SEO basics: what is SEO and why should I care?

If you are involved in digital marketing or have ever worked with a digital agency then you’ve likely heard the term SEO or search engine optimisation. But, that doesn’t mean you understand what it is, why it is important or how to do it successfully.

It also doesn’t mean you can’t learn.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website or webpage by increasing its visibility in a search engine’s unpaid results. The higher your website appears in the ranks, when people search certain keywords, the more likely you are to receive the traffic.

The benefits of a solid SEO strategy are obvious: free, passive traffic to your website, month after month.

But how do you develop a content strategy for SEO, and what “ranking factors” should you actually focus on? To answer that, we first need do understand how search engines work.

How search engines rank a page/website

There are two different types of search results organic and paid. But, for the purpose of this blog we are going to focus on organic.

In simple terms, organic results are the free visits to your website and can be influenced by three different variables.

1. Expertise: The relevance between a search query and the content on the page
2. Authority: Is this the best source to answer the searcher’s question? High authority indicates in-depth knowledge and web popularity.
3. Trustworthiness: Does the content provide an honest, unbiased presentation of the topic in their content?
   
   

How to monitor rankings and your websites overall performance

Before you can improve your SEO ranking, you’ll first need to know how your website or content strategy is currently performing.

Some of our favourite tools to help analyse SEO performance are:

• SEMRush
• MOZ
• Google Data Studio

These tools can also help you to see the areas that you are performing well whilst also highlighting the areas that may need improving.

Every website has a set of metrics, these metrics can help improve your websites ranking position.

• Domain Authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It ranges from 0 to 100; the higher it is, the better it ranks.
  
  
• Page Authority (PA) is the same as DA but scores specific pages instead of the whole domain.
  
  
• Citation Flow (CF) refers to the popularity of a link in a site without considering the quality of these links.
  
  
• Trust Flow (TF) analyses how trustworthy a site is by measuring the quality of its inbound links. If a link pointing to your website is authoritative and qualitative, then your trust flow will increase.
  
  
• Spam Score (SS) is like TF and represents the percentage of inbound links coming from websites that have been marked
  as spam, penalised or banned by Google. The lower it is, the better.

So what now?

The ultimate objective with any SEO strategy is to get more exposure and traffic for your website. Analyse how your site is currently performing and look for the quick wins that will help improve your rankings. Once you have made the quick fixes it is time to think about developing your strategy to climb the rankings. If you need help you know where to find us.