Do you want to improve your website's ranking on Google, boosting traffic and sales? SEO can help.

First of all, let’s define what SEO means.

What exactly is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website‘s ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

To put it more simply, SEO helps your website or piece of content rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Imagine you type “Where can I get oranges?” on Google and the results it shows you are displayed on the SERP. The websites listed on the first page of the results page are the ones Google believes provide the best answers. I know you’re wondering, “How did Google know which ones answered my question best?” The simple answer is SEO. I’ll discuss this in more detail later.

Now, remember that many pages are filled with different answers to your question. But like you, about 75% of people will never go past the first page. I mean, when was the last time you clicked on that “see more” button? I’m guessing you can’t remember, and neither can I.

What you want is for your website to be among the first pages to pop up, right? Well, it’s not rocket science to get to the first page. I’ll show you how SEO can help you do this.

How Does SEO Work?

When you optimize a piece of content, for example, an article or blog, You’re simply using words or phrases that people would normally type when looking for stuff on Google. We call these words or phrases “Keywords”.

For example, if I were to write a blog about oranges, I could choose “Where can I find oranges?” as my keyword. I’ll use this keyword multiple times in my article, following SEO best practices. So, when someone searches for “Where can I find oranges?”, my article will automatically pop up.

Sounds easy? Yeah, it’s not that simple.

The main problem I’ll face is if this keyword has been used multiple times by big bloggers in the orange industry—high competition. Because this keyword is very competitive, my blog won’t pop up on the first page.

So, how did those other websites get their content to pop up organically? (organically: meaning without paid ads)

Here’s what they did aside from writing an SEO blog or article:

• Improving their on-site SEO

• Matching their content to search intent

• Monitoring their technical SEO

I’ll go through these steps briefly.

How To Improve On-Site SEO

To improve on-site SEO, you need to make sure that you use the keyword in the title tag of your article. If I had used “Where can I find oranges?” as a part of my title tag, my article may have done better. This is because Google pays close attention to what appears in the title tag.

Because most of the content that ranks high on Google is content with at most 1800 words, writing short content can help improve your ranking. That doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t rank well; it just doesn’t rank as well as short-form content.

Also, use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. LSI keywords are a bunch of other words or phrases that are similar to your main keyword. Search engines use these LSI keywords to understand your content in depth.

For example, if I were writing an article with the keyword “SEO ranking”. The words in bold letters in the image below are some of the LSI keywords I would consider:

How To Match Your Content to Search Intent

Search intent is Google’s interpretation of how users feel about your content. If people find an answer after visiting your page, your rankings will improve. If not, Google will push your content down.

Google gets data to know if your content matches the search intent through the bounce rate.

I mean, I’d bounce if I came across content that didn’t answer my question :)

To ensure that your content will answer the user’s question, make sure your

• title tag,

• meta description,

• keywords and LSI keywords,

• and body of work are saying the same thing

Link all of these together to reduce your bounce rate. A low bounce rate means a happy and satisfied user. Google will boost your content for this.

How To Monitor Technical SEO

While technical SEO issues are rare, they can hurt your website’s SEO.

Here are some things you should look out for:

• Is your website responsive? Does it work well on any platform? Your website should be designed to work well on PCs and mobile devices. It should work regardless of the screen size.

• How fast does your website load? If your site is taking too long to load, it can affect the overall user experience badly. That’ll lead to an increase in bounce rates and a lower ranking. Thankfully, this is a technical issue that can be resolved quickly.

Conclusion

Remember, work on your on-site SEO, match your content to the search intent, and monitor your technical SEO.

SEO can improve your ranking on Google, increasing your traffic and sales. Consider using SEO to boost your campaigns and get more results.