’t that great. Well, you could improve your pagespeed. And use subheadings and large fonts to make your content easier to read and skim.

Rinse and repeat this process for every page that you want to improve.

Step #2: Use Internal Linking

Now that your page is significantly better, it’s time to create internal links that point to that page.

Specifically, you want to add internal links on authority pages on your site. And have those links point to pages that need a rankings bump.

You probably already know the pages on your site with the most link authority.

If not, you can use an SEO tool like Semrush to ID your high-authority pages.

The only other thing to keep in mind here is that you want to use keyword-rich anchor text in your internal links.

That’s because the anchor text you use helps Google understand that your page is “about” your target keyword.

For example, I made sure to make the anchor text for this internal link “on-page SEO”. Which is my target keyword for that page.

Step #3: Optimize for Organic Click Through Rate

Google uses organic click through rate (CTR) to figure out which results are super relevant. And which aren’t a good fit for that keyword.

(I should point out that not every SEO expert agrees with this idea)

For example:

According to the Google Search Console, this page on my site ranks #8 in Google. And it has a CTR of about 3%.

And if I was able to get this CTR to 5% or even 7%, that would send a strong signal to Google that people REALLY want to check out my site. And they’d likely bump me up a few spots.

But if my CTR dropped to 1%, that would send the opposite message. It would tell Google: “People don’t want to see this site in the results for this keyword”. So they’d probably relate me to page 2 or 3.

This video will walk you through some of the things that you can do to get a higher CTR in Google.

Step #4: Improve Your Core Web Vitals Score

Core Web Vitals is a report in Search Console that tells you “how your pages perform based on real world usage data”.

In other words: Google uses Chrome data to see how people interact with your site. And they share that data with you.

Core Web Vitals isn’t a direct ranking signal… yet.

Even so, it’s totally worth optimizing for.

Why?

Well, a bad user experience can directly and indirectly impact your search engine positioning.

For example, let’s say that your page loads slowly. And your content is hard to read.

Well, what are Google users going to do when they land on your page? Hit their “back” button as fast as they can.

Which is going to dramatically increase your bounce rate. And hurt your page’s overall dwell time.

According to a ranking factors study we did, sites with low dwell times tended to rank lower in Google’s results.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. A bad user experience can indirectly hurt your SEO too.

For example, let’s say that a blogger lands on your page. Your content is amazing. AND your Core Web Vitals are on point.

Well, there’s a good chance that the blogger will link to you in a future post. But if your site’s UX was horrible? That same blogger probably wouldn’t stick around long enough to read your stuff.

So yeah, I recommend checking out your Core Web Vitals scores on a regular basis. And improving them as much as you can.

Step #5: Get Multiple Results for the Same Keyword

This is definitely an advanced SEO strategy. So if you’re brand new to SEO, I’d focus more on steps #1-4 here.

That said:

Ranking in multiple spots is a great way to improve your site’s positioning in the SERPs. So it’s worth doing. Especially for keywords that are super important for your business.

There are two main ways to rank in more than one spot.

First, you can get your site to rank in consecutive spots, like this:

This is (obviously) great when it happens.

But it’s hard to specifically optimize for.

The only thing that I’ve seen help is having two pages that cover similar topics. And interlinking between those two pages.

For example, these two pages on my site cover similar topics.

And they both link to one another. Which helps Google see these pages as closely tied together.

But like I said, this doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically get both pages to rank. It’s very hit or miss.

That said, I still think it’s worth doing. After all, ranking twice essentially doubles your search engine positioning for that keyword. Which is pretty sweet.

But there’s another way to take up more SERP real estate: rank content from different websites for the same keyword.

For example, I was able to get my site to rank in the top 3 for “YouTube SEO”.

I also created two videos optimized around the same keyword. Those two videos also rank on the first page of Google for that term.

Learn More

How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy: Improving search engine positioning for a specific page is only one part of SEO (although it IS an important one). This in-depth guide shows you how to execute an entire SEO plan from scratch.

The Definitive Guide to Link Building: Thorough guide to building the types of backlinks that Google wants to see.

It also covers topics (like content marketing) that are super important for SEO.

The post Search Engine Positioning appeared first on Find2Digital.

The goal of SEO is to rank your website in the organic search results.

You can also get your website in the paid area of the search results via pay per click (PPC).

SEO is where you focus 100% on ranking in the organic results. SEM is when you tap into both SEO and PPC in order to get traffic from search engines.

So yeah, SEM is a broad term that includes SEO and PPC. Which means that SEO falls “under” the umbrella category of SEM.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get into some of the major differences between SEM and SEO.

SEO vs SEM: Main Features

SEO Overview

SEO is the practice of continually optimizing a website in order to rank in the organic, non-paid search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google uses 200+ ranking signals in their algorithm. That said, SEO can be divided into four main subcategories: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO and User Interaction Signals.

On-Page SEO: This is where you optimize your website around keywords that your target customer searches for in Google, Bing and other search engines. For example, one on-page SEO best practice is to include your main keyword in your title tag, meta description and webpage URL.

Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO is all about getting trust and authority signals from other websites. This mainly involves building high-quality backlinks to your site. But Google may also use other off-page signals to size up your site’s authority, like E-E-A-T and social media sharing.

Technical SEO: Here’s where you make sure that Google and other search engines can crawl and index all of the pages on your website. Technical SEO also includes things like making sure your pages load quickly. And that your site architecture is set up correctly.

User Interaction Signals: The way that users interact with your site helps Google figure out if your page is a good match for someone’s search. For example, if your page has a high bounce rate, that could be a sign that your page isn’t giving someone the answer to their query. And if Google considers your page a bad fit for that keyword, they can drop your rankings down a little bit. Or completely off of the first page altogether.

SEM Overview

Remember: SEM is a high-level term that includes SEO. So everything that I just outlined above for SEO also applies to SEM. But in addition to SEO, SEM also includes PPC. And PPC is a field that has its own set of features, best practices and more.

Bidding: Whether you use Google Ads or Bing Ads, paid ads in search is all about bidding. With PPC, you bid on a specific keyword. And when someone searches for that keyword, your ad shows up.

The rankings of the ads are usually proportional to how much someone is bidding. So if you’re the highest bidder, you’ll appear above all of the other ads.

And when someone clicks on your ad, you pay whatever amount that you bid. The amount that you pay when someone clicks on your ad is known as cost per click (CPC).

Quality Score: Quality Score is a super important Google Ads metric. It’s basically Google’s way of figuring out if your ad is a good match for whatever someone’s searching for.

Google calculates Quality Score based on a combination of click through rate, the quality of your landing page and your Google Ad account’s overall Quality Score. And if your ad has a high Quality Score, you’ll get a discount on each click.

Ad Copy: Writing compelling ad copy is a HUGE part of doing well with PPC. Why? Great ad copy=high CTR. And a CTR means a good Quality Score. Which means that you pay less for the same click.

The opposite is also true. If your copy doesn’t push people to click, your Quality Score will suffer. And your PPCs will start to get super expensive.

Ad Groups and Account Management: Here’s where you use the data in your Google Ads account to optimize your ad spend.

SEO vs. SEM: How Long It Takes to See Results

One of the main differences between SEO and SEM is speed.

The fact is: SEO takes time. A lot of time. Especially if your site is new and doesn’t have a lot of backlinks yet.

In fact, one analysis found that it takes an average of 2 years to rank on the first page of Google. And many of the top-ranking pages were first published 3+ years ago.

This doesn’t mean that you should expect it to take 2 years to rank in Google. If you target long tail keywords and implement SEO best practices, you can start to see some results within a few months.

For example, when I launched Find2Digital in early 2020, my website had essentially zero domain authority.

But thanks to a ton of hard work and a focus on SEO, I was able to get some organic traffic within months.

That said, it did take years for my rankings and organic traffic to really climb.\

On the other hand, if you focus your SEM efforts in PPC, you can start to see results pretty much instantly.

You can run an ad in the morning, and start to get traffic and conversions in the afternoon.

But that doesn’t mean that you’ll get an ROI on day 1. In many cases, it can take months of testing and tweaking to get a positive ROI from PPC.

Even so, there’s no question that PPC starts working much more quickly than SEO.

SEO vs SEM: How Much They Cost

A lot of people are drawn to SEO because it’s “free website traffic”.

And yes, you don’t pay when someone clicks on your site in the organic search results.

But make no mistake: SEO is NOT free. Not even close.

For example, let’s take a quick look at one of my pages that’s currently ranking #1 in Google for “on page SEO”.

#1 is a great place to be. I’m getting traffic from that keyword literally every day. And I don’t need to do anything or pay anything for that traffic to come in.

But it took A LOT of money, time and effort to get that #1 ranking.

At a high-level, I had to build up Find2Digital’s Domain Authority by consistently putting out world-class content. And promoting that content with email outreach.

Then, I had to find that keyword using a paid SEO tool. That tool alone costs me $355/month.

Then, there was the content itself. I had to invest 20+ hours writing that post.

Then, we hired a graphic designer to take all of the screenshots. We also worked with an illustrator to make these nice custom illustrations.

There was also a developer that coded and deployed the actual page.

And that was with no guarantee that this page would rank for anything.

Contrast that with an SEM approach that’s 100% PPC.

In that case, you’re spending cash up-front. But at least you know that you’re going to get some results from that effort.

(You can even set your account to automatically bid so that you appear in a certain position).

So over the short-term, PPC is usually cheaper than SEO.

The big issue with PPC is this:

When you stop paying, your traffic goes to zero.

But with SEO, once you rank, you’re pretty much set. Your investment is all up-front. Once you actually rank, you don’t need to invest a lot of money into maintaining your current rankings.

So yeah, when it comes to cost, SEO and PPC have their pros and cons. Which is why most businesses use a marketing strategy that includes a mix of SEO and PPC.

SEO or PPC: What to Focus On

Should you focus 100% of your digital marketing efforts on SEO? Or should you combine SEO and PPC and launch a full-on search marketing campaign.

When to Focus Just SEO

You Have a Very Limited Budget: If you’re a startup or small business with a tiny marketing budget, you probably want to focus on SEO. You may not see an ROI on your SEO budget for months or years. But it still makes more sense than burning through your marketing budget on PPC ads that may only run for a week.

You Can Rank For Informational Keywords: Informational keywords are terms like “What is X” or “How to X”. Although these types of search queries don’t convert super well, they get a lot of search volume. So if you feel like you can write AMAZING content on topics that customers search for in Google, SEO is probably your best bet.

For example, my entire business has been built on ranking for informational keywords that my target audience (pro marketers) search for.

You Can Wait: SEO and content marketing takes time to kick in. So if you can play the long game and wait 6-12 months to see legit traffic start to roll in from Google search, go with SEO.

You’re Good at Link Building: Creating high-quality content is a key part of ranking in Google. But it’s not enough. If you’re serious about ranking, you’ll need to also use a few different link building strategies to get other sites to link to you.

When to Focus on PPC

You Have a Consistent Ad Budget: One of the nice things about PPC ads is that you can set a strict budget. That way, it’s impossible to spend more than you planned.

That said: it’s easy to burn through that budget quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing (and if you’re just getting started with paid ads, you won’t).

Which means that you need a regular monthly budget that you can play with to figure out what combination of keyword targeting, ad copy, landing pages and bids work best for you.

You Can Manage An Adwords Account: On the surface, PPC sounds super simple. Bid on keywords. Get traffic.

But in practice, managing a Google Ads account is no joke. You need to take into keyword-targeting, ads, Quality Score, ROI, conversion rates… and process all of this data to make decisions on how to get the most out of your ads.

You Have the Ability to Launch and Test Landing Pages: One of the first things you’ll learn about PPC is that you need targeted landing pages for each ad. Or at least each ad group. So to get the most out of PPC, you need a way to quickly launch lots of different web pages. And run A/B tests to figure out which one is performing best.

When To Do Both (SEM)

When should you tackle SEO and PPC at the same time?

Let me answer this question with a real-life example:

When I launched my first website, I was running all of my SEM myself. I was writing content and optimizing it for search engines (SEO). And managing my Google Ads account (PPC). So in addition to being “Founder”, I was also “SEM Manager”.

And because I was trying to do my site’s SEM myself, SEO and PPC suffered. It was too much for one person to manage.

But if you feel like you have the staff to manage both PPC and SEO, go for it. Otherwise, I’d pick one or the other.

Learn More

What is SEO? How to Optimize Your Site for Google: A deep-dive into what search engine optimization is, what it involves, and how to get started with it.

The Definitive Guide to Keyword Research: A guide to finding keywords for SEO. But many of the strategies also apply to keyword research for Google Ad campaigns.

Google Adwords Tutorial with Step by Step Walkthrough: Super good tutorial on getting started with Google Ads.

The post SEO vs. SEM: What’s The Difference? appeared first on Find2Digital.

Thorough

Google wants content that completely answers someones query.

That’s probably why one industry study found that longer content ranks above short content:

So make sure that your content is thorough and complete.

Useful

In other words:

Does your content satisfy what a user wanted when they decided to do a Google search?

For example, let’s say you search for “Crossfit exercises”.

A post that lists 17 Crossfit exercises is MUCH more useful than an opinion piece about why Crossfit exercises are great for weight loss.

So make sure your content is insanely useful.

Structured

Last up, SEO-friendly content is highly-structured.

Why is this important?

First, well-structured content is easy to read. Which means that users can get the answer to their question faster.

Second, organizing your content into sections helps Google understand what your content is all about.

So make sure your content is structured and well-organized.

2. Content Uniqueness

It’s one thing to have a great piece of thorough, useful and structured content.

But if it regurgitates information that’s already out there, it’s probably not going to rank well.

(After all, Google has content with the same information in its index already. Why would they rank yours above it?)

That’s why your stuff needs to be different or better than the content on page 1.

When you do that, you’ll have a HUGE leg up on the competition.

For example, when I published this guide to voice search, there was nothing else remotely like it on the web:

And because my content provided value that no other content did, it started to rank for on the first page of Google for competitive keywords (like “voice search) within a few weeks:

3. Fully Crawlable Page

If you want to rank, it’s VERY important that search engines can fully crawl and index the content on your page.

In other words:

If search engines are blocked from accessing the page (for example, from Robots.txt), they won’t index the page at all.

And if they can’t access certain parts of your page, that’s going to hurt your search engine visibility too.

You can easily check if your page is fully accessible to search engines using the “URL Inspection” feature in the Google Search Console:

4. Mobile Optimized Site

Google has said that:

“Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results.”

In other words:

To rank in 2020, your site NEEDS to work well on any device.

(Desktops, phones, tablets and TVs)

Fortunately, Google has created a nifty free tool called the “Mobile-Friendly Test”.

It tells you whether or not your page is optimized for mobile…

…with specific recommendations on fixing it.

5. Number of Backlinks

A backlink is like a vote from another website.

Search engines like Bing and Google measure these votes. And they use them to figure out which pages deserve to rank in the top 10.

For example, this page on my site has 6,700 total backlinks:

Which has helped it climb the rankings for my target keyword: “on-page SEO”.

The bottom line?

The more backlinks a page gets, the better it will rank in search engines.

6. Domain Authority

A link pointing directly to a page will help that page rank better.

But these links also help boost your site’s overall Domain Authority, which is your site’s authority as a whole.

And the higher your Domain Authority, the better all of the pages on your site will rank.

The best way to boost your Domain Authority is to create an awesome site.

7. Anchor Text

Google uses anchor text to figure out what a page is about.

For example, someone recently linked to my site with the anchor text: “backlinks”

This anchor text tells Google: “Other people are linking to this page with ‘backlinks’ anchor text. This page must be about backlinks.”

8. Site Loading Speed

Your site’s loading speed is a VERY important ranking factor.

(Especially how quickly your page loads on mobile devices)

In fact, Google has even come out and said that “page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches.”

9. Keyword Usage

I’m going to sound like Captain Obvious here, but stay with me:

If you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page.

Otherwise, Google won’t know that your page is about that keyword.

For example, here’s a page on my site optimized around “link building”

As you can see, I use the keyword “link building”, a few times in my content.

(I should also point out that I don’t go overboard and use my keyword 100 times. That’s called “keyword stuffing”, which can work against your SEO efforts).

Another thing to keep in mind:

You don’t need to use your exact keyword every time. In fact, it’s smart to include variations of your main keyword in your content.

For example, if your keyword is “Paleo Desserts”, you’d also want to use terms like “Paleo Diet Desserts” and “Paleo Cookies”:

10. Google RankBrain

RankBrain is the AI part of Google’s algorithm.

How important is RankBrain?

Well, Google has confirmed that RankBrain is one of their “top 3” ranking factors:

RankBrain’s main job is to figure out what a searcher wants… and serve them up the best results for that search.

Because RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm, it’s constantly changing. Which makes it tricky to optimize for.

So my advice is this:

The best way to “optimize” for RankBrain is to create awesome content that makes searchers happy.

11. Search Intent Match

Does your content match what a searcher wants at that particular moment?

If so, you’re going to find yourself with a massive rankings boost.

That’s because Google is trying to downgrade traditional ranking factors (like keywords and links) in favor of ranking factors that answer the question: “Does this content give the searcher what they were looking for?”.

In fact, Google employs thousands of “Quality Raters” to measure how well the search results satisfy search intent.

How about an example?

Let’s say you just did a search for “link building”.

Google closely monitors how you interact with the search results.

For example, if you click from the first results — and quickly bounces back to the search results — that’s a strong sign that the result didn’t make you happy.

(The act of bouncing around the results is called “Pogosticking”)

But if you click on a result and get exactly what you were looking for, Google will push that result to the top.

12. Content Freshness

Google does NOT want to rank out of date stuff.

That’s why you might have noticed that brand new content gets a temporary rankings boost:

(Usually for day or two)

That said, “Freshness” is still important weeks or months after your content goes live.

Specifically, Google wants to see that your content is still relevant and up to date.

For example, let’s say you just published a massive iPhone buying guide.

Well, unless you update that content on a regular basis, it’s going get out of date REALLY quickly.

Google measures freshness directly (they check to see if the content has been updated since you published it… and how often.)

But they also use User Experience Signals to see if people start interacting with your content differently (for example, they notice people start bouncing from the page right away).

That’s why it’s important that you regularly update your content to keep it fresh.

For example, I update almost every page on my site at least once per year.

But even if you’re not in a fast-changing industry like SEO, I still recommend updating your content once per year to keep it fresh in the eyes of Google (and users).

13. E-A-T

Google’s newest Search Quality Guidelines state:

“…the amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
is very important”.

In other words:

Google wants to promote content written by legit experts on that topic.

Here are 3 quick tips to help you optimize for E-A-T.

Identify Authors

Make it easy for Google to know WHO wrote a particular piece of content.

And whenever possible, hire or work with well-respected experts in your field.

Be Transparent

Make sure that users can easily contact you (using a contact form or email address).

Reputation Matters

Google’s quality raters are instructed to look at a site’s off-site reputation.

In other words:

They monitor what people online are saying about your site.

And if your site has a reputation for publishing useful, trusted content, that’s going to help your rankings in a major way.

Learn More

Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List: A list of 200 (potential) signals that Google uses to rank web pages.

We Analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO:
The largest Google ranking factors study to date. The results of this study will help you identify which ranking signals are most important right now.

Google RankBrain: The Definitive Guide: A in-depth guide to Google’s RankBrain algorithm, including actionable tips and strategies.

The post Search Engine Ranking Factors appeared first on Find2Digital.

What Are SEO Best Practices?

SEO best practices are a set of tasks that aim to improve a website’s search engine ranking. These practices include on-site optimization, keyword research, and backlink building. By implementing these practices, website owners can increase their website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic.

Put another way:

There are a million things you can do to get higher Google rankings (including advanced SEO strategies and techniques).

But it’s important to get the basics down first.

In other words: you want to make sure that your site follows current SEO best practices. That’s the foundation.

Then, once you get your foundation in place, dive into new and advanced approaches.

With that, here are the 10 most important SEO best practices you need to know in 2024:

1. Add Your Main Keyword Early On In Your Content
2. Write Unique Titles, Descriptions and Content
3. Optimize Your Title Tag for SEO
4. Improve Your Site’s User Experience
5. Optimize Your Site’s Loading Speed
6. Track Your Results With The Google Search Console
7. Optimize Images for SEO
8. Use Internal Linking
9. Publish Amazing Content
10. Build Backlinks To Your Website

1. Add Your Main Keyword Early On In Your Content

It’s no secret that you want to use your keyword a handful of times on your page.

But you may not know that the location of your keyword also makes a difference.

Specifically, you want to mention your main keyword at least once at the top of your page.

Why does this matter?

Google puts more weight on terms that appear at the top of a webpage.

For example, this page on my site is optimized around “mobile seo”.

So I mentioned that term once in the first 25 words of my content.

Simple.

2. Write Unique Titles, Descriptions and Content

Avoiding duplicate content is one of the most important SEO best practices to keep in mind.

In fact, Google has stated that you should avoid “duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.”

And this rule applies to every piece of content on your website, including:

• Title tags
• Meta description tags
• Ecommerce product pages
• Landing pages
• Image alt text
• Category pages

Basically: if you publish a page on your site, the content on that page has to be 100% unique.

If you run a small blog with a homepage and a bunch of blog posts, this rule is pretty easy to follow.

But if you’re an eCommerce site owner with thousands of products, writing unique content for each page can be tricky.

Tricky… but worth it.

If you’re having trouble writing content for each page, consider combining pages that have similar content together. Or use the canonical tag.

3. Optimize Your Title Tag for SEO

When it comes to on-page SEO, your title tag is KEY.

Google has even said that: “it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”.

Here’s how to get the most out of your page’s title tag:

Front-load Your Main Keyword: “Front-load” simply means that you start your title tag with your target keyword.

Why is this important?

Well, search engines pay close attention to the terms that you use in your title tag. This is why you want your keyword in your page title.

But what you may not know is that Google also puts more emphasis on words and phrases that show up early in your title tag.

So if it makes sense, start your title off with the keyword that you want to rank for.

For example, I currently rank #1 for the super competitive term “eCommerce SEO”.

And my title tag starts off with that exact phrase.

Sometimes it’s not possible to use your keyword that early on because it will make your title tag look weird. Yes, search engine optimization is important. But your title tags need to be useful for users too.

(More on that later)

If you’re not able to start your title tag off with a keyword, no biggie. Just include your keyword as early on as you can.

For example, this page is optimized around the keyword “SEO strategy”.

I couldn’t figure out a way to include the keyword “SEO strategy” really early in my title. So I just used my keyword as early as I could.

It’s not right in the beginning. But it’s early enough so that Google can see that my page is clearly about “SEO strategy”.

Use One Keyword Per Title: Google has been really clear on this.

They don’t want you to stuff your title with a bunch of different keywords.

(Also known as “keyword stuffing”)

Instead, you want to use one main keyword in your title. And if your page is high-quality, you’ll naturally rank for that keyword… and lots of others.

For example, this page on my site is optimized around the term: “keyword research”.

And, as you can see, I use that term in my title tag.

The other words and phrases in my title are just to highlight what my page is actually about.

And because my page contains high-quality content, it ranks in the top 5 for my main keyword.

And, according to SEMRush, this page also ranks for 630 different keywords.

Did I optimize my page around 630 keywords? Nope!

Instead, I optimized my page (and title) around ONE important keyword. And Google largely took care of the rest.

Write Compelling, Shareable Titles: Your title tags should make people want to click on your page to learn more.

Why?

When lots of people click on your result in Google, you can find yourself with higher rankings for that term.

This is why, once my SEO stuff is taken care of, I then start optimizing my title for clicks and shares.

In other words:

I try to write title tags that are interesting, compelling and push people to share.

For example, this list of content marketing tools has an eye-catching title.

4. Improve Your Site’s User Experience

Improving your site’s user experience (UX) can, directly and indirectly, help with your SEO.

UX can directly help with SEO because Google knows when people start “Pogo sticking” after landing on your site from the search results.

If enough people bounce from your site to the search engine results, this tells Google that your result didn’t give that searcher what they were looking for.

And your search engine rankings can start to dip.

You can get a proxy measurement of Pogo sticking from Google Analytics. If your page has a really high bounce rate, this might be a sign that users aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

UX can indirectly help with SEO because people are more likely to share and link to user-friendly site.

So if your site is hard to use, uses intrusive popups and ads, and has a bunch of broken links… people aren’t going to link to it.

(Even if you have great content.)

So yeah, UX is something that every site owner should pay attention to anyway. It just so happens that great UX can give your SEO a boost too.

5. Optimize Your Site’s Loading Speed

Google usually doesn’t talk publicly about the ranking factors in their algorithm.

So when they talk a lot about a specific ranking signal, you KNOW it’s a big deal.

Site loading speed is one of those rare ranking factors.

This is why I highly recommend making your site load as quickly as possible.

(Especially on mobile devices.)

Your first step is to benchmark your site’s current loading speed. That way, you know where you’re at before you start making changes.

I recommend the super-helpful PageSpeed Insights tool.

After all, the recommendations you get from this tool come from Google themselves.

Plus, it doesn’t just tell you if your page is fast or slow. The tool gives you a detailed report that includes ways you can improve.

If you want to dig deeper with page speed stuff, check out Web Page Test.

It’s a free tool that tends to give a more accurate feel of how your site loads to actual users.

Either way, here are a few ways you can improve your site’s loading speed.

• Compress Images: This is a big one. Images tend to make up the bulk of a page’s size (in terms of KB). Which is why I recommend using a tool like Kraken.io to shrink your image sizes.
• Use Lightweight Themes: Bulky WordPress themes can slow things down. So if your theme isn’t optimized for speed, consider switching to one that is.
• Use Lazy Loading: Lazy loading images can boost your site’s loading speed by 50% or more. The downside is that images show up as users scroll down the page, which isn’t great for UX. So it’s a tradeoff.
• Use a CDN: CDNs serve images and other media on your site on servers that are close to your users.

6. Track Your Results With The Google Search Console

If you don’t have the Google Search Console setup, you’re flying blind with your SEO.

The Search Console is like a live dashboard that lets you know how your site is doing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are a lot of cool features and tools in the Search Console.

But you probably won’t need most of them.

Instead, I recommend checking these 3 reports on a regular basis.

Performance: This data lets you know how many people see and click on your site in Google search.

You can also see the exact keywords that people use to find your content… and where you tend to rank.

This is all super valuable on its own. But the real value is tracking your impressions and clicks over time. If they’re moving on’ up, it’s clear that these SEO best practices are working.

If not, it may be time to try a different approach.

Coverage: The coverage report lets you know which pages from your site Google has indexed.

It will also let you know if it’s having trouble fully-crawling any of your pages.

If you see “errors” and “warnings” here, I recommend fixing these ASAP.

After all, if Google can’t index your page, it won’t rank for anything. Fortunately, Google doesn’t just tell you: “We can’t index this page”. They usually let you know what’s causing the issue.

Enhancements: The main thing to pay attention to in this report is “Mobile Usability”.

Considering that Google’s index is now mobile-first, you definitely want to make sure that your site is easy to use on mobile devices.

7. Optimize Images for SEO

Image SEO isn’t just for ranking in Google Images.

Google recently reported that properly-optimized images can help your pages rank higher in Google web search.

So if you use images on your page, you want to make sure they’re optimized for SEO.

Fortunately, this is REALLY easy. All you need to do is keep these two image SEO best practices in mind.

Name Your Images With Descriptive Filenames: Google can’t “see” images (yet). And your image’s filename is one thing that helps them understand the content in your image.

For example, let’s say you have an image of pancakes on your site.

You wouldn’t want to name that image something like: image89.png.

Instead, use a filename that describes what’s in your image.

Use Image Alt Text: Google has said that they largely rely on alt text to understand images.

It takes a few extra seconds to write alt text for each image. But in my experience, it’s worth it.

For example, you wouldn’t want your picture of pancakes to have alt text like this.

Just like with your filename, you want to write descriptive alt text that lets search engines know what your image is all about.

8. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the easiest SEO best practices to use.

All you need to do is add a link from one page on your site to another page on your site.

That said, you don’t just want to add a bunch of random internal links. Yes, random internal linking is probably better than no internal linking at all.

But if you want to get the most out of internal links, I recommend implementing these tips.

Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text: Google uses your anchor text as a clue to what a page is all about.

For example, the anchor text in these links helps Google understand what each page is about.

Needless to say, you want to use anchor text that includes your main keyword.

For example, this internal link is linking to my page about “on-page SEO”.

And, as you can see, my internal link’s anchor text has that exact term in it.

Send Authority to Pages That Need It: In general, you want to internally link to pages that don’t have much (if any) link authority.

When you do, you’ll send much-needed authority to that low-authority page… which can boost its Google rankings.

With all that said:

I wouldn’t overthink this step. In fact, I just tend to link from OLD pages to NEW pages.

Old pages tend to have more authority than new pages.

And this little shortcut helps me use internal links without having to analyze every page on my site.

9. Publish Amazing Content

If you’ve tried to learn SEO before, you’ve probably heard about the importance of “high-quality content”.

And it’s true: publishing original, helpful content can help you rank higher in Google.

The thing is, what most people consider “high-quality content” has changed over the last few years.

I’ll explain:

Back in the day, you could publish a 1,000-word blog post and blow people away.

Today? A 1000-word blog post is nothing special.

In fact, a blogging survey by Orbit Media found that the average blogger now spends over 3 hours on a single post.

(That’s 44% more time than in 2014.)

The bottom line?

If you want to rank your content today, your content marketing game needs to be on point.

Which usually means an investment of time, money, and staff… or all 3.

For example, we published an industry study on email outreach.

To publish this one post, we had to:

• Find a data partner.
• Collect and analyze the data.
• Write up the report.
• Edit the report.
• Create a PDF of the study methods.
• Design charts and graphs.
• Promote the post on social media and via email.
• Reply to comments.

In total, this single post took 20+ hours to complete.

Overall, the effort was worth it. It brought in a ton of traffic the week we published the post.

And people still share the post on social media and link to it from their blogs.

There’s no getting around the fact that creating content that stands out in 2021 takes a ton of work.

(More work than publishing a bunch of “high-quality content”.)

But if you’re willing to publish amazing stuff, you have a good shot of ranking in Google for your target keywords.

10. Build Backlinks To Your Website

It’s 2024. Are backlinks still an important Google ranking signal?

Yup!

A recent study by SEMrush found that backlinks were strongly correlated with higher Google rankings.

Here are a few ways you can build links to your site.

First, focus on content formats that tend to do best in terms of backlinks.

Our analysis of 900+ million blog posts found that what and why posts (along with infographics) got more links than other types of content (like video).

That’s not to say that publishing this type of content will automatically result in links. But, at least according to this study, it can increase the odds that other people will link to you.
Second, create content with a “hook”.

A hook is an angle, a data point, or something controversial that will encourage people to naturally link to you.

For example, a few years back I published a post about a strategy called “The Skyscraper Technique”.

Unlike most SEO case studies, this post contained a detailed, step-by-step process.

I also made sure to give the strategy a name to make it easy to remember.

And because my content contained multiple hooks, that page has 11.2K backlinks.

Learn More

Link Building for SEO: The Definitive Guide: More tips and strategies for building backlinks to your website.

21 Actionable SEO Techniques That Work Great: A list of advanced SEO strategies that I recommend checking out after you’ve implemented the SEO best practices here.

25 Amazing Free SEO Tools: A hand-curated list of tools that can help you implement a lot of the strategies in this guide.

The post SEO Best Practices appeared first on Find2Digital.

This report shows you exactly how many people clicked on your site in Google’s organic results.

Now:

There’s a lot of other helpful information here too. Like impressions. And Average CTR.

But these aren’t nearly as important as total clicks. In fact, I’d say that “total clicks” should be your SEO north star. If that number is going up, your SEO efforts are working.

If not, then you probably want to switch things up.

Which leads us to our second important SEO metric…

2. Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is Google’s way of sizing up your site’s overall user experience.

Why is this important?

As you may know, Google now ranks sites partly based on so-called “User Experience Signals”.

In other words: Google doesn’t just evaluate your site based on traditional search engine ranking factors, like backlinks and keyword optimization.

(Even though that stuff is still important).

Instead, Google wants to make sure that your site is VERY user friendly.

And Google’s AI-based RankBrain algorithm makes it easy for Google to measure how users interact with your website.

Which is why they’re making user engagement metrics a bigger part of the algorithm.

That’s why I recommend paying super close attention to your Core Web Vitals report.

This report breaks down your site’s user experience based largely on pagespeed and performance.

3. Referring Domains

Earlier this year my team and I conducted a Google SERP analysis of 11M results.

As you might expect, we discovered that links are still a key part of Google’s algorithm.

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while this result shouldn’t really surprise you.

The thing is: we didn’t just find a correlation between the total number of backlinks and rankings.

We also found that webpages with lots of referring domains tend to rank higher in Google organic search.

Referring domains are the number of different sites that link to you. Not the number of total backlinks.

Why is this such a big difference?

Well, Google puts less weight on a backlink from the same site.

For example, I recently got a link from Vimeo.

That was the first time that Vimeo linked to me. This means that the link is pretty powerful.

But the next link they send my way will be significantly less powerful. And the one after that will be less powerful than the second link etc.

This is why I recommend focusing more on referring domains than total backlinks.

In fact, I basically ignore “Backlinks” when I check my site in Semrush. Instead, I focus 100% on “referring domains”.

If that number is going up, then it’s a sign that my content marketing and link building is working.

4. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is another way of measuring how much traffic you get from Google organic.

You can easily find this SEO metric in Google Analytics.

First, head over to Audience → Overview.

Then, hit “Add Segment”.

And choose “Organic Traffic”.

Voila! You’ll see exactly how many search engine visitors your site gets.

You might be wondering:

“Isn’t this the same exact thing as “Total clicks” in the Search Console?”

Yes… kinda.

“Organic traffic” and “Total clicks” essentially measure the same thing.

But they do it in different ways.

For example, “Total clicks” ONLY measures traffic from Google. And “Organic traffic” takes all search engines (including Bing) into account.

They also measure traffic a little bit differently. Which is why the numbers from each source are sometimes different.

But the overall trend usually lines up.

That’s actually why I like looking at both metrics: if Total clicks and Organic traffic are both moving in the right direction, that’s a good sign.

5. User Experience Metrics

I already covered the Core Web Vitals report (it’s the second SEO metric on this list).

Thing is, Core Web Vitals doesn’t tell you the whole story.

Yes, page loading speed is important. And you definitely don’t want slow site performance to impact your UX.

Which is why Core Web Vitals focuses almost 100% on those two things.

But if you ONLY pay attention to Core Web Vitals, you’re missing out on the whole UX picture.

Specifically, you want to zero-in on two other key user experience signals that Google uses in their algorithm:

• Bounce rate
• Dwell time

To be clear: these aren’t the only ways that Google measures how people interact with your website.

But they’re two of the most important.

In fact, the 11M+ results ranking factors study that I mentioned earlier discovered a strong correlation between dwell time and first page rankings.

The other reason that I recommend focusing on these two SEO metrics is a practical one:

They’re easy to measure and improve. In fact, you can easily find both of these metrics inside of Google Analytics.

All you need to do is go to Behavior → Site Content → Landing Pages.

And you’ll see a breakdown of how users interact with each page on your site.

The two columns to pay attention to here are: Avg. Session Duration and Bounce Rate.

Avg. Session Duration is how long users spend on your site after they first land on it (aka Dwell Time).

Needless to say, the higher this number, the better. Google wants to serve up results that give them what they want.

And nothing says “this page stinks” then someone spending 5 seconds on a page before going back to the search results.

You also want to keep an eye on your Bounce Rate. As you can see in my report, my bounce rate is all over the place.

Certain pages (like /hub/youtube/name) have a super high bounce rate. Other pages (/how-to-get-youtube-subscribers) have a really low bounce rate.

This is perfectly normal. The key here is to figure out WHY certain pages have a high bounce rate. And improve those pages.

For example, let’s look at my page with an 80%+ bounce rate.

This page might have a high bounce rate because I don’t dive right into the meat of the content.

The page is about “how to choose a channel name”. But I have two intro sections before I get into the first step.

Which may lead people to quickly bounce.

On the other hand, my pages with a super low bounce rate tend to jump right into the important content.

6. Traffic Cost

Referring domains.

Bounce rate.

Organic traffic.

It’s really easy to get lost in the weeds with this stuff.

Yes, these SEO metrics are important.

But they don’t answer the most important question of all:

Is SEO giving your business a positive ROI?

This is a surprisingly tricky question to answer.

After all, you can easily rank #1 in Google for a keyword that results in ZERO sales.

(This is a mistake that I’ve made hundreds of times)

Or you can watch your search traffic climb… while your site’s overall conversion rate stays pretty much flat.

(Note: Solid keyword research can help you sidestep this issue. That’s because you’ll strategically pick keywords that your target audience actually searches for).

Which is why you don’t want to fixate 100% on organic traffic. Instead, you also want to pay attention to your SEO traffic cost.

SEO traffic cost is an estimate of how much you’d pay in Google Ads for the traffic that you’re getting from Google organic.

You can see this number in Semrush.

To be clear: this number isn’t 100% accurate. After all, these 3rd party tools estimate your organic traffic in the first place.

So they’re starting from a number that’s not totally accurate.

But in general, they do a solid job of figuring out how much your SEO traffic is worth. And it, at last, gives you an IDEA of whether your SEO is paying off.

For example, my site gets $386,665 worth of organic search traffic every month.

So as long as I’m not spending more than that on content, link building and other SEO tasks, then I should have a strong ROI from SEO.

Which I do 🙂

7. Indexed Pages

This is one of the most underrated SEO metrics on the planet.

Like the name suggests, indexed pages is the number of pages from your site that Google has indexed.

There are two simple ways to find out how many indexed pages you’ve got.

First, you can use the site:yoursite.com operator in Google search.

The number of results is a rough estimate of how many pages Google has indexed.

You can get a more precise number from the Coverage report in Google Search Console.

Either way, you definitely want to pay attention to this number.

And make sure that the number of indexed pages is in-line with the number of pages that you WANT indexed.

Why?

Lots of excess pages can hurt your site’s overall technical SEO. Excess pages can easily lead to problems with duplicate content. Indexing. And more.

In fact, I recently slept on this metric. And it came back to bite me.

One of my properties was generating thousands and thousands of low-quality pages automatically.

For example, the site was putting out dozens of versions of the same page on different URLs.

And all of those similar versions were getting indexed in Google.

Which led to the site ballooning to over 12k indexed pages.

We eventually noindexed all of those duplicate pages. But it took MONTHS for those pages to get removed from the index. And our SEO performance suffered in the meantime.

8. Average CTR

Average CTR is the percentage of people that see your site in Google. And ultimately click on your site.

Obviously, the higher your CTR, the better. It’s simple math:

Higher CTR=more clicks=more traffic.

But that’s not the only reason to pay attention to Average CTR.

Google likely uses CTR in their ranking algorithm. And if your site gets more clicks than normal, it makes Google say: “This site is a super relevant result for this keyword. Let’s bump it up a few spots”.

You might be wondering:

What’s a “good” CTR?

Honestly, there isn’t an answer to that. Why?

Because it HIGHLY depends on where you rank. And what other SERP features you’re competing with.

For example, take a look at this SERP.

It has a bunch of ads, a featured snippet, and more. Which means that your CTR is going to be low (even if you rank #1).

On the other hand, this SERP is pretty clean.

So in this case your CTR will probably be pretty high.

The thing is, you can’t really control what Google puts around your results. But you CAN control how enticing your result looks to Google searchers.

So the goal here isn’t to hit some random CTR benchmark.

Instead, you want to improve your title and meta description tags. That way, more people will want to click on your result.

9. Keyword Rankings

This is simply where you rank for a set of keywords.

Now:

There two main ways to track keyword rankings…

First, you can use a rank tracking tool. You enter a set of keywords that are important for your SEO campaign.

And the tool will let you know where you rank for those search terms. And track your rankings over time.

The second way is to check out organic keyword reports in SEO tools like Semrush.

I actually pretty much stopped using traditional rank tracking. Instead, I just use organic keyword reports.

Why?

Well, the big problem with rank tracking tools is that they only track keywords that you put into them.

Which means that you only get a small look into all of your site’s keywords.

But an organic keywords report automatically tracks all of the keywords that your site ranks for. And where you rank.

Which gives you a super thorough overview of your keyword rankings.

10. Coverage Errors

Coverage errors are crawling and indexing problems that your site has.

To be clear: it’s not always possible to get this number all the way down to zero.

(Especially if you run an ecommerce site with 10k+ pages).

Either way, you definitely want to monitor your coverage and crawl errors in the Google Search Console. Otherwise, they can easily lead to problems that can pull down your entire site’s rankings.

For example, you can see here that this site has a bunch of submitted URLs marked as “noindex”.

This error means pages that I want indexed aren’t getting indexed.

And if these pages aren’t indexed, they’re not going to rank for anything.

That’s (obviously) bad.

Which is why I recommend checking our Coverage errors at least once a week.

Learn More

How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy: Yes, you can optimize for each of these SEO metrics one-by-one. But starting from a solid SEO strategy makes optimizing for these metrics much easier.

We Analyzed 5 Million Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate: Benchmarks for what a “good” CTR is by ranking position. Along with data-driven ways to get more clicks.

The Definitive Guide to On-Page SEO: Solid on-page optimization can help boost up most the SEO metrics that I covered on this list.

The post SEO Metrics appeared first on Find2Digital.

SEO web design is the practice of creating websites that are fully accessible and indexable by search engines.

Why Is SEO Friendly Web Design Important?

It’s simple:

SEO-friendly websites usually get more traffic than websites that ignore search engines.

Of course, you want to put your users first. But to get the most out of your website, you want to design and develop your website with users AND search engines in mind.

Best Practices

Fully Indexable Pages

It’s SUPER important that Google can fully index the content on your site. Here’s how to make sure that happens:

Use Alt Text

Google isn’t very good at identifying images. In other words, Google and other search engines can’t understand what an image is without your help.

That’s why Google recommends that you:

“Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images.”

For example, here’s an image on my site of the Find2Digital YouTube channel ranking for the keyword “backlinks”:

And to help search engines understand what that image is, I gave my image a descriptive filename:

find2digital-youtube-video-ranking-for-backlinks.png

I also used alt text that accurately described my image.

Find2Digital YouTube video – Ranking for “backlinks”

Hidden Content

Content that’s hidden behind forms and expandable menus can be hard for search engines to index.

For example:

Websites sometimes make sections of their content hidden behind tabs or “accordions”.

(This is super common for content designed to load quickly on mobile devices)

Even though Google usually has no trouble indexing this content, they sometimes do:

That’s why I recommend keeping all of your content out in the open. That way, they can easily crawl and index 100% of your page.

Provide Transcripts

Just like with images, Google can’t understand content in video or audio format. They need text.

So if you publish multimedia content on your site, hook Google up with a transcript on the page:

Not Blocked

The “noindex” meta tag in Robots.txt tells search engines NOT to index a page.

This is helpful for pages that are under construction or designed only for internal staff.

But you’d be surprised how often this tag gets used incorrectly.

For example, Chad Burgess had a client that accidentally applied the noindex tag to a big chunk of their pages.

This (obviously) led to a big drop in organic traffic:

And when that noindex tag was removed, their rankings quickly recovered:

Use an SEO Browser

Want to be 100% sure that your content is indexable and crawlable?

Use an SEO browser.

An SEO Browser shows you how your page looks to search engines.

(Spoiler: Your site will look A LOT different than in a regular browser like Chrome)

I recommend using the free and useful Zeo SEO browser:

Just enter a URL from your site into the tool…

… get you’ll get to see your content from the eyes of a search engine spider.

In my case, the main content of my page (like text and images) are fully visible.

But if you notice that key parts of your page are invisible in the SEO Browser, they’re invisible to Google too.

So that’s something you want to fix ASAP.

Fetch and Render

The Google Search Console has a nifty little URL Inspection feature.

This will let you know if Google has issues accessing your page.

If everything is A-OK, you’ll get a green checkmark.

Simple Website Architecture

Website architecture might sound complicated. But it isn’t.

Website architecture simply how all of the the pages on your site are linked together.

In general, you want to keep your site architecture simple.

In other words:

If you have a tangled mess like this, Google is going to have a tough time finding and indexing all of your pages.

On the other hand, architecture like this makes Google’s job A LOT easier.

Unique Content

Google HATES duplicate content.

In fact, Google states that if they find a site with lots duplicate content:

“…the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

In short:

You want to have unique content on every single page on your website.

This is easy for a 50-page blog.

But what about a local business that has a different page for 500+ locations? Or an ecommerce site with 10k product pages?

The same rules apply.

It’s not easy to write something 100% unique about your dry cleaning location in Brooklyn that’s a whole lot different than your location in Queens.

But if you want those pages to rank in Google, you need to make it happen.

In fact, Google warns against using boilerplate content that’s repeated on multiple pages:

Bottom line?

Duplicate content is SEO poison. Avoid it at all costs.

Use the Canonical Tag

In some cases, you might have several different pages on your site with similar content… but you only want ONE of them to rank.

(For example, you have a page for every size and color of tennis shoes that you sell)

Well, you don’t want to get dinged for duplicate content.

But it also doesn’t make sense to write totally unique content for the red, blue, green and yellow version of your shoes.

What’s the answer?

The canonical tag.

This tag tells search engines:

“This page is worth indexing. The rest are just variations of that page”.

The downside of the canonical tag is that the “variation pages” won’t get indexed.

But the big upside is that you’ll avoid a costly duplicate content penalty.

URL Structure

URLs are VERY underrated.

In fact, most people put ZERO thought into their URLs. And they end up looking like this:

Thoughtless URLs are bad for users (weird URLs are hard to remember).

Search engines also struggle with long, confusing URLs. That’s because Google looks at your URL (along with your meta tags and content on the page) to figure out your page’s topic.

So you want to avoid URLs that don’t describe your page.

https://website.com/cat=90/10/09/2019/pageref810a.

Instead, use URLs that give users and search engines a clue to your page’s topic. And that are easy to remember.

For example, for this post about SEO techniques, my URL is:

https://find2digital.co.uk/seo-techniques

Simple.

Limited Number of Pages

If I could give people only ONE piece of SEO advice, it would be this:

Limit the number of pages on your site.

Why is this important? Two reasons…

First, more pages=more potential problems.

A site with 100 pages is infinitely easier to work with than a site with 100,000 pages.

Sites with tons of pages are more likely to run into issues like:

• Duplicate content
• Thin content
• Google Panda penalties
• Outdated content

Second, smaller sites with a few awesome pages are more SEO-friendly.

(At least according to Google)

For example, my site gets 193,964 organic visitors every month:

And a big reason for that is that I don’t publish lots of filler content. Or pages that have similar content on them.

In fact, my site only has 128 total indexed pages:

Awesome User Experience

When it comes to user experience and SEO, Google says it best:

“You should optimize your site to serve your users’ needs. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content.”

You already learned how to optimize your site for Google and other search engines.

Now it’s time to flip the script.

Specifically, we’re going to focus on creating an awesome user experience for human users.

Why is this important for SEO?

First off, Google closely measures so-called “UX Signals”. If Google sees that people enjoy your content, it will rank higher up in the search results.

(This is processed by a Google algorithm called “RankBrain”)

Second, if your site is awesome, more people will link to it.

(Which is a KEY part of SEO)

With that, here are 3 tips for creating an awesome user experience for users and Google.

Mobile-First Design

63% of all website traffic now comes from a mobile device.

Which means:

It doesn’t make sense to create a desktop site FIRST… then make a mobile version.

Instead, you want to create a site made for mobile devices… THEN worry about the needs of desktop users.

This is also good for SEO.

Google is now running a “Mobile-first Index” that ONLY looks at the mobile version of your website.

Bottom line?

If your site is mobile optimized, your site is PRIMED to satisfy users and Google.

Descriptive Titles

You have two main goals with your title tag:

Goal #1: Describe what your page is about.

In fact, Google’s Quality Rater guidelines say that “descriptive or helpful” titles are one of the most important parts of a high-quality search result.

So you want to avoid generic titles like “Homepage” or “Contact”.

For example, here’s the title tag for my homepage:

SEO Training and Link Building Strategies – Find2Digital

This gives users (and search engines) MUCH more information than a generic title like: “Welcome to my website”.

Goal #2: Use your target keyword in your title.

Google puts A LOT of weight on your title tags. So make sure to include your target keyword once in your title.

For example, my target keyword for this post is “SEO Tools:

So I made sure to include that exact phrase in my title:

Again:

Hitting these two goals will help your living breathing website visitors.

After all, a descriptive title that includes keywords that people search for will help users find what they’re looking for on your website.

Organize Content with Subheaders

Let’s face it:

No one on the planet wants to read a giant wall of text, like this:

And content that’s all smushed together makes it harder for Google to read and understand your page’s content.

That’s why you want to organize your content into discrete sections, like this:

This lets your user skip around and find the section that helps them most. It also helps Google understand all of the subtopics that you cover.

For example, this post from my blog is a step-by-step SEO audit.

As you can see, I use H2 subheaders to break my content up into a bunch of different sections:

In fact, Google recommends that you use “Use heading tags to emphasize important text” and to structure your content:

Learn More

What is SEO? How to Optimize Your Site for Google: A deep-dive into what search engine optimization is, what it involves, and how to get started with it.

The Definitive Guide to Keyword Research: A guide to finding keywords for SEO. But many of the strategies also apply to keyword research for Google Ad campaigns.

Google Adwords Tutorial with Step by Step Walkthrough: Super good tutorial on getting started with Google Ads.

The post SEO Friendly Web Design appeared first on Find2Digital.

Even though Google now has dozens of SERP features that appear on the first page, the two most important categories are paid results and organic results.

The paid results are from advertisers bidding on keywords via Google Ads. Although Google Ads take ad relevancy into account, their placement essentially goes to the highest bidder.

The organic results are “earned” placements that are determined by Google’s algorithm to be the overall best, most relevant results for a given search.

Why Are SERPs Important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

The SERPs determine how your site appears on Google’s first page.

For example, let’s say you rank your site on the first page of Google for the keyword “how to start a website”.

That’s great… until you see that SERP features push the #1 result to well below the fold.

Which means that, even if you crack page 1, you probably aren’t going to get many clicks.

On the other hand, the SERP for “link building” is much less busy.

It’s basically 10 blue links. Which means that your organic result has a good chance of getting clicked on.

There’s also another important factor to keep in mind when it comes to evaluating the SERPs: “no-click searches”.

According to Sparktoro, there are more “no-click searches” than ever before.

And these no-click searches are largely due to SERP features (especially Featured Snippets).

For example, let’s say you search for “when did Google start”.

Why would you click on any of the 10 blue links in the search results when you get your answer right there on the first page?

That’s why you want to target keywords that don’t have a ton of SERP features. That way, your result will stand out and get clicked on

With that, here are the elements of a typical Google SERP:

Organic Search Results

The organic results are determined by Google’s complex algorithm (which has 200+ ranking signals).

Even though Google’s algorithm is top secret, they have publicly confirmed a few key ranking factors, including:

• Off-page SEO signals (the number of websites linking to a specific page. Also known as “backlinks”)
• On-page SEO signals (the keywords you use on your page)
• Site loading speed
• Brand presence and trust signals

A standard organic search result snippet includes:

• Page title (title tag)
• Page URL
• Meta description

Google sometimes adds features to specific organic snippets.

For example, if they consider a page’s published date important they’ll show that:

Or, for certain results, they’ll show “sitelinks” below the result.

Sitelinks link to sections of a page. Or to related pages on the same website.

And, when Schema is used on a page, Google will sometimes add review stars, images, and event info that turn a normal result into a “Rich Snippet”.

Paid Search Results

Paid search results are marked with a small “Ad” icon in the top left corner of their snippet.

According to Rank Ranger, ads appear on 51.61% of page one SERPs.

And when ads do appear, there’s an average of 3.10 ads per page.

And for really competitive, high-value search terms, Google will put ads at the bottom of the SERPs too.

Because ads appear at the top and bottom of the page, they can crowd out the organic results.

That said: I don’t recommend avoiding keywords that have lots of ads. Even though the ads will likely reduce your CTR, the fact that people are bidding on these terms show that the traffic is valuable.

In fact, I usually specifically target terms with lots of ads and a high “commercial intent”. Sure, I may not get as many clicks. But the clicks that I do get are that much more valuable.

Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are a short section of content pulled from a webpage or video.

Here’s an example:

According to an industry study by Ahrefs, 12% of all SERPs have a Featured Snippet.

Common types of Featured Snippets include:

• FAQ: A short paragraph in response to “What is” and “Who is” types of searches
• Bulleted List: For rankings and “best of” lists
• Numbered List: Used for instructions, DIY, recipes, ordered tasks
• Tables: a visual display of dates, prices, rates… or any data presented in a table

Although most Featured Snippets contain text…

….Google has started to add “Video Featured Snippets” to the results.

Featured Snippets are both a threat and an opportunity.

Featured Snippets are a threat because they almost always show up at the very top of the SERPs. Which pushes the organic results down the page.

In fact, Featured Snippets appear so high on Google’s first page that many people refer to the Featured Snippet spot as “Position #0”.

Featured Snippets are an opportunity because YOUR content can show up inside of a Featured Snippet.

And when it does, you can find yourself with a super high organic CTR.

For example, my site currently ranks in the Featured Snippet box for “link building tools”.

And, according to the Google Search Console, it’s one of the main reasons that my CTR is 8.3%.

Direct Answer Box

18% of search results have “Direct Answers”, which are a direct answer to a specific question.

Here’s an example:

The answers that Google spits out are considered public domain. So, unlike a Featured Snippet, they don’t credit a source or link to the answer.

Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panel

Knowledge Graphs and panels usually show up on the right side of the organic results.

They’re basically “baseball card” stats for a company or important person.

Most of this data is scraped from hand-picked sources (like Wikipedia and Crunchbase).

Local Packs

Local Packs show up for local searches, like “comic book store Boston” and “comic book store near me”.

They can also appear when Google feels that a “normal” search needs a few local results. For example, if you search for “plumber”, Google knows that you’re probably looking for a plumber nearby.

Google Image Results

Google will feature results from Google Images for keywords where images make sense, like “cute cats” or “blue cars”.

Video Results

These usually show up as a pack of 3 videos… with a carousel to see more.

88% of video results are pulled from YouTube.

It’s not known exactly how Google decides which results should have a video. But it’s likely based partly on the keyword itself and their own split testing.

For example, someone searching for “how to paint a garage” probably wants to see a video. Which is why Google shows a video carousel for that term.

People Also Ask

This is a new-ish feature that Google usually inserts in the middle of the SERP.

And when you click on one, it expands out with an answer to that question.

According to Moz, 58% of Google’s results contain a People Also Ask SERP feature.

Pro Tip: The People Also Ask section is GREAT for content topic ideas.

For example, when you search for “keyword research”, you get a list of these questions related to that term.

All of these are GREAT questions to answer in the form of blog posts, videos and podcasts.

Twitter Results

Here’s where Google pulls the latest tweets from a specific Twitter account.

For example, when you search for SEMrush, it shows their Twitter account… with links to their last 3 tweets.

Top Stories

These are links to news articles about a specific topic.

Contrary to popular belief, Top Stories don’t only show up when you search for trending keywords.

For example, take a keyword like “weight loss”. The search volume for this term is pretty stable. Yet, when you search for “Weight Loss”, there is always a Top Stories section in the SERPs.

Note: Unlike most of the other SERP features on this list, your site has to be Google News approved to get in the Top Stories section.

Google Shopping Results

Google Shopping Results (also known as “Product Listing Ads”) are results that appear for keywords around a specific product.

Here’s an example:

Even though most Google Shopping Results are ads, they feature select organic results too.

Because most Google Shopping Results appear at the very top of the page… even above traditional ads.

Learn More

How to Appear in Google’s Answer Boxes: A practical and clear video from Moz on getting your site inside of the coveted “#0” Featured Snippet spot.

The post What Are SERPs? appeared first on Find2Digital.