Search engine plays a vital role in our daily lives in this modern era. From browsing academic courses to reading the latest news, all kinds of information can be found on the internet. But how do search engines determine which content ranks higher than the other?
How do we get our content to be shown on search engines?
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is the process of optimizing a website so its pages can become visible on search engines. Websites that provide relevant content and a friendly experience to their visitors will be ranked higher on search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Long story short, SEO is a free method to market your content.
With higher ranks on search engines, businesses and individuals can be benefited in many ways. This organic marketing channel can help your business in each customer funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. From educating the market about your products, promoting your unique selling point, to convincing visitors to complete a purchase, many goals can be achieved with SEO.
Because of its huge benefits, SEO has been, and is still, performed by companies from all across the globe.
Whether startups or unicorns, local businesses or multi-billion companies, organizations are racing to boost their presence on the internet. Tokopedia, Gojek, and Shopee, for instance, hired SEO specialists, executives, and consultants to complete such goals. Interestingly, not only can experienced professionals perform SEO activities, but anyone can thrive in this marketing channel.
What Are The Types of SEO?
Generally speaking, there are two SEO elements that are equally important: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is about optimizing elements on your website. This includes improving copywriting on your landing pages, publishing high-quality content regularly, handling technical problems that may occur, and the like.
On the other hand, off-page SEO is handling elements not on your website, such as backlinks. Collaborating with other website masters and sharing links to your website on social media are two examples of this technique.
How to Perform SEO For Free
Anyone can boost their website’s online presence with SEO for free. It is time we learn how to do SEO.
Keyword Research
The first step to SEO is understanding what your website is about and what keywords are relevant. Which keywords do you want to rank your website at? What topics are currently trending? What are the difficulties for each keyword? Various free tools like Semrush, Uber Suggest, and SEO Frog may be beneficial in discovering your keywords.
To illustrate, you may have an online blog about traveling and tours and would like to gain more audience through SEO. After doing some research at Google and Semrush, you might conclude that phrases like “what is traveling” and “traveling to Singapore” are the right keywords for your blog.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is the process of visiting and surveying websites with a high ranking on your targeted keyword.
What are your competitors writing about? Which particular content do you find most interesting? These contents can be used as a benchmark for your own content. With the traveling scenario, you may search “what is traveling” on Google and click on the top three ranked websites.
Content Creation
There are several aspects of content that generally results in a higher rank: quality, freshness, and intent.
The quality of websites generally prompts their ranks. Webpages that solve someone’s problems and add value to their lives generally have better quality than those that spam users with certain keywords.
Another aspect to keep in mind is content freshness. This is because search engines like Google prefer fresh content with accurate and updated data to outdated pages with irrelevant data.
User intention also plays a role in determining the quality of content. When targeting the keyword “buy bikes,” for instance, instead of providing informational paragraphs, you should rather create a transactional page so that webpage visitors can turn into paying customers.
Conclusion
I hope you find this article beneficial for your marketing endeavors. Patience is key when it comes to SEO. You cannot expect immediate results, especially if your website is brand new.
As long as you do things the right way, you may start seeing parts of your website on Google’s results pages in approximately six months.