SEO Basics: Your Guide to Ranking #1 on Google

Search engines follow similar principles for both local and global rankings. However, given that they position a site for specific, location-based results, they need to analyze some other ranking factors, too. Technical setup, content, and links are critical to getting a website into the search results.

SEO optimization

Technical Proficiency

On the other hand, our voice search study gave bloggers and journalists data that they can EASILY reference. Featured snippets are still your best chance to get extra visibility in front of searchers for a lot of keywords. Information gain is about offering new perspectives, data, or insights not found in other pages targeting the same search query. Metrics like conversions, brand authority, engagement, and revenue are clearly important. Zapier can’t help you with the first two points, but it can help you with the third.

Start your keyword research

SEO optimization

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that assesses your page’s Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience and are SEO ranking factors. But I also noticed that these posts gave out search engine optimization tips for voice search… without any data or research to back them up. If you’re optimizing old content, it’s a good idea to go through the process with a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Audit (also available for free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools). It will help you catch all the missing tags, unoptimized images, and more. When you start to notice constraints with time, resources, or results, consider looking at SEO consulting companies.

  • If you’re looking to get started with SEO or want to achieve better results for the low cost of $0, here are 110 of the best free SEO tools you should be using.
  • Or choose the URL prefix option to get data for only a specific section (for example, your blog or knowledge base).
  • SE Ranking even allows you to reply to Google and Facebook reviews directly from the platform, making it easier to engage with your customers.

It’s not about the actual words or information on the pages but more about setting up the website so search engines can navigate and make sense of that content. Becoming proficient in SEO requires understanding the inner workings of search engines. Shopify Magic is built to help with ecommerce optimization, which should be no surprise considering that ecommerce is Shopify’s bread and butter. You can use this tool to help your online store rank better in search results. Even if your business doesn’t have multiple locations, Yext can still be a helpful tool. It’s particularly good at helping you optimize for voice search, which is growing more and more important.

SEO optimization

But in my experience, it does help—especially for content that can go out of date really quickly. Adding the year to your title and description won’t make or break your CTR. You can double check if you have your schema set up correctly for rich results using the Schema Markup Validator.

Set regular intervals for evaluating your SEO performance (keep in mind SEO can take three to six months to work). Look for trends and outliers while considering seasonal factors to brainstorm what’s working and where to improve. While SEO Anomaly attracting online reviews is a team effort, from the marketing to the customer experience to the product or service, marketers can take some steps to generate more reviews. Generate an XML sitemap to provide web crawlers with a map of your site. Use a free third-party tool like Yoast SEO to speed up (and even automate the process).

The person you delegate to this job will contribute cross-functionally more often than not. When analyzing local websites, Google looks at the proximity to a searcher’s location. With the rise of local searches containing the phrase “near me,” it’s only fair that Google will try to present the closest businesses first. Up until now, we focused on getting a site rank in search results in general. If you run a local business, however, Google also lets you position it in front of potential customers in your area, specifically.

The focus is on delivering reliable, high-quality search results to users, which has guided Google’s content policies for years. Understanding the nuances of search penalties is important for maintaining and improving your website’s visibility. Penalties can significantly impact your site’s search engine rankings, either through automatic algorithmic actions or manual reviews by the search engine’s team. Here’s a beginner-friendly overview of algorithmic and manual search penalties, their differences, common issues that trigger them, and solutions for recovery.

SEO optimization

Understanding Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Keyword placement is where the work of SEOs and content creators converge. This is a key part of on-page SEO and is one of the core three categories of SEO as a practice, the other two being off-page SEO and technical SEO. There are some basic keyword usage rules you should follow to get started. Unique keywords should be employed on each page of your site in the areas that bots and humans normally look to reassure them that you have what they’re after. The long tail of search, according to Moz’s Marketing Scientist Pete Meyers is the “limitless space of low-volume (and often low-competition) keywords.

That’s why I invest a lot of my marketing budget into content design. The design might be the most underrated part of content marketing. And this Search Intent optimization helped my post crack the first page of Google within a month.

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