Technical SEO for Regular People: Part I: The What, Why, and How of SEO
One of our Peas, Sara, wrote an article covering the “SEO trap”, setting the stage for our “Technical SEO for Regular People” series by emphasizing the importance of keeping SEO simple. Like Sara says, “It all boils down to making sure your content is relevant to your customers.“ But without a solid technical foundation to back it (don’t worry, we’ll teach you all about what that means a bit later), your content may never be found by search engines let alone rank well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Through this series, we’re going to help you ensure your content is technically sound so it has the best chance to make it to page one of Google—and hopefully improve your bottom line!
Technical SEO for Regular People
- Part I: The What, Why, and How of SEO
- Part II: All about URLs
- Part III: Making sense of the markup (Markup, Metadata, and Structured Data)
- Part IV: Sending the right signals (Redirects and Status Codes)
- Part V: Mobile or bust (Mobile-first indexing, Responsive Web Design, and Page Speed)
- Part VI: Security—it’s not just for banks (HTTPS, SSL, and Malware)
The What and Why of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In this first article of our “Technical SEO for Regular People” series, we’ll briefly cover the What and Why of SEO, after which we’ll begin our deep dive into the How of technical SEO.
What is SEO, anyway?
To understand SEO, we first have to take a look at search engines and how they work.
Search engines like Google have computer programs called spiders (aka web crawlers) that follow links on websites, read the content on each page, and add it to an index that keeps all that information organized and easily searchable. Think of it like the card catalog system at your local library. Just like the library uses the Dewey Decimal System, search engines and their spiders have specific ways they organize and store the content they’ve indexed. Search engine optimization is all about giving your content the best chance of being found and displayed by Google and other search engines—and technical SEO is making sure it’s structured and delivered in a way that makes it easy for search engines and their spiders to index.
Once a search engine has indexed content from a website, it uses complex algorithms to analyze and serve up relevant content for searchers on a search engine results page (SERP). SERPs are made up of three primary parts:
- Organic results: unpaid results of pages and other content gathered from indexed websites that are relevant for a given keyword (indicated in ORANGE);
- Paid results: paid results from advertisers that are relevant for a given keyword (indicated in GREEN);
- Search features: unpaid, specialized results that often contain content copied from relevant websites, designed to encourage interaction directly on the SERP instead of requiring the searcher to visit the other site (indicated in BLUE).
Parts of a Google SERP (Search Results Page), with organic results indicated in ORANGE, paid results indicated in GREEN, and search features indicated in BLUE.
SEO is all about getting your site into the organic results—and if you’re lucky, a search feature or two as well—to increase the traffic to your website generated by these results. Bring on the new visitors!
There are two primary pillars of SEO: on-site and off-site. Spanning both those pillars is a common foundation—the technical foundation of your site and its content.
Without a solid technical foundation, even the best piece of content won’t reach consumers—it’ll remain unknown to search engines.
Why should I care about SEO?
You’ve invested a lot of time—and money—in your website’s design and content. But without a parallel investment in SEO, you’re making a risky bet. In order to get visitors to your new site—and ultimately convert them to paying customers, they’d need to:
- Already know your website address in order to find you (also known as direct traffic);
- Click a link from another site to yours (also known as referral traffic);
- Interact with an ad that links to your site (also known as paid traffic).
The likelihood that a consumer is going to have your brand top-of-mind and visit your site directly is minuscule. When a consumer has a need, they search for a general service or product first; brand-specific searches account for just a fraction of overall search intent, according to a study by Search Engine Land.
You could launch a link-building campaign, spending weeks or months doing outreach to relevant sites (after in-depth keyword and competitor research) to get referral links to your site. While link-building is a very valid part of a larger SEO strategy, it would need to be done on a massive scale to even come close to generating the traffic for your site that organic search could.
You could also invest heavily in paid marketing to increase brand awareness and run targeted PPC campaigns to gain new visitors, but that can be really expensive—especially when you’re trying to reach a large audience with competitive keywords.
Relying on these traffic sources without investing in SEO is putting your website and your brand at a huge disadvantage. Search allows consumers to find your site who may not otherwise know about your brand. By optimizing for search, you’re giving your brand higher visibility in the SERPs, either by ranking well in the organic results (indicated in ORANGE in SERP graphic) or by providing your information in a search feature (e.g. local pack, etc., as indicated in BLUE in the SERP graphic).
According to an in-depth review of click-through rate (CTR) history for Google’s organic search results, it’s the first three organic results that are most important; results beyond that get clicked at drastically lower rates, meaning less traffic to your site.
Being in these first few results gives your brand a massive edge over your competitors. That’s why SEO matters.
How to do SEO
You understand what SEO is and its value to your brand. So, naturally, you’re likely finding yourself asking, “How do I get into that local pack (or other search feature)?” Or what about, “How do I make sure my brand is in the first three organic results?” We’re about to tell you! So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn!
Start with Strategy
Before you start making changes to your site, it’s important to set a strategy—because it’s hard to get where you’re going if you don’t know how to get there!
Your SEO strategy should include:
- SMART goals, ideally ones that tie into your brand’s top-level goals (e.g. increase donations, decrease costs, etc.);
- SWOT analysis, including a site and content audit, competitive analysis, etc.
- Address the Pillars (On-site, Off-site, and Technical—more on that in a bit);
- Project plan with tasks, due dates, etc.;
- Reporting and revision.
If this part sounds a bit intimidating, you’re not alone! Setting a solid SEO strategy can be a big undertaking, and it’s the squishiest part of this whole thing; the SEO strategy can vary widely from site to site, meaning this isn’t something you can copy from someone else and get good results.
Need some help getting started?
On-Site SEO
This is where the real magic happens. The content on your site. Don’t let the technical focus of this series confuse you—quality content is vital. Without it, the technical foundation won’t be worth much. Make sure the content you’re putting on your site is unique, relevant, and high-quality. It’s been demonstrated that quality content can gain traction in the SERPS without a dedicated link-building campaign, meaning you can either buy your way to the top, or you can let your content do the heavy lifting for you.
Based on a study by Moz, an on-page score of 90 or higher using their on-page optimization tool yielded a significantly higher likelihood of that page ranking in the top ten results for the target keyword. That’s not something to ignore. But before you can optimize a page for a specific keyword, you’ll have to first do some keyword research.
Keyword research is the important—albeit time-consuming—process of analyzing historical search data, competitor sites, search volume, and more to determine which specific keyword(s) you should use for a given piece of content (i.e. home improvement projects vs diy projects). Essentially, you’ve got to figure out what people are searching for (keywords) when they’re looking for content related to yours, and then optimize your content for those target keywords.
Aside from quality, keyword-optimized content, other on-site SEO factors include:
- Well-structured URLs
- Semantic markup
- Structured data
- Responsive design
- Fast page speed
- Secure, malware-free site
Off-Site SEO
Google and other search engines—as part of their index—keep loads of information on backlinks, or how other websites link back to yours. With that data, as well as data on how visitors use your site, the search engines determine whether your site is trustworthy and authoritative. Whether you’re going to make it onto a SERP pretty much boils down to whether your site is trustworthy and the content of a given page is relevant to a searcher’s query. And when other trustworthy and relevant sites link to yours, it’s a signal to the Googles that you’re trustworthy and relevant, too.
Some ways you can gain backlinks:
- Having quality content, because great content gets shared naturally—resulting in more relevant links to your site;
- Manually requesting links from other influential sites and blogs;
- Marketing or sharing on social platforms;
- Guest or influencer blogging;
- Encouraging customers and other influencers to leave reviews (also known as brand mentions).
All these links and mentions—along with a bunch of other data—are thrown into proprietary algorithms like Google’s RankBrain to generate scores that determine how likely a given page in your site is able to rank in the SERPs vs a similar page on a competitor’s site. It’s this—and other off-site factors—that comprise off-site SEO.
Technical SEO
In this series, we’re going to focus not on the strategy, keyword research, or content-creation aspects of SEO, but rather on the technical foundation every site needs in order to ensure it’s found and indexed by the search engines. Despite its intimidating name, technical SEO is a great place to start when approaching SEO for the first time or when you’re looking to make big impacts without (re)writing a ton of content.
By definition, technical SEO is the optimization of the underlying foundation and structure of your website, and can include:
- Load time;
- Mobile-friendliness (aka responsive web design);
- Sitemaps and robots.txt;
- Markup & metadata;
- Structured data;
- Broken links and other errors;
- And other assorted issues related to indexation, crawlability, and rendering.
Up Next: All about URLS
This is where things get exciting! In the next article of our “Technical SEO for Regular People” series, we’ll help you make sure your site can be found and crawled by search engines—and it all starts with good URLs.
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