Are you at the start of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) journey? Maybe you’ve heard that SEO can help drive traffic to your website and get you higher rankings by knowing how search engines work.
We’re here to remove any confusion or complications around SEO – with some insight on how artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing fits into the picture. Once you understand the fundamentals, you can learn how to leverage SEO to drive traffic and generate quality leads.
The Key Elements of SEO
What you’ll learn in this blog is:
- What is SEO?
- What are the three pillars of SEO?
- Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
- How do search engines work?
- How does Google order and rank search results (and how to optimize for RankBrain)?
- What is an SEO strategy?
- How to set objectives for your SEO strategy
- 3 examples of SEO objectives
- How to set objectives for different business types
- How to become an SEO specialist
- What skills do you need to become an SEO specialist?
- What can you earn as an SEO specialist?
- AI and SEO – what’s coming?
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s start by asking an obvious question: what exactly is SEO?
SEO stands accurate mobile phone number list for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages (SERPs). Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
There’s a great graphic created by Rand Fiskin, co-founder of Moz, that takes from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ pyramid. Fishkin’s ‘Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs’ looks at how people should execute SEO.
Top tip: SEO is no longer confined to search engines like Google or Bing. It’s also important to consider social networks to rank videos on YouTube and leverage TikTok as a search engine as more people turn to them to find information.
What are the three pillars of SEO?
As a digital marketer, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company found by searchers is a core skill, and understanding how SEO is evolving will keep you at the top of your game.
While SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles do not. We can break SEO into three core components or pillars accurate mobile phone number list that you need to be familiar with – and action regularly:
Technical Optimization: Technical Optimization is the process of completing activities on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to content. It often happens behind the scenes. A simple example of technical optimization is submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: On-Page Optimization is the process of ensuring the content on your site is relevant and provides a great user experience. It includes targeting the right keywords within your content and can be done through a content management system like WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify.
Off-Page Optimization: Off-Page Optimization is the process of enhancing your site’s search engine rankings through activities outside of the site. This is largely driven by high-quality backlinks, which help to build the site’s reputation.
Paid search vs. organic search – the differences and similarities
From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences and similarities between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search.
What sms to data are the differences between paid and organic search?
There are five key differences between paid and organic search. Let’s look at each one of them.
Position
The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.
Here’s an example from searching ‘best water bottle’.
Be aware that the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews is changing display advertising all the time using AI.