What is SEO, and Why Does It Matter?
Mark Davis, SEO strategist at Numeral Digital, explains:
“SEO helps your website rank higher on search engines, bringing in organic traffic — that means people actively looking for what your business offers. In essence, it puts your business in front of the right audience at the right time.”
Why Is SEO Important for Your Business?
As Jane Wilson, project manager at Numeral Digital, puts it:
“SEO isn’t just about ranking higher in search results; it’s about improving the overall user experience on your site. The easier and more intuitive your website is for visitors, the more likely they are to become customers.”
For businesses like online stores, car detailing services, or healthcare providers, SEO can be a game-changer in attracting customers. Unlike paid ads, where you’re charged for every click, SEO brings in traffic organically — without paying for each visit.
What Does SEO Involve?
At Numeral Digital, our SEO experts break the process into several key stages:
1. Preparation and Planning
Before diving into specific actions, it’s essential to outline your goals, strategy, and tools for SEO. This step involves:
- Audit of the current website: Experts evaluate the site’s alignment with search engine requirements. Common issues found include:
- Broken links (links that lead to nonexistent pages harm user experience)
- Duplicate pages (confuse search engines and lower rankings)
- Slow page load times (users might leave before the page fully loads)
- Poor mobile display (leads to high bounce rates from mobile visitors and impacts rankings)
- You can check your site’s mobile-friendliness using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Competitor analysis: A thorough analysis of competitors’ traffic, sources, ranking keywords, and site visibility provides key insights.
- Keyword research and clustering: Once keyword research is complete, terms are grouped and linked to specific website pages. This informs site structure decisions like adding pages or refining existing layouts.
- Meta tags, headers, text, image descriptions, and other elements are optimized based on keyword research.
- Landing pages for ads are identified, and campaign targeting is adjusted accordingly.
2. On-page Optimization
This includes:
- Content development: Adding blog articles, product descriptions, videos, and other relevant content.
- Meta tags: Creating unique titles and descriptions for each page based on the semantic core.
- Internal linking: Linking pages within your website. For example, in a blog post titled “How to Use Product X,” it’s logical to link to that product’s page.
Technical on-page optimization also covers:
- Robots.txt and sitemap.xml configuration: These files provide instructions for search engines, indicating which pages to index or avoid.
- Redirect setup: Useful for URL changes, like moving from site.com/page-old to site.com/page-new.
- Fixing duplicate pages and broken links and improving mobile responsiveness and load speed.
Broken links can be identified using Xenu, a free desktop tool for link checking.
3. Off-page Optimization
After completing on-page optimization, attention turns to external SEO factors, primarily link-building:
- Media mentions: Articles on industry websites, interviews, and expert opinions contribute to site authority.
- Guest posts: Publishing articles containing backlinks on relevant websites or blogs either for free or through collaborations.
4. Behavioral Factors
It’s impossible to predict how users will interact with a site during its development and testing phase. User behavior tracking tools like Google Analytics help monitor how users navigate the site, providing valuable insights for further improvement. Search engines consider factors such as:
- Pages per visit: The more pages users explore, the more engaging your site appears.
- Time on site: A key indicator of how interesting or relevant your content is.
- Bounce rate: A high percentage of users leaving immediately signals issues with site engagement.
- Return visits and direct traffic: These metrics show that users know and trust your website.
As we’ve seen, SEO involves a combination of technical audits, content optimization, and link-building to ensure that your website ranks well in search results. However, as digital marketing evolves, certain outdated practices can do more harm than good, and it’s essential to avoid them. In Part 2, we’ll delve into the risks of outdated SEO strategies, the cost of professional SEO services, and how businesses can make smart investments in their online presence.
