SEO is one of the most well-known marketing acronyms, and more than 25 years after its introduction, search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever before as it is the process of ranking highly on search engines like Google and improving your website’s visibility.
“If you do SEO right, The usual Find exactly what you're looking for from Google and other search engines.” Rachel Nicholson writes in HubSpot's Ultimate Guide to SEO 2024:“For businesses, at least in my experience, if you don't have some sort of presence on Google, you're going to struggle digitally.”
The goal of SEO is to have your website pages rank highly in organic (free) search results.
“SEO is made up of multiple components, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important.” The Digital Marketing Association explains: “So, SEO is extremely important as it increases the visibility of your website, which means more traffic and more opportunities to convert leads into customers.”
Let’s take a look at the basics of SEO and how Google SEO search works.
SEO: Still relevant after all these years
SEO has been around for a lot longer than the Gen Z workforce.
“You could argue that SEO and search engine marketing all began with the launch of the first public website in 1991, or with the launch of the first web search engine, but the story of SEO “officially” begins a little later, around 1997.” Search Engine Journal says.
Like many origin stories, there are conflicting tales about how the acronym was coined and how the concept was created. According to Search Engine Journal, some of the possibilities include:
“Back in 1997, ranking highly in search engines was still a fairly new concept.” Search Engine Journal says.
In 2024, this concept will not only be relevant but will become a key area of marketing spend.
“SEO is one of the top areas marketers are investing in this year. In fact, according to data from HubSpot, 32,000% of marketers plan to leverage their website, blog, and SEO as part of their overall marketing strategy in 2024.” Nicholson writes:.
SEO Basics
You’ve probably heard the term SEO a lot by your marketing team and other stakeholders, but what exactly is SEO?
As we have already mentioned, search engine optimization (SEO) is all about improving your website to increase its visibility in search engine results.
Simply put, it makes your website more attractive to search engines like Google so that when people search for topics related to your content, your site appears at the top of search results.
The main components of SEO are:
- Keywords: Words and phrases that people type into search engines
- Content: High-quality, relevant information on your website
- Site structure: how your website is structured and linked internally
- Backlinks: Links from other websites to your website
- User experience: How easy and pleasant it is for visitors to use your site.
- Technical aspects: site speed, mobile friendliness, secure connection, etc.
So what does Google say?
“When you built your website, you probably had your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is search engines, and you want to help them find your content. SEO (short for search engine optimization) is all about helping search engines understand your content so users can find your site and decide whether or not to visit it via a search engine.” According to Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide:.
Google also says SEO is “taking the next step and working to improve your site's presence in search.”
HubSpot breaks down SEO into two main components: rankings and visibility.
- Ranking: A website’s rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Visibility: How prominent your domain is in search engine results for relevant search queries.
“SEO works by optimizing your website's content, conducting keyword research, and acquiring inbound links to improve the ranking of that content and your website's visibility,” says HubSpot. “Typically, once your web pages have been crawled and indexed by search engines, you'll see results in the SERPs, although it may take several months for your SEO efforts to fully materialize.”
Understanding Google SEO Search
Google describes itself as a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to continually explore the web looking for pages to add to its index.
“Typically, you don't have to do anything other than publish your site on the web. The majority of sites that appear in search results are discovered and added automatically as we crawl the web.” Google says.
Google says Changes you make to your website may appear on Google within hours, but it may also take several months for the changes to appear.
“Generally, you'll need to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work has had a positive impact on Google search results.” Google's advice“Remember, not every change you make to your website will have a noticeable impact on search results. If you're not happy with the results and your business strategy allows for it, keep making changes to see if they make a difference.”
Google offers the following tips for Google SEO search:
- Check if Google has found your website: Check if Google has found your content by running the command site:yourwebsite in Google search. For example, searching site:adwhite.com will return all pages indexed by Google.
- Use the URL Inspection toolThe URL Inspection tool provides information about Google's indexed version of a particular page and allows you to test whether a URL is indexable.
- Block content from Google Search: Sometimes, you may not want certain content to be found through Google Search. In this case, How to block content from appearing on Google.
- Organize your site: Organizing your site logically helps users and search engines understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Some tactics include:
- Use descriptive URLs: Parts of the URL are displayed as breadcrumbs in search results, so users can also use the URL to decide whether the result is useful to them.
- Group topically similar pages together in a directory. Using directories or folders to group similar topics helps Google understand how often the URLs in each individual directory change.
- Reduce duplicate content: While having duplicate content on your site doesn't violate Google's spam policies, it can create a poor user experience and cause search engines to waste crawling resources on URLs that users don't care about.
Content still matters when it comes to SEO
According to Google, the best way to improve your website’s presence in search results is to create engaging and useful content.
“Attractive and useful content” has different meanings for different people, According to Google, this type of content typically shares several common attributes:like:
- Make sure your text is easy to read and organized. Write naturally, make sure it's clear and free of spelling and grammar errors. Divide longer content into paragraphs and sections and add headings to help users navigate your page.
- Your content is unique: When creating new content, don't copy someone else's content, in whole or in part. Create the content yourself, based on what you know about the topic. Don't simply rehash what someone else has already published.
- Content is up to date: Check in previously published content and update it as needed or remove it if it's no longer relevant.
- Your content should be helpful, trustworthy, and people-first. Make sure you create content that is helpful and trustworthy to your readers. For example, provide expert or experienced sources to help your readers understand the expertise of your article.
Google recommends predicting your readers’ search terms, avoiding distracting ads, and linking to relevant sources.
Impacts how your site appears in Google SEO searches
It's important to note that a typical Google search results page is made up of several different visual elements that can influence whether a user clicks on a link.
Google recommends:
- Titles that influence links: A good title is specific to the page, clear, concise, and accurately describes what the page is about.
- Manage snippets: The search result description below the title link is a snippet, which is important when a user decides whether to visit your page. The snippet comes from either the actual content of the page that the search result links to, or from the content of the meta description tag, which is a concise one- or two-sentence summary of the page.
- Add images to your site: Many people search visually, so images are important for SEO. Add high-quality images near relevant text and add descriptive alt text to your images.
- Optimize your videos. Users may find your site through video results in Google Search. Create high-quality video content, embed your videos on standalone pages near text that is relevant to the video, and provide descriptive text in the video title and description.
- Promote your website: Promoting your new content will help you get discovered faster. There are several ways to promote your website:
- Social media promotion.
- Community engagement.
- Both offline and online advertising.
- word of mouth and many other ways.
Google is warning “As with anything in life, over-promoting your site can do more harm than good. People may get tired of the promotion, and search engines may interpret some of the promotion as manipulation of search results.”
At adWhite, we understand that you’ve likely spent a lot of time and money designing and developing a beautiful website, so it’s important for it to appear in search results, especially for lead generation.
SEO and Google Search SEO is a constantly evolving field, and ranking highly in search results will become even more complicated in 2024 as summary results generated by artificial intelligence (AI) take a major place in search queries.
It may seem like a surreal thing, but SEO still works. Just ask Jefferson Starship.Jefferson Starship) ranks second only to AI-generated synopses in today’s search results.
