Online visibility is one of the most important things a brand has to maintain, and search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in this. SEO is the practice of optimizing search engine traffic to your brand’s web pages; when users search for keywords relevant to your brand and industry, they should find your website at or near the top of first-page search results.
For brands, SEO is practically a necessity. Most people don’t scroll beyond the first or second page of Google search results, so if your website isn’t there, how can you expect to attract more customers?
Despite its importance, many people remain skeptical and cynical about the practice. SEO can and has been gamed through various “black-hat” tactics, which we’ll discuss in a later section. This involves artificially increasing a brand’s presence at the expense of those who’ve grown theirs organically. Also, with the constant tweaking of Google and other search platforms, once-reliable practices can easily become outdated.
To better grasp how SEO can work for your brand, as well as some of the qualms people have about it, we’ve assembled this helpful overview below.
4 SEO Best Practices for Today
- Effective keyword research.
- High-quality content.
- User-friendly experience.
- Monitoring changing search trends.
How SEO Works Now
For a strong online presence in today’s digital landscape, it’s important to understand what search engine optimization entails. Here are the key components of SEO.
Keywords
Keywords are the phrases, questions, and words that your potential audience is most likely to search. The more relevant, high-visibility keywords you have on your pages, the more likely customers will find you.
Backlinks
An organized structure of backlinks allows customers to more easily find relevant content on your page. Internal linking also helps Google and other search engines navigate your website, increasing your SEO’s reach. Adding external links to verified sources also increases your brand’s trustworthiness in Google’s algorithms, facilitating growth in brand visibility.
Content Optimization
Creating content is a fast way to increase your brand’s value and make it more visible in search results. Figure out what questions your audience has and what tools they’re looking for. Then, create engaging, informative blog articles exploring that subject. This will place you at the forefront of customers’ minds when they find your content.
Technical SEO
Even if you have quality, high-visibility content available throughout your site, you need to ensure your back end is equipped for indexing by search engines. Reducing the number of broken or deprecated pages, ensuring optimization for mobile phones, and using a consistent URL structure are all effective ways to improve the technical aspects of your page and make it easier for Google to index it.
Google and other search engines take all these factors into account when ranking pages; the more topical authority and technical aptitude, the higher your page will rank. This is why the top brands in the world have worked hard to keep their pages at the very top. Your aim is to be positioned alongside them.
Why People Don’t Trust SEO
Although most brands grow their SEO organically, others have resorted to backhanded tactics to artificially place themselves on top. These so-called black-hat techniques play a role in people’s distrust of SEO. Common black-hat tricks include the following.
Keyword Stuffing
This entails “stuffing” a page with irrelevant keywords and overusing relevant ones, such as a shoe store using the words “buy cheap running shoes” in every paragraph. Not only does it look forced, but it can also mislead customers as to the relevancy of a page’s content.
Link Farming
Link farming involves artificially inflating the number of external links to a page, typically by creating a page or a website solely for this purpose. They are often tagged with low-quality content as a superficial disguise. For example, this could entail setting up multiple pages with generic content and interlinking them all to a single commercial page like “buy shoes” to manipulate search engine results.
Misleading Redirects
Sites may use redirects to take search engine indexes to irrelevant content in order to inflate that content’s SEO. A similar practice involves creating a page with multiple links to one irrelevant page. For instance, a site might redirect traffic from an article about healthy eating to a page selling “luxury” watches.
These techniques have contributed to a negative perception of SEO as simply manipulating search engines to increase web traffic. Google frequently checks for black-hat techniques, however, so most brands that use them may not stay in the search engine for long.
Additionally, the inner workings of search engine optimization often remain obscure. Google offers little transparency about its ranking practices, making accurately measuring SEO success difficult. Many factors can cause a change in a brand’s web traffic, both positive and negative, and trying to untangle those from the effects of SEO is not an easy task. Despite perceptions that SEO is a “quick fix” for driving web traffic, doing it properly requires a heavy burden of research and wrangling with ever-changing guidelines from Google and other search engines.
Why SEO Is More Important Than Ever
Search engines are the dominant method people use to discover information and find businesses. Unsurprisingly, Google and other search engines have become a battleground for coveted first-page visibility. Although large, multinational brands maintain a level of prominence even without SEO, smaller businesses rely heavily on web traffic to generate sales and continue to grow.
Smaller brands should see SEO as a long-term investment. By developing a comprehensive and competent search engine optimization strategy, you can define your entire brand in a way that is easily accessible to Google. This can open the door for hundreds of thousands of customers to discover your content, products and value through organic traffic. This is why SEO has become a critical part of digital marketing strategies; search engine optimization is one of the most viable ways to communicate the value of your brand to a global audience.
How to Build a Sustainable SEO Strategy
So, how do you create a search engine optimization strategy? What you aim to achieve from SEO depends on your brand, but you should develop it from these key elements.
Effective Keyword Research
Identify the terms and phrases your target audience searches the most and incorporate them organically into your content. Make the content relevant and useful, and do not try to use excessive keywords without providing quality information.
Content that effectively incorporates keywords will look something like this: “Our eco-friendly products help reduce waste and promote sustainability.” Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, would look like: “Eco-friendly products reduce waste. Eco-friendly products promote sustainability. Buy eco-friendly products now.”
High-Quality Content
Ensure your content is well-researched, thoroughly edited, and informative. Incorporate relevant data from credible sources to make it more likely to attract backlinks and improve search engine indexing.
User-Friendly Experience
Make your pages desktop and mobile friendly. Prioritize best UX and UI practices will leave customers with a positive impression that will be reflected in your SEO.
Monitoring and Adaptation
Stay up to date on Google’s search engine guidelines and keep pace with emerging customer search trends so your SEO practices don’t become outdated. You can do this by regularly reviewing Google’s search engine guidelines from official sources like Google’s Search Central Blog and other leading SEO blogs. Use analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to learn how users are finding and interacting with your site.
Use these foundations to develop a functional SEO strategy, then tweak it as needed for your brand’s goals and messaging.
The Future of SEO
New and emerging technologies will significantly impact search engine optimization in the near future. Artificial intelligence is fast becoming a tool in the SEO space. Digital marketers are already using generative AI to amplify their content output, and machine learning is proving extremely useful in streamlining keyword optimization. As AI continues to evolve, it is likely to play a much larger role in a brand’s SEO strategy.
The rise of voice search has also impacted SEO development, and more SEO strategies are accommodating the more specific questions users tend to ask voice assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. This often involves developing content that can be pulled by voice assistants from Google’s “snippet box,” an isolated piece of high-authority content that rests above all other results on a search page.
Ultimately, even with these innovations, the focus will remain on developing high-quality, authoritative content with strategic implementation of keywords and links.
Stay Ahead of the SEO Curve
The general public still doesn’t understand search engine optimization well, and it may never be possible for it to be fully demystified. The fluctuating nature of the market and Google’s guidelines make it hard to define what is and isn’t standard practice in SEO. For the time being, you should prioritize a user-centric SEO strategy for your brand, making sure your brand’s online presence remains in line with Google’s search index by creating and linking to content that customers can trust.
Remember, search engine optimization is a long-term investment; a strong online presence, optimized for SEO, will create sustainable success. Search engine optimization has been a core part of digital marketing for decades now, and you should maximize its potential if you want to grow your brand.
