What is Search Engine Optimization?
You've probably heard of search engine optimization or SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I have realized in many meetings that the knowledge around the details of what it is and how it is done is relatively low. Therefore, I thought I would take a few minutes and tell you about the basics of a search engine optimization.
We all search for information today through various search engines on our phones, computers or tablets. Google is the largest search engine in the whole world but there are many more such as Bing, Baidu (largest in China), Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and many more. Since Google is the largest search engine, SEO usually adapts websites according to what Google's terms and conditions are important already when developing the site. Not sure that your website is built the right way? You can easily check this with technical tools. You can book a free consultation with me, then I will go through your website before our digital meeting and see if everything is right.
On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO
To make it easy, we usually divide search engine optimization into 2 different main groups. On-Page SEO concerns all the work that can be done on a website to improve ranking on Google and Off-Page SEO is any work that can be carried out outside the website, such as marketing with the aim of drawing relevant traffic to the website, which is an important part of search engine optimization efforts. In this article I will talk about on-page SEO work. If you are interested in how you can drive traffic to your website through marketing, we have several other posts about it.
Before making a configuration with SEO tools on your website, you need to do some research. A configuration of the wrong keywords does no good. Usually the following points are followed.
- Check out what the competitors are doing
- Check out how to lie on Google so you don't change something that's already good
- Find the right keywords for your services
- Decide which pages to optimize with the aim of generating traffic
- Find the right schedule type
- Check for any redirects
- Update alt tags, snippets, titles and texts
- Configure the seo tool on the site
- Add links to the site
- Create a relevant sitemap and upload it to the search console
Competitor analysis helps you gain insight into your competitors' digital positioning
When you want to appear on selected keywords, it is possible that you will start competing digitally with your industry competitors. SEO tools can help us tell you if keywords are easy or difficult to compete with and we can also find out what keywords your competitors have on their site. Sometimes it may be better to choose a keyword with less traffic that is easier to compete with that still generates relevant visitors — you make that decision together after doing a competitive analysis. We perform keyword, current and competitor analyses to enable you to make fact-based decisions about how you want to position yourself in the digital market.
A current situation analysis helps us analyze how you appear on Google today
If you have a website that has been live for a while, it can be smart to perform a current analysis to see which keywords you already appear on Google with and what rank (place) on google they have. If you appear on the front page of Google, the first 10 results, with keywords that generate a lot of traffic, you don't want to spoil what is already working well! A current analysis can also be useful to perform before rebuilding a website so that you can plan which pages and URL addresses you need to keep in the new page structure. If you plan to rename several pages in your new website and old pages generate a lot of traffic, the old links will remain on google and if you visit the page that no longer exists, it says - 404 - the page is not found! Then you want to plan in redirects links to get a smooth user experience.
A keyword analysis helps you find the right keywords
If you want to appear on the first page of search engines, you must first decide which keywords you want to be good at. Then you should take the opportunity to do a keyword analysis with a company that works with SEO as they use better tools and can perform a relevant keyword analysis. An experienced agency knows how to search effectively for the right keywords and can come up with suggestions beyond your own. Often companies that I work with are surprised that the keywords they have suggested have so few searches and that we can offer suggestions for better keywords. As I said, you can guess - but it helps to know how it really is.
Start on-page configuration
Now that you have an insight into your current digital positioning and a plan of where you want to be, then the work on the site begins. We usually help our customers to write excerpts, titles and copy on the pages so that they can be optimized in the best way for the keywords that they want to enter. It's not about pressing the keyword x number of times in a text. You should write helpful and clear texts to get the best possible results. When the work is done, we upload a sitemap in the search console that tells google which pages to index and what information to retrieve.
Find out how you can get started with Atom Agency
Do you want to know more about search engine optimization and if it is the right strategy for you? Contact us today to discuss your opportunities and challenges - book a free consultation. If it is the right strategy for your company, it can be a successful path to explore.
