What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is all about influencing how visible your website is in the organic results of a search engine. In order to improve rank, you’ll make changes to your site’s technical setup as well as the content on the page. You’ll also look at offsite factors like sites that link to yours and how they’ve chosen to structure those links, as well as measure your performance and review your competition. If you’re just getting started with SEO, it’s critical that you understand how search engines work.

So, at the most basic level, a company like Google will have a bot, which is essentially a software program that crawls the web. It accomplishes this by following links, including links from your site to other pages on your site as well as links from one site to another. When the crawler arrives at a page, it reads the code and saves it. The index refers to the information that has been saved. And your first goal should be to be indexed by Google. You will rank if you are indexed, and you may not rank well, but you have the potential to rank. And when I say rank, I’m referring to the position you appear in for a specific search query. As a result, when you enter a search term, Google will do its best to provide the most important and relevant answers, ranking them from best to worst. The better Google performs at their job, the more likely you are to use them, and the more money they make. As a result, it is in Google’s best interest to provide the best content. And, because Google drives a massive amount of traffic every day, ranking well for relevant terms is in your best interest. Rank is determined roughly by importance, quality, and relevance. A complex algorithm will churn through hundreds of variables to determine where your page will appear, and many of those variables will be what you will be attempting to optimize.

Google even considers the quality of the pages that link to you. If they’re on brand, relevant, and popular, it’ll assume you’re more credible than if they’re off-topic, unpopular pages linking to your content. Variables you can’t control include where a user is searching from, trending topics, and any current events that may skew your results, as well as whatever your competition is up to. Now, SEO done well can provide an impressive ROI; however, done poorly, it will have a negative impact on your organic search efforts.

Evaluating local SEO

If you’re marketing a business with local customers, you’ll undoubtedly encounter the need for local SEO. And this is how you make sure all of the online elements of your business are optimized so that your search result appears in front of a relevant local audience. Now, when you enter a term into Google and hit submit, Google determines where you’re located and then works to understand if your search result should include local listings. And there’s a few type of local searches, contextual, inferred, and intent. Contextual is really easy for Google to understand. In this case, a user gives Google all of the context, say a search for “best bakery near me.” Now the next type of search is an inferred search. Let’s say I’m in Los Angeles, and I conduct a search for the best bakery in New York. Google has to infer that I’m actually interested in local results from New York, despite the fact I’m currently in Los Angeles. The last type of search is intent. And this is becoming one of the most popular types of searches. As Google gets better and better at understanding the intent of a search, well, people are less likely to include any additional location context. In this type of search, let’s say I’m in Los Angeles, California, and the only thing I type into Google is cupcake bakery. Google has to figure out if I want cupcake bakeries near me or from anywhere. Now, the first step in local SEO is to set up Google My Business. This is a platform that puts your business information on Google Search and Google Maps. It makes it easier to manage how your business appears across those areas. Another unique piece of local SEO is the concept of what’s commonly referred to as a citation. And a citation is a mention of your business anywhere on the web with or without a link back to your website. For local brands, your citation is usually accompanied by the business name, address, and phone number, or NAP for short. Citations are a primary factor that Google will use in deciding how to rank your business in its search results. So, be sure they are consistent across the web and update any records that you can find online to have the most recent information. Now you’ll also want to use structured data, which will allow you to call out items on a menu, reference your opening hours, share products or reviews and a whole lot more. You’ll also want to be sure you have other sites pointing to yours. This is referred to as generating backlinks. Just as Google uses the quantity and quality of your citation to determine the value of your business, it too use backlinks to provide those signals. So the more relevant local backlinks you collect, the better ysour local SEO is overall.