A Complete Guide on
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What is SEO, why it is an important part of Internet Marketing. Internet marketing, which is also known as online marketing or digital marketing, is the process of promoting a business, brand, company’s products and services over the internet by using different strategies and tools which helps in driving traffic, leads, sales and revenue.
Digital Marketing is a very broad term that includes various activities, marketing tactics and strategies and Search engine optimization(SEO) is one of these strategies which need to be implemented or done properly and if it is not then the other digital marketing strategies will not be fruitful or give the expected results.
Digital Marketing matters for every business it includes multiple online marketing strategies like Search engine optimization(SEO) services, Pay per click (PPC), Content Marketing, Conversion rate optimization (CRO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Referral Marketing and more.
Here in this guide we will talk about the various aspects of SEO from the keyword research to traffic generation.
SEO marketing helps in growing your business website by improving the visibility on the search engines and brings organic traffic. SEO basically refers to the improvement of unpaid results that is natural/organic or direct traffic. SEO services providers target different kinds of searches used by users such as video search, image search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Search engine optimization company like SEO Experts Company India aka SEO India which is one of the reliable companies providing the organic SEO services helps you to rank higher on Google by analyzing your business and competitors strategy.
If you want to rank first on Google you must hire the services from an agency which has a proven record in helping businesses to improve organic ranking in Google.
SEO Basics
A good SEO starts with ensuring the crawling accessibility and moves up from there. Lets checkout the seven steps to successful SEO to get top ranking on Google.
First step is Crawling Accessibility to make sure that search engine can read your website.
Second step, Compelling content means the content on the website should be informative to the users.
Third step, your keywords should be optimized on the website to attract searchers and engines
Fourth step, the loading speed of the website should not be more than 5 seconds
Fifth step, Share worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
Sixth step, Meta tags of the website that is the title, description and URL structure should be SEO optimized And the last but not the least the Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs.
Why Hiring an SEO Company is Important for your Business
In this digital world, the importance of SEO marketing rises more than ever before, reason being search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems and users are now more comfortable to purchase the products online as this saves time and it is more accessible.
Nowadays, More than 65% of the search engine users clicks on the top 5 suggestions in the Search engine results pages and this is the opportunity to gain visitors to your website to access your services. SEO is not only about the search engines but good SEO practices followed by white label SEO company will improve your user experience and usability of your website. This is one of the reasons to improve your online visibility.
Search engine users or your most potential audience trust search engine and having presence in the top positions for the keywords or search queries. Moreover, SEO can put you ahead of your competitors.
Stages of Search engine optimization (SEO)
First Stage : Technical SEO
Second Stage: On-Page SEO/ on-site SEO
Third Stage: Off-Page SEO/ off-site SEO
Understanding Technical SEO is essential to know that the webpages are structured for both humans and crawlers. So, you should know about how websites work, how search engines understand websites, how users interact with websites.
What SEO does? As we know the Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing the website and for this you should know about what you need to optimize.
Loading speed of the website is a very important factor because if your website loading speed is more than 5 seconds it will increase the bounce rate. Why is it important? Now, every business wants that their website deliver a great user experience and it is the fact that the website delights returning and new visitors is likely to perform better on the search engines.
Another reason why you should take your website seriously is that your website speed also affects your SEO. How?? Website speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests and a fast loading speed can help you to improve your SEO. Other factors included in technical SEO is HTML this will help in knowing for what web page has been created for and by this google crawlers determine the relevancy of your document to a particular query.
Here is the checklist of important steps you can take to ensure your technical SEO:
1. Use Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) : This is very important to keep sensitive information sent across the internet encrypted so that only the intended recipient can access it.
2. Mobile friendly Make sure your website is mobile friendly as nowadays, people use their smartphones to search a product or if they are looking for information. So, one should invest in responsive design of the website because you never know on what device someone will be using to view your website.
3. Website Loading Speed Speed of your website is considered as an important SEO factor and Search engines prefer sites that load quickly. It is not only important for website owners but also for the users. If your website takes more than 5 seconds to load it will increase the bounce rate of your website.
Following are the reasons why it is important:
a) Your website is the first impression of your business, so when your website loads faster you will create a strong impression
b) From the user perspective, a fast loading website makes your user experience good.
c) Slow websites kill conversations
d) It will affects your google rankings
4. Duplicate Content Issues
Your website must have unique, informative and quality content, duplicate content means you are trying to manipulate search rankings to get more traffic
5. Create an XML sitemap Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the file used to keep all the URLs on the website as it includes extra information about the each URLs like the meta data, when the webpages were last updated and more. Creating an XML sitemap will help you to crawl your website more efficiently.
6. Enable AMP Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP), it will help in mobile web browsing and intended to help web pages load faster. For those who've never heard about the AMP, it is a open source HTML framework developed by the AMP open source project.
7. Structured Data markup Structured Data which is also known as Schema optimization is a code that will help search engines to know what your website is about in a better way. This information about your business helps search engines to index your website more effectively and provide the more relevant results.
8) Register your website on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools These tools are free that allow you to submit your website to search engines for indexing. So, whenever you want to launch your website you should submit your XML sitemap on the Bing Webmaster and Google search console so that they can crawl your website to their search engines for indexing. Also with this you can check your website mobile usability, access search analytics, you can check the backlinks to your website, and disavow spammy links.
STAGE 2 : On-page SEO On-page SEO/
On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing the web pages content for search engines and users. The common on-page SEO practices include optimization of Meta Tags, content optimization, internal linking and URL structure optimization
On-page SEO is important for the user experience, to reduce bounce rate and dwell time, for search intent, page loading speed and click-through-rate (CTR).
How to Optimize your Content?
The best practice to optimize your content is to use your targeted keywords in the first 100-150 words to help Google to understand what your page is about. Wrap your Blog title in H1 Tag as it will help Google to understand the structure of the page. In the subheading, include your targeted keyword and wrap that subheading in H2 Tag.
Use the keywords multiple times in the content of the website, it will help Google to know what your website is all about. Also, use the LSI keyword to make your content relevant for the different search queries.
External Links or Outbound links also helps Google in figuring out your page’s topic and shows Google that your web page has quality information.
URL Optimization: SEO friendly URL is one of the important thing which people usually forgets or we can say this is the underrated part of on-page search engine optimization.
Tips to Make SEO Friendly URLs Keep your URL short Include your keyword in the URL
Meta Tags Optimization
The other important factor in on-page SEO Optimization is optimize your title and description. Your title gives search engines the overview of what your web page is all about. Use title tag modifiers like best, guide, checklist, review, fast, top can also help you to rank first on Google for the long tail version of your target keyword.
Write the unique and keyword rich meta descriptions which helps your result stand out and boost the CTR
Share valuable SEO Content
Start sharing the valuable SEO content, it should be unique and informative to the users. If you want to make your Content SEO optimized must follow these tips:
a) Add the images, screenshots and steps so that it will be easy for someone to put your content into practice.
b) Your content should be engaging, and copywriting is the best practice to make content more engaging.
You never heard about the copywriting. Don’t worry. Copywriting is the practice of crafting your content in order to be informative, inspiring and to persuade. This will improve the structure, increase flow of articles and make your content more shareable. With copywriting you can understand your customer needs and wants consequently increase sales and conversions.
c) Copywriting is implemented in sales letters, blog posts, advertisements and social media posts.
d) Keep updating your article with new strategies and information
Optimize Content for Search Intent
Your web page content has to satisfy search intent or user intent and it has to be what your user wants. Common types of search intent are informational, commercial, navigational and transactional.
How to Optimize website for CTR
Why organic Click through rate is important, CTR is google ranking factor. High CTR drives more traffic on your website.
Ways to Improve your Organic CTR
Use question Title Tags - Question Based title tags have an above average CTR
Fill out the missing description, if you don’t have a description just add them.
Use review and FAQ Schema, Schema doesn’t help SEO directly but rich snippets can help you to get more clicks.
Add the current year to your Title and Description
Some Advance Tips for On-page SEO
First, use original Images
Internal Linking
Write Comprehensive Content
Boost your Page Speed
Off-page/off-site SEO
Off-Page SEO or off-site SEO includes efforts done outside of the website to increase google ranking. Off-page activities include link building, brand awareness, increasing engagement and social media shares. Off-page SEO are the activities or actions performed away from the website.For eg. Link Building, make sure your web pages are ready for link building. For this you have to layout your internal pages. Optimization of internal pages can make a huge difference in your overall rankings. Besides this, let’s check out the best off page SEO techniques:
a) Brand Mentions
b) Commenting
c) Influencer outreach
d) Guest Author
e) Broken Link Building
f) Social networking
g) Social Bookmarking
h) Content Marketing
i) Newsletter
j) Questions and Answers
Brand Mentions
Branding is very important in this digital world and Google uses lots of algorithms when it ranks a website. By building brand reputation through brand mentions or Citation helps in reaching the potential audience. How you can do that or the best practices to do brand mentions:
First, attract more mentions of your brand like increase your presence on social media, encourage your users to leave reviews, collaborate with your influencers, build a personal brand and guest blogging
Explore the sources of Brand Mentions To grow your rankings and to increase the website rankings, brand mentions is the best practice. Monitor your brand and knowing who’s talking about you, what they are saying and where they spread the word will help you understand how the audience sees your business, what they need and how they are using your product or services. This will help you to know about the consumer behavior and with this you can improve your business and to provide valuable information to your customers.
Filter your Mentions, if you are having a lot of junk mentions that you don’t want to keep track then use filters and segments.
Finally, turn your brand mentions into the links. This is the time where you need to put all your skills into practice. Here you need to convince people to take a step and turn unlinked brand text into the links.
2. Commenting
Blog commenting is the second off-page SEO practice, this will build the relationship between the blogs, bloggers and blog readers. Blog Commenting makes your backlinks graph grow and it’s the great way to exchange ideas, opinions and thoughts. Blog Commenting helps in getting the backlinks, traffic, building relationships and for the brand recognition. Make sure if you are posting comments it should be on the relevant blogs and providing information on your business niche.
3. Forum Participation This is also a very good off-page SEO technique, you must find and participate in the forum discussions that are related to your product and services. This will help in building the relationship with the communities, you can reply in the threads and provide the valuable information. Now how to get backlink from the forum participation? Well, while creating the profile place the anchor in the signature so whenever you post a comment it will display along with your anchor.
4.Influencer Outreach This is the best and powerful alternative for developing credibility and promoting awareness of your brand. Who is the influencer? Influencer is the one who has the ability to deliver your message and promotion of your brand to a large number of people. You can add a community-driven section to your article and reach out to well-known influencers in your niche.
5. Guest Author
Guest Posting or outreach is writing and publishing an article on someone else's blog or website to connect with new users, to build relationships, build authority and to get backlinks.
For guest blogging, you need identify the keyword you’re interested in and then search on Google in this way: Keyword + “write for us” Keyword + “become a contributor” Keyword + “contribute” Keyword + “guest blogging”
6. Broken Link Building
Broken Link Building is the off-page activity, by building broken links. Broken links could be one of your own pages that you would then provide the update to, or it could be an outdated competitor’s link that you would then offer to replace with one of your links to similar content. By building broken links you can reduce the number of redirects and 404 pages, resulting in better user experience
7.Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking refers to a website that facilitates discussions and resource sharing with a rigidly tagged and organized taxonomy. This is the best way to get instant traffic. Some of the best social bookmarking sites are Reddit, StumbleUpon, delicious, and Digg. Write an eye-catching tagline with the quality content to boost your article.
8. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach to create and distribute valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a defined audience. Content Marketing helps in increasing sales, saving cost, and attracting better customers who have more loyalty. Search engines also reward businesses that publish quality consistently. Content marketing is the key to drive inbound traffic and leads. So, these are the off-page SEO strategies. The most important thing while implementing all these strategies is Anchor text as everyone knows links are a crucial ranking factor. Google uses Anchor text to understand the context of the link. Now, the question arises what kind of Anchor text should you use? How to Choose Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable word used to link one page to another. Anchor text influences the search engine ranking. Types of Anchor Text
Exact Match - The Anchor text is the exact keyword or phrase for which you want to rank. For eg. Men’s Shoes.
Phrase Match- Phrase Match is the keyword phrase for which you want to rank like with your company name “Nike shoes for Men” Partial Match - Partial match is the anchor text has all words in the query, but not as an exact phrase. Men’s Nike Shoes online store
Branded - Branded is the anchor text with the name of your brand for eg. Nike Men’s Shoes Random Anchor text - Random Anchor text is an generic, unspecific which does not include keyword for eg. click here, this site, this article etc. Image links - Image Links is the Alt text of the image according to Google.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO or Local Search engine optimization referred to as a local search marketing is an effective way to target local market online as it helps businesses to promote their products and services to local customers at the exact time.
Local SEO helps businesses to promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. To collect the information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages of business, links and citations to provide the most relevant local results. Tips for Local SEO optimization
Optimize Google My Business.
This is the first step in any local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. Optimization of Google My Business can increase your chances of showing up in Google’s Local Pack, Local Finder, Google Maps, and organic rankings in general. Google My Business (GMB) is their tool to help your business meet Google's needs.
To ensure you're optimized for Google My Business, you need to create and verify a Google My Business page, use Google Posts within your account, encourage your customers to share reviews online, and respond authentically to reviews, and specifying location.
Optimization of URL, title tags, headers, meta description, and content You can add 750 character description in GMB profile, this text should describe your business in an engaging way and it should be authentic but it should not reference things like sales and promotions of your business.Write an optimized Google my Business description, but you should follow the basic rules of optimized content with each draft. Make Sure your NAP is Accurate
While optimizing Google my Business Account for local search success. That means your business name, address and phone number needs to be correct, up-to-date and entirely consistent with other local business citations. Citations is important because they help with business directories and help customers to find your business.
Improve your Internal linking Structure Internal and External Linking both are important and will boost your local SEO rankings. Internal linking matters a lot as it support website navigation, assists with information architecture and website hierarchy, distributes page authority and ranking power by linking pages.
Must Add Location pages to your website Location pages provides information about the location, name address, phone number, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, and testimonials from happy customers. Make sure you don’t have any duplicate content across multiple location pages. For single location businesses, create a locally descriptive About Us page.
Create Informative and Unique Local content
Everyday, Google continues to get smarter, which means content strategist or content creators are now able to truly write for users, not search engines that means content needs to be informative from the user perspective. But while writing about general topics will attract a wide crowd, sometimes it's more important to hone your focus and write about local or industry news to attract a local audience.
Responsive or Mobile-friendly website
This becomes really important because nowadays 9 out of 10 people are using their smartphone to find the directions, to look up reviews and to search contact information. So, making your website is really beneficial for your business.
Optimization of Online Directories and Citations
Citations is any place where your business name, address, phone number and your website URL appears together as in the business listing website or business directories. Citations are really important to get in place for local SEO as if you don’t appear on these place then your competitors take advantage of this.
There are two types of Citation like Structured and Unstructured. Structured citations typically appear in business listings and come from form fields being filled in when the listing is claimed on the other hand Unstructured citations are more likely to be the result of press and social media, wherein your NAPW (Name, Address, Phone number and website) information is visible and connected on a web page, but not in a structured format.
How to Rank in Local Search?
Rankings on the Local Search depend on the 3 elements:
Proximity, that is how close your business to the searcher.
Relevancy, that is the relevancy of your products and services according to the search query.
Prominence, this is what other consumers say about your products and services?
Local SEO Services Include:
ebsite Localization : What does Website Localization mean? This includes your city, county or region name naturally throughout your site. If your business has several locations, this could involve creating separate pages or Content Hubs for individual locations.
Citation Building : Make sure your website features on citation sites and online business directories.This will not only help customers find your business, but featuring your company’s name, address, phone number and website URL (NAPW) on citation sites and adding extra information to business directories will help improve your rankings on search engines.
Claiming Google my Business (GMB) listing: Claiming your Google My Business (GMB) page is a key step towards helping your business display on important Google services, such as local search results and Google Maps. GMB (and its Microsoft equivalent, Bing Places for Business) should always be the first online directory you take ownership of.
Manage Reviews and Rating: The amount of quality reviews you receive authority of reviews themselves are all important factors for local search rankings. Genuine, honest reviews are critical both for showcasing the quality of your service and for sending signals to search engines that your website and service are trusted and useful for the users
Create or get Relevant and Quality Backlinks: Relevant and quality backlinks is important not only for Local SEO but it will also boost your organic traffic and improve domain authority of the website. Make sure create links on the relevant website which will give you the maximum benefits. For the Local SEO you can take links from the blogs, local newspapers, business associations, register your business to relevant directories can improve your local SEO rankings.
But before starting the Local SEO you should know how the Local SEO Algorithm works or if you are hiring a SEO agency make sure the team you are hiring have a knowledge about this.
Google Local Algorithm
When you want to rank your business in the local search it becomes necessary that you should know about the Google Algorithm and how it does work as nowadays ranking a business in local search becomes difficult day by day because of the Competition. Google keeps updating the local algorithm to show the best match to the user’s query.
SEO experts keep themselves with these updates to make the changes in their work strategy accordingly. Let’s check out how Google Local Algorithm impacts the rankings of local search.
Three Core Pillars of Google Local Altgorithm
a) Relevancy
b) Prominence
c) Proximity
First core pillar is Relevancy, this is the first and the most important component. Relevance means the keywords you are targeting should be relevant and ensure that the search engine such as Google can find and view your business relevant to user query.
For instance: If you are having a plumbing business in New York then your keyword should be like “Plumbers New York”
Now, how you can optimize your business to inform Search engines and Google Local Algorithm that your business is relevant to the user’s search queries.
When you start optimizing your business for any search engine whether it is Google, Yahoo or Bing, you need to pay attention to the NAP’s that is Business Name, Business Address and your listed phone number. This should be correct and must select the relevant category for listing your business that means select only those categories which defines your business.
Another important thing your team of SEO experts need to take care of the Business Description, by adding a business description your users can easily find what exactly you do, what services you are providing and how you work. But don’t make a sales, marketing or advertising pitch, instead of this your business description should be more informative and determine how your business fulfills your needs.
On-page optimization for Local SEO
Optimization of web pages not only increases the relevancy but it also makes your website google friendly. But before optimizing you should check the various aspects such as competition, search queries, search volume, keyword analysis and competitors strategy.
Here is the on-page checklist for local SEO to fulfill the first core element of Google Local Algorithm that is Relevance
1) Optimization of Content
According to the Core Google Algorithm update came in 2018 focus on content relevancy. Content should be relevant to user intent, and gives information to user search queries. What google sees in your content is does it give answers to users on what they are looking for?
Your content relevancy doesn’t depend on stuffing the keywords in the content. To make your content relevant you should include Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords in your content. Don’t forget to add the long tail keywords or long phrases in your content. You can easily find the long tail keywords in the Google suggestions where you can see what terms are used by the user’s to find the services you are providing.
2) Optimization of Title Tags
Optimization of Title tags impacts a lot and it is an important part in SEO. Title tag allows users to know what to expect upon clicking. Make sure your title tag is not duplicate and poorly written because it will impact your rankings negatively. It should be Unique and relevant to your business.
3) Optimization of Meta Description
Meta description provides a brief summary of your business and webpage to the users. Optimization of Meta description is a crucial element in on-page SEO. Include your targeted keyword in meta description, keep your description in 155 characters, you can include call-to-action words like find out more, learn more, know more, and get it now.
4) Optimization of Heading Tags (H1, H2 etc.)
Heading tags helps in structuring your webpage from the SEO perspective. To increase the relevancy of webpage make sure that your Heading tags should be descriptive as it will boost SEO and enhance the readability and visibility.
5) Optimization of Images
Alt text or alternative text helps search engine crawlers to index an image properly. You can optimize the images by adding keywords in alt text. Optimization images showcase a service your business offers and it is an easy way to crawl images and helps search engines to know exactly what your image is about.
6) Internal linking or inbound Link Building
Internal linking not only helps in navigating users to relevant pages on your website but it also establishes hierarchy and spreads the link equity throughout the website. Helps search engines crawlers to understand the structure of the website and pass authority throughout the webpages.
7) External Linking or Outbound Linking
Linking relevant high authority website links on your website, this will improve the credibility of your website. These links are more valuable when you link your website with the highly authoritative website.
8) Schema Markup
Schema Markup helps in organizing the business information in the better way for better accessibility. Schema Markup is the semantic code which helps search engines to show more informative results to users. Schema also helps in increasing the relevance of the topic, keywords or services you are providing.
9) Reviews and Rating
Relevant reviews and rating plays an important role in Local SEO. Reviews are the genuine feedback left by customers on the website. Google, Yelp, facebook are the three major platform review platforms other than this there are other options like superpages or Bing. These reviews should be relevant that means the review on the product pages reflect the product or service.
10. URL Structure Optimization
URL or web address need to be optimized as per the SEO. URL Structure should be SEO friendly. Why is URL optimization essential? Optimization of URL allows search engines algorithms to understand how they should prioritize and crawl your website. Your products and services webpages should be optimized with the relevant keyword or product name or we can say that the URL structure should reflect the topic.
Off-page optimization for the Local SEO
Off-page SEO helps you in getting the link from a high authority website which is also known as Backlinks. To improve the rankings in Local Search trust and credibility are the major factors that need to be built. To increase the domain authority we need to create good backlinks because the more strong backlinks we have the higher your website page authority will be. Following are the off-page SEO strategies to create good backlinks
Guest Posting/ Guest Blogging
Guest posting or guest blogging is sharing the content on the other blogs related to your niche. With Guest blogging you can get instant exposure to targeted traffic and for this what you need is to create a quality and informative content for your users. Not only this you can expand your personal network, improve online authority, and also improve your social media following.
Another way to build good is creation of 10x content. Have you never heard about the 10x content? Let us explain, this is the content which is 10 times better than the highest ranking results. 10x content needs deep research, it is time consuming, you need to create a content structure and should plan before writing content. The criteria for creating a 10x content is it should have great UI/UX on any device, content needs to be trustworthy, useful, informative to the users, connect readers so they can comment and share their views on that, and the most important is needs to be unique and the readers can get the answers of their queries.
Second core pillar of Google Local Algorithm is Prominence
Prominence is how your brand or product stands out from your competitors and it depends on trust and credibility you built with search engines in the form of links, authority, directories, reviews and more. Relevant reviews online not only improve the rankings but it also influences user decision to visit on the website Google local algorithm analyze the reviews, how you respond to reviews, how many reviews you have.
To build brand prominence get more reviews and always respond to the reviews. Citations also help in building credibility as we already mentioned the NAP should be correct. Businesses that are mentioned a lot online google find them more credible.
Third and the last pillar is Proximity
Proximity is how relevant your business is to the user search query. Google local algorithm keeps updating to ensure that the search results should be relevant to the search query of the user. There are two types of Local searches such as Geo Modified searches and non-geo modified searches.
Geo Modified Searches performed when the user wants to go to another city or looking for services in the unknown city like if I am travelling to New York and want to avail painting services then I will write Painters in New York.
Non-geo Modified searches are those when we are looking for services around us like Painters near me.
So, in this guide we tried to serve all aspects of Search engine optimization and how it is to be done properly to rank your website on the search engines. So, it is very important to hire the best SEO company which helps you in the growth of your business.