A guide to SEO in 2022
Increase your website's visibility and rankings with search engine optimisation, content marketing, and link building.
Whether you’re looking for your next hair appointment, for an accountant, or need new ideas for marketing, chances are you will turn to Google. It's estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year.
Impact Plus reported that 61% of marketers named SEO as a top marketing priority in 2021. It’s fair to say with this data in mind that without some presence on Google, your business faces a digital uphill battle.
For a detailed SEO, checklist visit our blog here.
Throughout this guide I will be taking you through the basics of:
SEO defined
How SEO works
Why SEO is important
The three components of an SEO strategy
How to measure SEO
Local and black hat SEO
SEO defined.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic organically. The aim is typically to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience. So, SEO is as much about understanding the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how to configure your website.
There are a lot of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behaviour, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in its SERPs.
In summary, there are two primary factors - rankings and visibility.
How SEO works.
SEO works by optimising a website's content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase that content’s ranking and the website’s visibility. While you can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, SEO efforts can take months to fully materialise.
It’s no secret that SEO prioritises Google. This is because Google has around 92% of the global search engine market. Because of this, SEO typically revolves around what works best for Google.
Ranking
In SEO, ranking refers to your content's position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). A #1 ranking means that when people search for a particular term, your web page is the first result. The ranking may change as time passes due to age and competition so keeping fresh new content is always regarded as best practice.
Visibility
SEO Visibility is an indicator of how visible a website is in the organic search results when queries are entered into search engines. It is an index that also makes it possible to analyse problems and identify the potential for optimisation. Basically, lower search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries whereas, with higher search visibility, the opposite is true.
The reason why SEO is important
Brand Position
It influences buying behaviour
Self-serve customer support
Encourage autonomous buying processes
Because of these benefits, a good SEO virtually can help your business and your brand position itself strategically throughout the entire buying journey. In turn, SEO can ensure that your marketing strategies match the new buying behaviour.
What Google wants
Google is designed to deliver the best search experience to its users, or searchers. That means providing the most relevant results, as quickly as possible.
The 2 core elements of the search experience are the search term (the user input) and the search results (the output).
Let’s say you search “Adobe guides and tutorials.” This is a clear, unambiguous search. Google understands what you’re asking for, and it delivers a useful page as the top organic result—.
From Google’s perspective, this is a very good search result and a positive user experience, because it’s likely that the user will click the top result and be happy with the outcome.
The three components of an SEO strategy
1. Technical Setup
For your site to rank a search engine needs to find your pages on the web. Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and identify their keywords. And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a database of all the content it has found on the web. This way, its algorithm can consider displaying your website for relevant queries.
Seems simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there is a catch. A web page looks different for you and the search engine. You see it as a collection of graphics, colours, text with its formatting, and links.
To a search engine, it’s nothing but text.
As a result, any elements it cannot render this way remain invisible to the search engine.
That’s where technical setup, also called on-site optimisation, comes in. It ensures that your website and pages allow Google to scan and index them without any problems.
Website navigation and links
Search engines crawl sites just like you would. They follow links. Search engine crawlers land on a page and use links to find other content to analyse. But they cannot see images. So, set the navigation and links as text-only.
Simple URL structure
Search engines don’t like reading lengthy strings of words with complex structures. So, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them up to include as little beyond the main keyword for which you want to optimise the page, as possible.
Page speed
Search engines use the load time — the time it takes for a user to be able to read the page — as an indicator of quality. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool for suggestions on how to improve your pages.
Dead links or broken redirects
A dead link sends a visitor to a nonexistent page. A broken redirect points to a resource that might no longer be there. Both prevent search engines from indexing your content.
Sitemap and Robots.txt files
A sitemap is a simple file that lists all URLs on your site. Search engines use it to identify what pages to crawl and index. A robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines what content not to index (for example, specific policy pages you don’t want to appear in search.) Create both to speed up the crawling and indexing of your content.
Duplicate content
Pages containing identical or quite similar content confuse search engines. They often find it to be nearly impossible to display any of those pages at all.
2. Content
Every time you use a search engine, you’re looking for content — information on a particular issue or problem, for example.
True, this content might come in different formats. It could be text, like a blog post or a web page. But it could also be a video, product recommendation, and even a business listing. It’s all content. And for SEO, it’s what helps gain greater search visibility.
Here are two reasons why:
First, content is what people are searching for. The more you publish, the higher your chance for visibility.
Also, search engines use content to determine how to rank a page. It’s the idea of relevance between a page and a person’s search query that we talked about earlier.
While crawling a page, they determine its topic. Analysing elements like page length or structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines like Google, and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page (SERP).
The process typically involves identifying terms and topics relevant to your business. Then, convert them into initial keywords. And finally, conduct extensive research to uncover related terms your audience would use.
The next step is to optimise your content.
On-Page Optimisation
On-page optimisation (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. Examples of this include measures to optimise the content or improve the meta description and title tags.
a) Keyword Optimisation
First, ensure that Google understands what keywords you want this page to rank. To achieve that, make sure you include at least the main keyword in the following:
Post’s title: Ideally, place it as close to the start of the title. Google is known to put more value on words at the start of the headline.
URL: Your page’s web address should also include the keyword. Ideally, including nothing else. Also, remove any stop words.
H1 Tag: In most content management systems, this tag displays the title of the page by default. However, make sure that your platform doesn’t use a different setting
The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of content: Finding the keyword at the start of your blog post will reassure Google that this is, in fact, the page’s topic.
Meta-title and meta-description tags: Search engines use these two code elements to display their listings. They display the meta-title as the search listing’s title while the meta-description provides content for the little blurb below it. But above that, they use both to understand the page’s topic further.
Image file names and ALT tags: Remember how search engines see graphics on a page? They can only see their file names. So, make sure that at least one of the images contains the keyword in the file name.
The alt tag, on the other hand, is text browsers display instead of an image (for visually impaired visitors.) However, since the ALT tag resides in the image code, search engines use it as a relevancy signal as well.
Also, add semantic keywords — variations or synonyms of your keyword. Google and other search engines use them to determine a page’s relevancy better.
b) Non-Keyword-Related On-Page Optimisation Factors
On-page SEO is not just about sprinkling keywords across the page. The factors below help confirm a page’s credibility and authority too:
External links: Linking out to other, relevant pages on the topic helps Google determine its topic further. Plus, it provides a good user experience. How? By positioning your content as a valuable resource.
Internal links: Those links help you boost rankings in two ways. One, they allow search engines to find and crawl other pages on the site. And two, they show semantic relations between various pages, helping to determine their relevance to the search query better. As a rule, you should include at least 2-4 internal links per blog post
Content’s length: Long content typically ranks better. That’s because, if done well, a longer blog post will always contain more exhaustive information on the topic.
Multimedia: Although not a requirement, multimedia elements like videos, diagrams, and audio players can signal a page’s quality. It keeps readers on a page for longer just like longer content does. And in turn, it signals that they find the content valuable and worth pursuing.
3. Links
From what you’ve read in this guide so far, you know that no page will rank without two factors — relevance and authority.
What is a backlink?
Links, also called backlinks, are references to your content on other websites. Every time another website mentions and points its readers to your content, you gain a backlink to your site.
Google uses the quantity and quality of links like this as a signal of a website’s authority. Its logic behind it is that webmasters would reference a popular and high-quality website more often than a mediocre one.
But note that I mentioned link quality as well. That’s because not all links are the same. Some — low-quality ones — can impact your rankings negatively.
Link Building
In SEO, we refer to the process of acquiring new backlinks as link building. And as many practitioners admit, it can be a challenging activity.
Link building, if you want to do it well, requires creativity, strategic thinking, and patience. Here are some strategies to do it:
Editorial, organic links
Outreach
Guest posting
Profile links
Competitive analysis
Now, if you’re still here with me, then you’ve just discovered what’s responsible for your site’s success in search. The next step, then, is figuring out whether your efforts are working.
How to Monitor & Track SEO Results
Technical setup, content, and links are critical to getting a website into the search results. Monitoring your efforts helps improve your strategy further.
Measuring SEO success means tracking data about traffic, engagement, and links. And though, most companies develop their own sets of SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), here are the most common ones:
Organic traffic growth
Keyword rankings (split into branded and non-branded terms)
Conversions from organic traffic
Average time on page and the bounce rate
Top landing pages attracting organic traffic
Number of indexed pages
Links growth (including new and lost links)
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat practices aim at manipulating search engine algorithms using strategies against search engine guidelines. The most common black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking (hiding keywords in code so that users don’t see them, but search engines do), and buying links. Getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings due to penalisations.
