After speaking with dozens of clients (and potential clients) about SEO, I started to notice common questions.
It doesn’t matter who your SEO service provider is, what industry you’re in, or what country you live in, search engine optimization for Google’s ranking algorithm follows a similar process.
You need three core things to succeed:
Technical SEO
Content Creation
Links from other websites that point back to yours
as an SEO service provider
Since most things in SEO pertain to one of these three factors, our website’s resource articles indicate which factor(s) they’re involved with using this same nifty graphic.
includes anything that changes how Google crawls your website or reads your webpages. Examples include:
These can be tedious changes, and sometimes clients don’t want to allow website access or devote development resources to this. That would be a mistake.
I literally increased the traffic to a website by 70% in one week once by changing the header structure of all the pages on a website – and this wasn’t a low traffic website.
I once updated the homepage title tag and jumped up to position number one for a high volume buyer keyword.
I’ve done internal linking that resulted in seeing brand new content jump to page 1 of Google for its intended keyword within hours.
for SEO is something that is often misunderstood. Whereas technical SEO often gets overlooked, content creation tends to just be done poorly.
A properly written article or webpage for SEO is:
So many articles or webpages are written with bad keyword strategy, little on-page optimization, and are just poorly-written to begin with…it’s no wonder they never rank well on search engines.
is a topic that engenders confusion on all sides. It’s a tricky topic, even among those in the industry.
Google sees a link (like this) pointing from one website to another as an editorial vote. The more votes you have, the higher you’ll go in the search engine rankings.
So how are these gained? It’s through relationships with existing site operators and reaching out to new websites to ask for a backlink.
There are many paths to a backlink from another website. These often include:
What should not be included on this list are press release links, comment links, or links from websites specifically created to sell you backlink. (The backlink industry is a multi-billion dollar industry – around 99% of backlinks SEO companies get are the latter!)
Anyone who you hire to do SEO should cover the basics – all of these things. If they don’t do one or two of those areas, they’re probably ripping you off.
Now you know – so if you get ripped off, don’t say you weren’t warned!
However, SEO is complex, so we move beyond the basics to get awesome results for our clients. These advanced factors include:
Entity Optimization
Brand Signals
UX Signals
An entity is a noun in Google’s Knowledge Graph. It’s a person, place, or thing in the Google AI super-brain.
If your company isn’t in the Google Knowledge Graph, the Google search algorithm doesn’t know what it is – so your website will struggle to rank for related keywords.
The good news is that you can influence this – you can train the Google AI super brain to think what you want about you.
If you know how.
Fortunately – we do! And we optimize this for our clients.
are how Google measures your brand’s popularity. The more popular your brand is, the higher you’ll rank in the search results.
These include:
Here at GB Digital, we consider brand signals to be so important that we separate branded traffic from unbranded traffic in our client reporting.
We’re the only company that does that, that we know of!
These aren’t things that we directly influence in our SEO campaign – but you can. Your PR, advertising, influencer campaigns, and social media buzz all affect how many people are searching for your brand.
Brands are important – they help SEO a lot.
The UX signals that matter to SEO are click-through rates and bounces. If somebody clicks on your website from a Google search results page, that’s a good thing. The more clicks you get, the higher you go in the rankings.
If somebody clicks and then bounces back to the search results page, that’s a signal that tells Google the searcher didn’t find what they need. If you get too many bounces, you’ll go down in the rankings.
This is called “pogo sticking”.
Source: Seobility
See, I just gave these guys a link for attribution of their image. They earned it!
Naturally, we want to drive as many clicks from Google as possible, and then keep the searchers on your website without bouncing back to Google.
How do you do this? Well, it’s a combination of smart keyword research, copywriting, content strategy, and good user experience.
It’s what we do here at Garit Boothe Digital (GB Digital for short).
The advanced SEO stuff (brand signals, UX signals, and entity optimization) are required to do SEO in the 2020s.
We live in the age of AI. All of Google’s machine learning supercomputers and fancy-pants AI tech rely on massive quantities of data – feedback from flesh and blood humans.
Discovery in Google’s lawsuit with the Department of Justice shows that its search engine uses feedback loops to training its algorithm:
Source: Google Is Magical, Justice.gov
The machine learns from humans:
Our job is to influence the machine that influences humans. Like the movie, Inception, you can plant ideas in the minds of other people. First we train the AI search algorithms to do what we want, then they rank us high in the search engines.
Then people think that they are the ones who “found you”, when in reality you placed yourself in front of them to be found.
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