Content creation is an important part of SEO because it gives search engines something to evaluate and rank. Assessing the search engine results page (SERP) and results for a given keyword is called SERP analysis. There are numerous issues that can cause problems at each stage—crawling, indexing, and ranking. So, understanding these concepts and how to optimize for them (which we’ll cover later) is key. To understand how to do SEO, you need a basic understanding of how search engines work. This lesson elaborates on the necessity of optimizing your content according to your local audience, the benefits of easy-to-find NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number), and Directories.
Google SEO Guide: The Ultimate Resource
Link building is something is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques. To find topics that meet both criteria, you need a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. If you’re curious to learn more about Google and its impact on SEO, check out our timeline of Google algorithm updates.
Content optimization
In other words, Google considers it a commercial, not a transactional keyword. Your goal is to find relevant keywords with high search volumes and low keyword difficulty – an ideal combination of the three most important factors of keyword research. Quality Raters don’t influence the rankings directly, but their data is used to improve the search algorithm. Undoubtedly now more than ever before, local results are being influenced by real-world data. This interactivity is how searchers interact with and respond to local businesses, rather than purely static (and game-able) information like links and citations.
You also want to know what keywords people use, so you can adapt or create website content that ranks high on Google. Forbes Advisor strives to test every product and service we recommend, but it isn’t always possible to get hands-on experience that matches your own. We started our search with a SEO Anomaly list of dozens of agencies to consider and then pared it down with qualifying features. Then we compared 28 popular SEO services that small businesses use.
Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around. Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. “People Also Ask” boxes). They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee.
At the same time, the best kind of topics are the ones that hold business value to you. Otherwise, you’re unlikely to attract potential customers through SEO. Google holds a number of patents related to how their search works in order to prevent manipulating search results and copying the secret formula of their multibillion-dollar business.
Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher’s location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results. Local search results are extremely sensitive to proximity, which refers to the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query (if the searcher included one). The addition of these features caused some initial panic for two main reasons. For one, many of these features caused organic results to be pushed down further on the SERP. Another byproduct is that fewer searchers are clicking on the organic results since more queries are being answered on the SERP itself.
- Also, consider giving low-performing pages a boost by linking to them from your pages with high link authority to share authority between pages.
- Learn more about how marketers use search engine optimization to rank higher and increase traffic.
- The piece you’re reading right now (or any of our other blog posts) is an example of content creation for on-page SEO.
After all, the terms in your URL represent a high-level overview of what your page is about. For example, for my guide to email marketing, my URL is /email-marketing-guide. And if that happens often enough, Google will downrank you for that keyword. Specifically, before I write a single word, I figure out my target keyword’s Search Intent. On the other hand, this keyword isn’t super competitive, has a high CPC and gets a decent number of searches every month. That way, I get my content in front of people that are actually going to buy.