SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art and science of improving a website’s visibility in search engines, leading to more and better organic traffic.
- SEO is both an art and a science because search engines use algorithms that account for objective elements (like crawlability, which is static) and subjective elements (like the user experience, which is dynamic).
- SEO is about improving a website’s visibility in search engines because organic traffic—users who click on a search result and proceed to a webpage—increases as more pages rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing.
- SEO done right leads to more (quantity) and better (quality) organic traffic because as a website’s pages rank higher for relevant keywords, more and more of the right users find the website’s products, services, or information, leading to customers, clients, or regular users.
While search engines have become more sophisticated since their inception, and there is more competition than ever before, ranking well in search engines for the right keywords can still work wonders for your website. Whether you are aiming at selling products, landing clients, or increasing subscriptions, organic traffic from SEO remains a fantastic and essential marketing channel.
In RicketyRoo’s intro to SEO fundamentals, we’ll work through how search engines work, key factors for SEO, and essential components of successful search engine optimization.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines are complex systems, but they can essentially be boiled down to three steps. If you want to learn more, Google’s explainer articulates their process in detail. You can also read about Bing here. Below, we’ll focus on Google.
Crawling
The web has no central repository of pages, so Google must “crawl” the web (primarily by following links and submitted sitemaps) to discover pages. Googlebot (sometimes referred to as a robot, bot, spider, or crawler) crawls pages (though some are blocked to crawlers) and renders pages so that Google can analyze the page content in the next step.
Indexing
Once crawled, Google analyzes the content on the page in a process called indexing. Google attempts to sort through duplicate pages and also gathers important signals about the page content, which are then used in the ranking process. Information about pages is stored in Google’s index, a vast library of web pages.
Serving
Google analyzes hundreds of factors to rank and serve web pages for a user’s query. Complex algorithms account for user data (like location) and information from websites and their pages to determine which pages best match what a user is searching for.
SEO is involved at every step of this process, but it is the last piece on ranking where search engine optimization typically focuses most of its attention. SEO is all about optimizing the right signals to satisfy search engines and users, thereby ranking higher, drawing more traffic, and reinforcing the quality and helpfulness of a given web page.
How is organic search different from paid search?
Don’t let anyone tell you that organic traffic is “free.” Blood, sweat, and tears (and money!) go into producing quality content that ranks well in Google. The main difference between PPC and SEOis that while you can pay to appear in ad slots, often at the top of search, you can never pay Google directly to rank better in organic search. You will pay with time, effort, and energy on your content and website, but in the end, organic rankings are up to the search engine’s algorithms.
Key Factors for SEO Success
Google discusses hundreds of signals it uses to rank pages. Although it never discloses all of its ranking factors, it does offer some information about its ranking systems and what helps it understand websites.
We won’t attempt to list every possible ranking signal here, but it can be helpful to think about three buckets or factors for successful SEO: content quality, authority and trustworthiness, and user experience.
Remember that all these factors have a reciprocal relationship, and isolating one is artificial and generally ill-advised. If you create genuinely helpful, high-quality content, you will aim to provide a pleasant user experience (otherwise, that content wouldn’t be helpful!), and by pleasing users, you are more likely to gain links and mentions for your brand and website, increasing your authority and trustworthiness.
Content Quality
Google repeatedly instructs us to provide “helpful, reliable, people-first content.” This is especially important with the advent of generative AI, where anyone with access to ChatGPT or other LLM interfaces can generate written and visual content on the fly.
Whatever type of page you are creating, your aim should be to make it as helpful and user-friendly as possible. If your page repeats the same information (perhaps reordered and reworded) that someone can find anywhere else among the search results, then why should users or search engines rate or rank your content above others?
Competition is steep these days, but the bottom line is that content creation has never been easy—at least not for content that is high quality and genuinely helpful to users. Prioritize quality over quantity. Put in the hard work to create truly useful content, and you’ll be rewarded – by Google and by users.
User Experience
If you are creating and serving quality content, then you already have the user and their experience top of mind. Still, apart from the text, visual, video, and audio content you create, it’s worth any website’s while to consider the page experience and overall user experience of the website. Pages should load quickly, and page elements should be easily navigable for users. White space is your friend. Optimize for various viewport sizes.
We won’t get into all the possibilities here, but if you design experiences around your content that pleases users, you will likely see both your traffic and conversions increase.
Authority & Trustworthiness
Anyone can create a website. Anyone can create content. Not everyone should—at least not about topics they don’t really know much about. But since anyone can technically produce web pages about anything, search engines need a way to filter through shoddy content. Some of this sorting and filtering can take place as Google analyzes content, but if there is a lot of overlap between web pages, Google wants to know that they are serving up trustworthy sources.
Google uses factors like links to your pages and domain in general, citations, brand mentions, social signals, and more to determine whether your website is worth showing up in search results. Google insists they do not use any sort of “domain authority” metric, but trust signals like backlinks are why some websites, especially newer ones, struggle to compete. You’ll get to know domain authority really quickly if you are pursuing highly competitive keywords with major brands in the search results.
Essential Components of Search Engine Optimization
Now that we’ve overviewed the three critical factors for SEO success, we can move on to some additional practical matters and “types” of SEO that are important for the basics.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website and includes elements like:
- Site speed
- Crawlability
- Duplicate content and canonicalization
- Structure data
- Sitemaps
- Hreflang
- Redirects
- Errors, like 404s
These days, CMSs make technical SEO reasonably straightforward, especially for smaller websites. Tech SEO is crucial and can make or break your SEO from the start. Especially for larger or enterprise websites with a lot of moving pieces to corral, technical SEO is essential. And for every website, if your pages aren’t crawlable and indexable, you’re going nowhere fast—at least not in search engines.
Keyword Research
Keyword research helps you identify what questions, problems, and solutions people are searching for in your niche, category, or vertical. Quality keyword research will identify opportunities from the top of the marketing funnel, through the middle, and down to the bottom. By identifying and targeting keywords across the funnel in your focus, you’ll have a better chance of getting found in search results by more users who may be interested in your products, services, or information.
On-Page SEO
Good on-page SEO helps users and search engines understand a page’s content. On-page SEO generally includes keywords, metadata, H-level heading structure, optimized copy, alt text, and more. It also includes aspects of technical SEO, like optimizing images for better load speed, structured data, and avoiding interstitials (like intrusive pop-ups) that can disrupt UX.
Fundamentally, on-page SEO goes back to providing “helpful, reliable, people-first content.” Certain aspects of on-page work are a little more technical, but overall, we are looking to provide an excellent page-level experience that satisfies our users.
Content Creation
Content creation goes hand in hand with keyword research and on-page SEO, but it’s worth mentioning on its own because it is often a standalone process—though it is often informed by keyword research and on-page “best practices.”
If you don’t have quality content, you’re not going to rank. You might rank for your brand name and a few assorted keywords, but without pages that are targeted at suitable topics for your industry, you’ll never move the needle. High-quality content is essential to improving your rankings. Beyond broadening and improving your keyword rankings, you’ll also improve your topical authority and increase the likelihood that other websites will want to link to yours.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO typically refers to work done outside of a website to improve that website’s trustworthiness and authority. Most often, off-page work centers on link-building, which is acquiring links from other websites to your website. Those links are like votes of confidence that increase Google’s trust in your site.
Beyond links, off-page SEO also involves social media, brand awareness, and anything that generates interest and buzz about your brand. In local SEO, you’ll want to use citations and Google Business Profile to improve your visibility.
Analytics and Tools
If you talk to ten different marketers involved in SEO, you’ll probably get ten recommendations for tools. Everyone has their own SEO tech stack, and there are plenty of tools we could recommend that we fire up daily at RicketyRoo (check out 5 local SEO tools we enjoy). Here, though, we’ll stick to two essential tools: Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
In our humble opinion, Google Search Console (GSC) is the single best SEO tool—and it’s completely free to set up on your site and use. GSC gives you a window into how your site is performing in search. This overview of what keywords are drawing impressions and clicks to your website is practically priceless.
Third-party tools are still helpful for discovering new opportunities, especially, but GSC presents so much actionable data that we generally recommend looking there first for SEO opportunities. Beyond that, you can request indexing for new or updated pages, submit sitemaps, get alerted to site issues, learn about page experience, identify links, and more.
RicketyRoo Pro Tip: Run—don’t walk!—to get GSC set up and running on your site. We use it every day to ascertain organic performance and technical issues for all our clients. Google Search Console is an untapped goldmine for improving your SEO.
Google Search Console is essential for understanding how organic traffic is arriving at your site, and Google Analytics (GA4) is fundamental for observing and measuring what users are doing once they arrive. You can measure performance to an extent in GSC, but GA4 is the gold standard for measuring traffic to your website and identifying how the various acquisition channels for your website (e.g., paid, social [organic + paid], direct, organic) are performing. Like GSC, GA4 is free to set up and use. There’s a learning curve, but it’s worth the effort to track conversions and back up your efforts and assumptions with hard event data from your site.
Hit the SERPs with SEO Basics
Search engine optimization sometimes carries a mystique, as if some sort of special knowledge allows agencies or gurus to skyrocket organic traffic out of the blue. SEO can be complex, and there is no doubt that expertise and experience correlate with favorable outcomes.
Fundamentally, though, SEO is about creating positive experiences for users: meeting their needs, and providing them with pleasant experiences on your website. Most websites can be improved for SEO with just a few fundamentals and an understanding of what best benefits users.
Today, search engine results pages (SERPs) are a bit crowded, with much more displaying than the “ten blue links” of a bygone era. Still, organic traffic remains a reliable source of traffic, leads, and conversions. Any investment in optimizing your website will pay dividends for your brand.
