Visibility Highlight June 3, 2020

SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is inherently competitive and dynamic because nobody maintains top positions on any search engine forever. Optimizing for search is akin to a chessboard, because it is about strategy: attacking, counterattacking, defending, and battling for the initiative. SEO experts must continually empire-build or risk losing.

Companies rarely maintain search prominence without sagacious exertion and commitment. 1st page rankings do not happen by accident.

To rank in the top results consistently, your content must be relevant, crawlable, engaging and authoritative.

The underlying goal of any SEO optimization work is one thing; Increase visibility to get you found on Google. However, unlike the “push” type of advertising, you should not look at SEO as an expenditure that gives ROI instantly, on the contrary, it’s a long-term investment that pays off in the long run but requires patience and diligence.

1. BASICS

The first step to submit your website to Google should be handled during the website development. At this stage you don’t worry about the specifics of the “why” and “how” of the searches and visitors but you put the required elements in place for the website to be properly taken into account by the crawling bots and for you to have a view on the stats.

2. RESEARCH

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO strategy and is similar to carrying out market research. Keywords impact every aspect of SEO: Topic Choice, Content Planning, Link-Building, CTAs and etc.

Researching keywords help you understand and reach the target audience. It supplies insight into what potential clients are searching for, how they think about their problems and the exact search queries they’re using.

The second part of keyword research is identifying who your main competitors are in your niche and how they perform. Scrutinizing competitors and their rankings is the ultimate way to analyze their content strategy, find their strengths and weaknesses, and reverse engineer what works for them Competitor analysis is a vital process for any SEO campaign and it enhances your overall marketing strategy.

3. TECHNICAL SEO

Before diving into content creation and optimization, our SEO experts and web developers will make sure it is 100% technically optimized and healthy.

This step ensures your website is easy to navigate and is free of any technical issues that prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. It includes:

Mobile friendly check-up
Sitemap
Robot TXT file
Crawlability and indexability check-up in GSC
Loading speed
Page depth
URL structure
Identify and fix broken links
Structured data
Canonical tags
HTTPS

4. ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

At this stage, we already have compass keywords. If those keywords are not clustered and organized as topic/page groups, they can cause chaos and lead to “keyword cannibalization”.

Our SEO team will not only optimize already existing pages for specific keyword groups, but will also create a content calendar with all pages (service page, blog article etc..) having dedicated target in the optimization plan! Here is what we look at:

Title and Meta Tags
Heading Structuring
Update the page experience: Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Visual Stability)
Search intent optimization
Image and design element optimization
Existing Content Update/Optimization
Cannibalization check-up
Bounce Rate
Click-Through Rate

5. OFF-PAGE SEO (LINK-BUILDING)

Backlinks are forever extremely important in Google’s ranking algorithm. Like everything else, time changes everything. Now that the Google algorithm is very sophisticated, off-page SEO is no longer a number’s game. Quality is king now.

But what makes a link a high-quality link?

Domain and URL Rating of the website that links to your page
Relevancy of the website
Traffic (and traffic trend) of the website
Link Placement and Anchor of the link

To increase your website’s domain authority, you need links from highly relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative websites that bring value to their online audience.

One high-quality link can bring more results than 100’s of low or even middle-quality backlinks.

Common Link-Building Strategies include:

Content Marketing
Email Outreach
Broken Link-Building
PR
Guest Posting

6. LOCAL SEO

Targeting geo-specific audiences is vital for many businesses. However, once the website is fully optimized for General SEO, there are some extra steps to follow for websites in which geographical targeting is important.

The leading Geo-Targeting Platform is Google My Business and the steps to follow to optimize for it are: