What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.Despite the acronym, SEO is as
much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s
about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are
seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume.
Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people
who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
If
knowing your audience’s intent is one side of the SEO coin, delivering it in a
way search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other. In this guide,
expect to learn how to do both.
Search engine
basics
Search
engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and
evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to
answer your query.
Search
engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on
the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as
“crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query
in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and
ranking in more detail in Chapter 2.
Which search results are "organic"?
As
we said earlier, organic search results are the ones that are earned through
effective SEO, not paid for (i.e. not advertising). These used to be easy to
spot - the ads were clearly labeled as such and the remaining results typically
took the form of "10 blue links" listed below them. But with the way
search has changed, how can we spot organic results today?
Today,
search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with
both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP
features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are
featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels,
etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are
seeking.
For
example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather
forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a
site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,”
you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient,
right?
It’s
important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their
goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming
back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.
Some
SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include
featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a
box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).
It's
worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they
aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features
often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD,
and IMDb.
Why SEO is important
While
paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic
to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
Organic
search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy
searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US
searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.
SEO
is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly,
can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of
content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball
over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your
site.
Search
engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.
Optimizing
your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your
content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.
Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?
Depending
on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s),
you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you
would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!
If
you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies
and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in
quality. Knowing how to
choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money,
as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will
help.
White hat vs black hat SEO
"White
hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that
abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.
"Black
hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool
search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous
risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has
ethical implications.
Penalized
websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very
careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.
Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry
Search
engines want to help you succeed. In fact, Google even has a Search Engine
Optimization Starter Guide, much like the Beginner’s Guide! They're
also quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing
conferences — such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon — regularly attract engineers
and representatives from major search engines.
Google
assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central
Help Forum and by hosting live office hour
hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster
Forums in 2014.)
While
webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying
principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide
your visitors with a great online experience. To do that, follow search engine
guidelines and fulfill user intent.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make
pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Don't
deceive your users.
- Avoid
tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is
whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to
a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my
users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Think
about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically
generated content
- Participating
in link schemes
- Creating
pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking
— the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than
visitors.
- Hidden
text and links
- Doorway
pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic
to your website.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Basic
principles:
- Provide
clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
- Keep
page titles clear and relevant.
- Links
are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have
grown organically.
- Social
influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on
how you rank organically in the long run.
- Page
speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
- Use
alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the
content.
Things to
avoid:
- Thin
content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise
redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
- Abusive
link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links
such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to
de-indexing.
- Ensure
clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic
parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
- Make
your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid
non-letter characters.
- Burying
links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
- Duplicate
content
- Keyword
stuffing
- Cloaking
— the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than
visitors.
Guidelines
for representing your local business on Google
If
the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a
storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies
for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has
guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and
managing these listings.
Basic
principles:
- Be
sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you
must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must
serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail
store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
- Honestly
and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data,
including its name, address, phone number, website address, business
categories, hours of operation, and other features.
Things to
avoid
- Creation
of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
- Misrepresentation
of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your
business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings
for fake addresses
- Use
of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
- Abuse
of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive
reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
- Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines
Fulfilling user intent
Instead
of violating these guidelines in an attempt to trick search engines into
ranking you higher, focus on understanding and fulfilling user intent. When a
person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an
answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user
intent.”
If
a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical
bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?
Your
job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the
format in which they desire it.
Common
user intent types:
Informational: Searching
for information. Example: “What is the best type of laptop for photography?”
Navigational: Searching
for a specific website. Example: “Apple”
Transactional: Searching
to buy something. Example: “good deals on MacBook Pros”
You
can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and
evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s
very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.
Also
evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you
currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?
Providing
relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in
search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust
with your online audience.
Before
you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to
execute a strategic SEO plan.
Know your website/client’s goals
Every
website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals.
This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on,
where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help
you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses,
etc.
What
will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO
investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your
organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this
simple:
For
the website ____________, my primary SEO KPI is ____________.
Here
are a few common KPIs to get you started:
- Sales
- Downloads
- Email
signups
- Contact
form submissions
- Phone
calls
And
if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your
Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:
- Clicks-to-call
- Clicks-to-website
- Clicks-for-driving-directions
You
may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs
list, and that’s intentional.
“But
wait a minute!” You say. “I came here to learn about SEO because I heard it
could help me rank and get traffic, and you’re telling me those aren’t
important goals?”
Not
at all! You’ve heard correctly. SEO can help your website rank higher in search
results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that
ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no
one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your
traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective.
For
example, if you run a lead generation site, would you rather have:
- 1,000
monthly visitors and 3 people fill out a contact form? Or...
- 300 monthly visitors and 40 people fill out a contact form?
If
you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions,
we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid
out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the
other way around.
SEO
accomplishes so much more than vanity metrics. When done well, it helps real
businesses achieve real goals for their success.
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