What is SEO and How it Works
Welcome to my page about what is SEO and how SEO works.
This is Joanna Vaiou, SEO Consultant at my own remote SEO business.
What is SEO
SEO is a combination of online marketing strategies that make a website appear organically on the 1st page of Google organic results for specific keywords or search terms that represent a company’s products, services, or other types of content the exact moment a user types them in Google search engine’s box.
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) involves applying specific edits to your website’s code, architecture, content quality, and formatting to make it friendlier and more relevant to a search engine like Google in order to rank your content as high as possible at the top organic results.
How SEO Works
SEO means creating high quality and unique content that answers a user’s query, optimizing it for specific search terms, publishing it on a website, and then promoting it to other industry-relevant and authoritative websites and Social Media Networks in order to increase its popularity, authority, and trustworthiness in Google search engine.
This happens after acquiring high-quality editorial and guest post backlinks from other reputable websites, online press mentions, and social shares and results in ranking higher in Google for your website’s target keywords.
What is SEO and how it works – Joanna Vaiou
It is not hard to get a complete overview of how SEO works.
Access my own personal guide on how to learn DIY SEO free for beginners here.
People have come to realize the significant role of SEO in the success of their companies.
This is because if they want to survive as well as stay ahead of their competition, it is very important that companies remain visible and continue to rank organically at the top spots of Google search engine when their target audience actively types keywords in the Google box that relate to their products or services…
SEO does that.
Either you are thinking about becoming SEO services professional or contemplating hiring one, you need to know how SEO works so you can make the best decision for yourself or your company.
You need to be able to know for sure if you are being conned or not.
How SEO Works in 2 Different Niches
Different domains & websites, different niches, different targets, different budgets mean different SEO results. How is that?
What these 2 website projects have in common:
1) Both are in a medium SEO competition space
What these 2 website projects are different in:
1) The first one targets global B2B and B2C customers/clients in the English language and the other one targets national customers/clients in Greece
2) The first one started with some domain authority and a decent amount of content already for me to work with and bring fast results (we doubled our organic traffic in less than 2 months of SEO work). The second one started with zero authority and zero link-worthy content. The slow progress during the first 6-8 months is the result of that.
3) The first one was a 5 month SEO project and the second one is an ongoing project. The ongoing project is experiencing a parabolic increase of organic traffic even if the progress was slow and the 5 month SEO project peaked in January 2021 and settled somewhere lower the following months after services stopped.
SEO Services List
I have listed some of the main services that an SEO Offer must-have.
- Keyword research
There is no doubt that keywords seem to make up a pretty big chunk of the basic SEO concept. This is because with the help of keywords, the visitors or customers, in general, seem to find the things that they are looking for.
So, by analyzing your target customer profile along with the vision of your business, the appropriate set of keywords are created.
One of the most common ways in which people find out about your website would be through search engines and typing phrases in the Google search box.
Therefore, to make the search engines work in your favor, it is important to conduct research regarding what keywords are the best for you to target.
You may incorporate a random set of keywords in your content of course but this strategy will not work in your favor. In fact, this is bound to confuse your readers (and Google) and send them backtracking.
Therefore, by conducting thorough research and analysis, the appropriate set of keywords are initially set and then mapped (or assigned) to specific individual pages or posts on a website.
These would then be used throughout the on-site and off-site SEO (content and linking) strategy to achieve the desired results.
- SEO Audit (Technical & On-Page)
This is the part of SEO which deals with all the major components of your website itself.
In other words, it includes the technical health, infrastructure/architecture of your website, the code, and your content.
The basic responsibility of the top SEO professional is to fix all technical errors, optimize and create the right appealing content for both Google and users, and make sure that the important pages on a website, are easily found by visitors and easily read by Google bots.
Just like the name suggests, these are the techniques that would be implemented to boost the overall quality and traffic of your website.
After all, your website is the 1st component that your target customers would be looking at when they find you online.
An On-Site SEO service starts with an SEO audit.
Some of the most important factors to tackle in an SEO Audit are the following:
- Making sure the website is correctly set-up in Google Search and Google Analytics Tools
- Headings
- Page titles
- SEO (meta) titles
- Meta descriptions
- SEO optimized images
- Contextual, unique, relevant, and straight forward content that satisfies the users’ intent
- Easily read content structure on the page
- 404 Error pages
- No-index tags
- Duplicate content issues
- Existing content quality review
- Improvement of existing content to improve Google ranking positions
- Crawlability and indexability issues
- Keyword cannibalization
- Page-load speed
- Internal linking structure
- Off-site SEO (Link acquisition or link earning)
Just like it is imperative that your company makes a good impression of itself through the website, it is not enough most of the time when you have to deal with strong competitors at the top page of Google for your target keywords.
This is because the majority of the work seems to be conducted behind the curtains.
That is where off-site SEO comes in.
This deals with how your website is referred to by other sources (external websites) and other signals of trust, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of your organization/brand.
Even though these two components (Onsite and Offsite SEO) tend to be regarded as the highlights of SEO by a consultant, there is more to SEO.
These are discussed in brief below.
- SEO Copywriting
In order to make sure that your website stands out from all the others in your industry, you need to focus on custom and unique content creation, content optimization, and distribution.
Being a business owner, it is highly unlikely you can dedicate time to create this content yourself.
Therefore, by hiring an SEO Copywriting professional, they will be responsible for generating useful and meaningful content that serves, helps, educates, and entertains your ideal clients or customers.
- Local SEO
The benefits from local SEO and Google my Business pages, cannot be ignored.
It really amazes me how underutilized the Google my Business (organic) channel is by a majority of Local, National, and International audience targeting companies.
Reasons Why All Companies Need a Strong GMB Presence
- If your audience is international, that includes your national and local audience so it is in your best interest to not exclude them.
- Even if you don’t care about local or national potential customers, use the GMB channel to provide the most current information for your business (what you are up to, your informational/educational posts, your videos, your images, your Press Coverage, etc).
- While it is not Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter, or Instagram and other Social Media channels as it lacks interaction with the other registered members, it still remains a free channel that you can utilize to optimize your presence, educate or entertain your future customers and promote your products and services.
- Google owns it.
- Social Proof and Online Reputation building for your brand through acquiring and accepting reviews from your customers.
- Receiving direct calls, direct messages, and questions about your business from customers in real-time.
With a strong presence on this channel, your company will be able to create a stable of monthly incoming leads, clients, sales, or other inquiries from Google my Business, the first place your ideal customers search for your products or services locally.
- Brand Development & EAT building for both brands and authors
“EAT” is the acronym of “Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness” and adheres to what people hired by Google are paid to evaluate manually in order to determine if a web page’s content is authoritative and trustworthy.
These people are named “Google Search Quality Raters” and their evaluations are used by Google to update their algorithm which is responsible for Google rankings.
In simple words, “EAT” is a term for both brands and their assigned expert authors who are responsible for creating and publishing content attached to their brands.
Google wants to rank on top organic positions websites and content that is authoritative, useful, and authoritative.
“EAT” can improve through online PR, media features, and press coverage of the experts behind a brand who are responsible for the content that they publish under their name signature.
Another thing that is important for EAT is a solid structure of the company’s “About Us” page and the Authors’ “About me page.
Next, you will find my online interview explaining what is SEO and how it works for solopreneurs and beginners, with Yoann Bierling who is an online publisher.
Few words about my interviewer Yoann:
After years of working as an international web development coordinator and international project manager for several world industry leaders, he runs a self-developed network of websites to help others get their businesses to reach an international level.
How SEO Works for Solopreneurs/Beginners
Are you a WordPress user?
A good strategy for new content creation is to use a WordPress lists plugin like RoundupWiz which will help you create unique high-quality content with how-to and lists articles where reached influencers could share their knowledge and give your website even more credibility and boost in traffic.
Learn how to show up in Google Search in two uncommon ways.
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