There are many factors that come into play when creating an effective and successful business website. While it is important to consider your website layout and proper user experience, SEO should be at the top of your list. With that, keep on reading for a complete guide to SEO and how you can boost visibility and traffic for your website.

What is SEO?

SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, organically boosts your content by improving your rank on search engine results pages. This helps users find your website easier and enables you to stand out from your competitors as the first option they see is what users choose to click on. With that, SEO in digital marketing is crucial in bringing in your target audience to convert them into returning customers and increase your business revenue.

While it is a slower process, investing your resources in optimizing your website with keywords and high-quality content is what contributes to better SERP rankings in the long run.

Understanding How SEO Works

With Search Engine Optimization, you increase the number of potential customers by being the first solution that users find. However, how exactly do search engines rank websites?

How Search Engines Rank Websites

Search engines work via three primary functions:

Crawling – Robots discover new and updated content, including webpages, videos, images, and PDFs, through links.
Indexing – After crawling, search engines render a page just like a browser would, and analyze its content. Then, the search engine stores the information in its index.
Ranking – search engines use algorithms to determine if the factors present are enough to meet the following criteria to be deemed worthy enough to rank high in SERPs.

Key Ranking Factors and Best Practices

Having understood how search engines rank websites, what specific factors influence how high they rank?

High-quality content

Producing content alone is not enough to help your website rank high in SERPs. Content must be unique, interesting, and have an objective that users seek to navigate organic traffic to your website.

Backlinks

Also known as inbound links that lead users back to your website. The quality and quantity of your backlinks influence how high search engines rank you.

Search Intent and Content Relevancy

Also known as user intent, wherein the goal is to predict what query users will type into a search engine. Content relevancy indicates how relevant a website is in relation to said query.

Website Loading Speed

How fast a page loads is another factor that SERPs consider when ranking your website. In order to provide quality user experience, a site that loads faster than others is prioritized. With that, there are several simple ways to learn how to improve page speed. To improve your loading speed, you must remember to:

Lessen image size – the larger the image, the slower your page loading speed
Reduce ads – while it is important to have ads, having too many can slow down load time
Limit embedding media – having too many links embedded in your content can reduce load speed as well
Avoid resource-heavy plugins – ensure that your plugins don’t negatively impact the load time of your website
Switch to a faster web host – choose a web host that meets your business needs and doesn’t hinder your loading speed
Choose a simple theme – a theme with too many effects greatly affects your page’s loading time
Optimize widgets – adding widgets may seem as help for your website but too much can also affect load speed. Be sure to optimize them or remove them if they prove to be unhelpful.

Mobile Friendliness

Because the majority of online traffic comes from users on mobile devices, SERPs deem websites that are optimized for mobile use worthy of a higher rank.

Domain Authority

It is calculated by evaluating multiple factors such as the number and quality of inbound links, content relevance, and domain age. A higher Domain Authority score indicates that a website is more likely to rank higher in search results, making it an essential consideration for any SEO strategy.

Keyword Optimization

The process that helps increase the relevance of a web page’s content based on a specific search query. SERPs rank websites that they deem to have the most relevant content that will provide a solution to users searching.

Website Structure

How your website is designed, laid out, and how pages connect with one another. Proper website structure contributes to high rank since it enhances user experience, preventing them from clicking away.

Website Security

Having a secure website not only helps protect users from scams but also helps increase your SERP ranking. This is because search engines prioritize trustworthy websites.

On-page Experience

A ranking factor that calculates the quality of a web page user experience through mobile optimization – responsiveness, accessibility, as well as quick loading time and page render quality.

Improve Website Visibility

In order to drive traffic to your website, you must work to increase your website visibility. This is an indicator of how visible your website is on the organic search results page once a query is put into a search engine.

On-page Optimization Techniques

On-page SEO helps optimize web page content for search engines and visitors. These include SEO methods such as providing quality content on websites that include meta tags, internal links, and URLs. However, in ensuring your web pages rank well on search engine results pages, you must also be wary of possible technical SEO issues that you may encounter. These will not only hinder your website from high ranking, but they can also lead to loss of customers, both old and new, as well as the inability to sustain business growth. Factors like poor content, title tagging, meta description, H1 tagging issues, missing alt tags, and broken links are just some of the many possible problems you may encounter.

Off-page Optimization Techniques

Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is any SEO strategy that does not involve producing any form of content for your website. Specifically, it is any action taken that is not your own in hopes to improve your SERP ranking. One example is link building, as it redirects visitors to high-quality pages to new or underperforming ones. It is important to have an SEO checklist for your website to ensure you maximize all the benefits to improve your SERP ranking altogether.

Driving More Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is when users are led to your website mainly through unpaid search results on search engines. This is the opposite of paid traffic which is generated by paid or sponsored ads. By being the first solution that users see when they type a query on a search engine, you bring a steady flow of traffic to your website and the products or services you offer. While it is a slower method, organic traffic actually proves to have a more stable conversion rate as compared to paid traffic in the long run. With that, what specific techniques can one do to increase organic traffic towards their website?

Keyword research and target selection

Keyword research is a method that helps businesses find which keywords provide valuable insight into the possible queries that your target audience and other users are usually inputting on search engines. Knowing these specific keywords or phrases can help plan out content and marking strategies to ensure you are the first to appear on SERPs.

Link building strategies

Link building is the practice of providing backlinks to a website to improve search engine visibility. This can be easily achieved through content marketing, email outreach, building useful tools, and public relations. One concrete example is when another website links your blog post on a certain topic on their post, helping drive traffic to you. Link building is essential for website visibility because SERPs look into how many links lead to your website, and the quality of those links. In fact, the top spot of Google SERPs, on average, contains 3.8 times more backlinks than the websites ranked lower.

Content creation and optimization

There are various forms of content that help drive traffic towards your website. Some examples include

Product pages – a good product page can not only boost SEO but it also serves as a PPC landing page
Blog posts – these include lists, guides, and articles that lead users to your products and services
Videos – videos in the form of product features or video tutorials on how to use the product can help boost SEO
Infographics – infographics or large-format images that present data according to your product can help attract users as it helps summarizes the topic effectively

Common SEO Challenges and Solutions

Optimizing your website and content don’t go without a few problems along the way. That is why it is important to familiarize yourself with the possible issues you can face when dealing with SEO.

Keeping up with constantly changing algorithms

Algorithms are a complex system SERPs use to retrieve data from their index. Once the data is collected, they determine the best possible results for a query, which affects a website’s ranking. However, algorithms are ever-changing, which makes it hard for businesses to guarantee or maintain their spot in SERPs. Because of this, it is important to not only stay up to date on these changes but to develop an algorithm update-resistant strategy to ensure your top spot on the results page.

Having user-intent content is one way to assure this, as it helps you curate material that appeals to them. This not only encourages them to click on your website but to follow through with a purchase. If users think your content is relevant, search engines will deem it the same.

Measuring success and ROI

It is one thing to set up SEO for your website, but it’s another to follow through by keeping track of how you’re doing. With SEO, it’s important to take note of the following metrics:

Search engine share of traffic sources – keep a close watch on which traffic sources are contributing the most to your traffic share. These include direct navigation traffic, referral traffic, and search traffic.
Referrals from search engine terms/phrases – keeping track of the most used terms, keywords, and phrases helps you identify trends. This will aid you in gauging how well your keywords perform and help identify which search queries bring you the most significant traffic.
Conversion Rate – it is vital to track which specific queries or search terms provide the most conversion. Additionally, you can refer to this data to further improve conversion in the future. Lastly, you can also use this data to pinpoint which landing pages bring in the most traffic, to enhance user experience.

Balancing SEO with other marketing efforts

While SEO is a vital part of your website’s digital marketing, there are other means of marketing that deserve just as much attention and investment. Each type of digital marketing addresses a specific concern. That is why it’s vital to have a good mix to ensure your website is getting the exposure it needs.

Fortify Your Website’s SEO with Verz Design!

Getting your website up and running is one thing, but optimizing it to increase website visibility is on a whole different level. Going about it alone can not only take a lot of time, resources and effort, but it could even end up being counterproductive. At Verz Design, you are guaranteed the best SEO services in Singapore. Through our team of dedicated SEO professionals, you are sure to rake in traffic in no time. Contact us at 6841 1680 or email us at @[email protected] for a free consultation today!

The Complete SEO Guide: Boosting Website Visibility and Traffic