When we talk about web marketing with entrepreneurs and managers of small and medium-sized businesses we often realize that not everyone really knows what SEO is .
This air of mystery surrounding SEO positioning activity causes entrepreneurs to avoid addressing the topic , or to blindly rely on a web marketing agency, without knowing what to ask for and what results to expect.
For this reason I decided to write a " clarification " blog post aimed at those who want to understand in practice how SEO works without big words or technical descriptions.
SEO in three words
Without further ado, here are the activities you need to do or have done on your website so that its pages are indexed by Google in the first search results:
Choose the commercial (i.e. with a purchasing intent) and informational (i.e. with a learning intent) keywords for which you want to be found
Optimize some technical aspects of the site , more or less complex, and then get to work on the website
Having inbound links from "more important" sites than yours to increase its importance in the eyes of Google
Have an editorial plan of content (interesting for those looking for information to solve the problems you solve) so that the site increases its chances of receiving natural links
Knowing that positioning yourself for informative keywords (and therefore having a blog) is not always useful : when the purchasing process is very simple, or the product/service is very well known, well, there is not much to tell the customer
When to start doing Google SEO
The most typical case we encounter is the request for an SEO campaign to give greater visibility to a website already online, with its own content structure already defined, (often) without a blog, and accompanied by the following sentence " we spent a sum, the site is not to be touched, work on what is there ".
Good: you need to know that if you want to be visible on the first page (later in the post we will clarify better on which first page it is best for you to be visible) you must necessarily have structured the website with SEO in mind .
So the answer to the question, “When is the best time to start doing SEO?” is “ When you design your website ” (or you have to be willing to change it).
And to do this you must first have done keyword research, that is, have studied a priori a list of keywords for which you want to be visible on the first page (and hopefully in the first results) of Google.
Keyword research
What your "cousins" don't tell you is that not all keywords are the same , and that Google no longer thinks in terms of single keywords, but rather in terms of search intents that group several of them together.
There are also specific and generic commercial keywords, that is, they should lead the user to product/service category pages , because the user is already in the product selection or purchase phase, but not only.
Added to these are informative keywords, which should lead to an informational section of your site, designed to help people frame the problem they want to solve , or understand which product/service can satisfy their desire.
So even before you start search engine optimization you should have entrepreneurially chosen for which keywords you want your website to appear in the first results.
The problem here is that it is very easy to appear for some keywords that are perhaps not useful to you at all in terms of business or, worse, do not even have a significant number of searches (i.e. nobody searches for them).
The result is that you only get beautiful reports with a lot of keywords on the first page and in the first positions, maybe some traffic... but you don't sell anything , no requests for quotes and the phone doesn't ring!
The real strategic value of SEO lies here, and search engine optimization is often preceded by Google Ads campaigns to verify a priori which keywords convert, before positioning for them ( here you can find an article that explains when Google Ads doesn't work ).
To start understanding searches in your industry, you can use Uber Suggest , a tool that shows you average monthly volumes and search variations based on a keyword you enter.
Website Optimization
This part is usually the most scary and obscure (like the aerospace engineer who has to repair the space shuttle to prevent it from losing orbit).
Nothing could be further from the truth: it is a checklist of "on-site" elements to check which include (to simplify):
Controlling the content structure (sections that reference generic commercial keywords, product pages that reference specific commercial keywords, and blog structured according to informational keywords (blog categories for macro areas and blog posts for long main articles and shorter in-depth articles)
Formal control of the structure of the text and the images present
The site loading speed and other technical aspects that favor indexing
The presence of "broken" internal or external links ( here you can find a tool to check their presence on your website ), that is, links that do not lead to the page they point to (because it has been deleted, the URL has changed, etc.)
The trick here usually lies in making routine technical activities seem like science fiction.
And if you haven't been offered any technical changes to your website, well, that's a warning bell you shouldn't ignore.
Here you find a tool ( Seo Optimer ) to check the technical aspects of your site. The result is indicative and reliable, but before calling your web agency angrily, know that it must be interpreted and taken with a pinch of salt.
Inbound links
As mentioned above , inbound links are very important for the success of an SEO campaign .
The difficulty here is to have natural links to your website, and by natural we mean unpaid (which is expressly prohibited by Google's policy).
Add to this that there are links that really help you (the " follow " ones, which transfer authority from the starting site to yours) and those that are generally considered useless for positioning (the " no follow " ones).
So how do you do it? Everyone’s answer is to create really interesting content that people will naturally want to share.
But for a small or medium enterprise this is not always possible, so don't tell anyone, but they are purchased (with moderation and intelligence).
Here ( Tilinko ) you can find a paid platform where you can request suitable links for your project (it was reported to us at Da Zero a Seo 3, but we haven't tested it yet).
The editorial plan
That said, it is still essential to periodically publish educational content for your audience (in the case of a complex purchasing process, such as for consultancy in general) or informative and commercial content (in the case of a shorter purchasing process).
A very useful tool for understanding the doubts (and therefore the information needs of your web users) is Answer the Public .
Try it, just enter a keyword related to your industry and find out the questions people ask about it.
Here too, the trick is to choose topics (i.e. sets of keywords) that really allow you to compete for the top positions, and that bring profiled traffic to the website, which can then be brought to conversion with remarketing actions or by connecting to the public (for example with a newsletter).
If your website only has news like "our latest fair" or "pictures from Christmas Day 2014" in a news section... well, you have a problem!
How to check how you look
Now that you have a general understanding of what SEO is, the first step to understanding how your website is doing is to use SeoZoom (the tool we also use for daily SEO activities) and enter your domain and that of your competitors.
You will immediately find out if you are performing better or worse than them, and for which keywords your website is indexed.
If you have any questions about SEO comment below or email us and we will get back to you shortly.
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