Your SEO guide
We usually go to the vast depths of the internet: we turn to Google search or MI to find answers to almost all our questions. So it’s no wonder that business and website owners do everything they can to make sure their information is found on all the acute search engines. This is exactly SEO’s most important task – Optimising your virtual content so that it appears higher in search results.
The first step to achieving great SEO results is to build your website on a platform that makes it easy to customise and update content, and provides the tools you need to optimise elements of your site. We recommend using a website builder such as WordPress, Wix, Spectra, etc. that makes updating your site as easy as possible and has built-in SEO tools.
Once you have the basics of your website in place, you will need to pay attention to many small details, such as metadata and links, which can help improve your website’s ranking. In this article, we’ll look at what it takes to put these important details in place on your website to make sure it meets SEO standards and ultimately delivers real financial returns.
How does SEO work?
Search engines use robots/bots that crawl web pages on the internet to determine what content they contain and what those pages are about. These bots scan the code, collecting text, images, videos and other content on web pages to gather all the information they can. Once they have gathered enough information about the type of information available on each page and determined that this content will be useful to their searchers, they add these pages to their index. The index is essentially all the possible web results that a search engine stores to present to a potential searcher.
Search engines assess what the best result is based on what people are searching for, as well as what other information is already available online. When someone searches, the algorithm matches the user’s search query with the relevant information in their index, giving searchers an accurate answer to their query. The platforms then use hundreds of signals to determine the order in which the content will be displayed to each searcher. It is these signals that SEO experts are trying to master.
It is important to be aware that Google does not disclose the details of its algorithm or process, so it is impossible to know exactly what factors influence the indexing and ranking of a page. SEO is therefore not a perfect scienceand even when it seems that all the optimizations are in place, achieving results often requires patience and constant adjustment of content and technical parameters.
How to implement a successful SEO strategy?
The first step in implementing SEO best practices is to create a well-designed and relevant website. Make sure your website is easy to navigate, provides a great user experience and clearly displays the information you want to convey to your visitors. This ensures that you are on the right track to provide an excellent answer to searchers’ queries.
Using and integrating SEO into the website development process is very important. Practice and research have shown that organic search is the biggest contributor to website trafficand this is even more pronounced in the B2B context. Therefore, traffic from organic search, if done correctly, is essentially built for the long term and is an essential component of the long-term growth of a website. However, SEO is much more than just having a great website. We have some practical steps you can take to get started with SEO:
1. Create an SEO plan
Search engine optimisation takes work, specific knowledge and consistency, so it’s important to have a plan with steps to follow before going into detail. Be sure to rethink your SEO strategy according to your goals. For example, if your e-commerce site wants to use SEO to attract more visitors and increase sales, your SEO plan may look different than if you want to increase brand awareness or increase the number of customers in your physical store. It’s definitely worth keeping these goals in mind and optimising your site accordingly.
Think about details such as the URL of the website, but also broader aspects such as whether you will have a dedicated SEO person, outsource or plan to optimise your website yourself. Also plan from the start how and when you will evaluate and optimise your site’s SEO performance. Note that SEO success takes time, so it pays to be patient, as you will see results over time.
2. Conduct keyword research
SEO keyword research is an essential step to improve your website’s visibility in Google search and attract your target audience. It involves identifying the right words and phrases that potential customers are searching for. By conducting research and using professional keyword research tools, you can understand how people around the world tend to search for things related to your product or service.
Keyword research helps you understand what phrases are searched for the most, and thus helps you create pages that can be optimised for those queries. Choosing the right words for websites can have a significant impact on the number of visitors to a website. We recommend thinking about a number of themes that are relevant to your brand and using these as drivers for keyword research and content creation. Instead of looking for just one keyword to base your SEO strategy on, consider a broader group of keywords that can help your website achieve better results based on a given topic.
3. Create title tags and meta descriptions
Metadata is information that you provide to Google to describe the content of your web page. Important aspects of metadata are title tags and meta descriptions. These are essential SEO elements that help improve your page’s visibility in Google searches and attract clicks. When you search in a search engine, each result displays a title and a description, which lets you know what kind of content can be found on the page. Providing this information to Google can help both search engines and Google bots understand the most important parts and information on your website.
Meta titles, or title tags and meta descriptions, are some of the strongest SEO signals you can give Google. It is therefore very important to try to include the most important keywords in the title tags. They give you control over the text that searchers see when they first open your website. The more people click on your website, the more Google notices that it matches their searches and the higher they can rank the page in the search results.
4. Don't forget the alternative text
Alternative text or alt text is a short description next to the images on your website. It is included in the HTML code of your website and is an important SEO tool so that bots crawling web pages can quickly read the alt text and understand the content of the image. Alternative text also increases the likelihood of your images appearing in Google search and the Google Images section, allowing you to appear more often at the top of search results pages. Images are becoming more standardised in Google search, and the better the alternative text, the more likely your image is to rank higher.
It’s important to know how to better formulate the alt text. Looking at an image, you can think of different ways to describe what you see. For SEO purposes, it is advisable to think strategically about the alt text and try to include some keywords to add value to the site. However, alt text cannot be keywords alone, it still needs to explain exactly what the image is visualising
5. Building internal links
Internal links are an important SEO factor – when one page links to another, it helps Google navigate your site and build a network of connections between pages and their content. This can help with page categorisation and, perhaps more importantly, allows Google to index your pages more effectively or add them to the list of sites that Google considers when displaying search results.
One of the best strategies is internal linking, or linking between pages within your website. This is simple because it allows you to control all your pages and you can add links from one to another. Internal linking also helps to increase the authority of your site. By linking less visited pages to stronger pages on your site, Google gets a signal that both pages are important.
6. Working with external links
External links or backlinks (backlinks) are created when other websites link to your website. This is an important SEO tactic because it increases the authority of your website. When an important web page links to your content, it sends a signal to Google that the page is an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. External links also help your pages gain visibility, allowing more potential users to reach them and learn about your product or service.
External links work best when they are genuine and of high quality. This happens when another platform has noticed your page and decided that your site can add value to their content. So they link to your page to help their readers or users. The more authoritative or relevant the other site is, the more valuable the link is. Although there is no shortcut to getting quality external links, the best way is to strive to consistently produce quality content.
7. Adapt the website to mobile devices
Another key element of SEO is to ensure that all searchers can reach your website and have a positive user experience. It has been proven in practice that More than 64% of all traffic comes directly from mobile devices. This means that it’s worth ensuring that your website is optimised and mobile-friendly.
This will ensure that people searching from their phones can use your website, but it’s also important for Google. The search engine often uses mobile crawling, which basically means it crawls the mobile version of your website to determine how it should rank in search results. That’s why the mobile version of your site deserves undivided attention.
8. Analyse SEO results
As SEO is a long-term, never-ending and ever-changing process, you need to constantly evaluate the performance of your pages and adjust accordingly. You can check your page rankings and performance using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Google Search Console to get an idea of the direct impact of optimisation. These tools can help you understand if your site has improved in rankings and note which keywords your site ranks best for.
Other important analytics tools include Google Analytics, which can help you gain insights into your traffic and understand where it comes from. It is also advisable to measure how users interact with your pages, which can help you understand and optimise your content.
To successfully analyse SEO results, you need to track organic traffic, search engine positions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions and technical metrics. This is best done with specialised SEO analytics tools. Key SEO performance indicators to analyse SEO results effectively:
- Organic traffic: How many visitors come from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.).
- Positions by keywords: Where your page appears for specific searches.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate)How often users click on your page link in search results.
- Conversions: How many visitors take the desired action (purchase, sign-up, download).
- Technical characteristics: Page load speed, mobile optimisation, indexability.
