SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization,” which is the practice of enhancing your ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! so that your website appears higher on search results than your competitors’. In today’s world, SEO is more important than ever before, as digital marketing experts predict that searches will overtake traditional searches (i.e., those conducted on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) by 2020.
The Key to Successful SEO
To ensure your website’s success, you must consider a number of important factors, including your niche, the strength of your competitors’, and how search engines rank websites.
When it comes to SEO, the term “niche” refers to a small market or specific segment of a market that you are passionate about. For example, if you are an outdoors person, you might want to target customers in the hiking and camping niche rather than those in the automotive niche.
If you are just starting your SEO journey, it might be difficult to know what niche to target. Fear not! Simply consider the types of products or services that your business offers and which marketing channels (i.e., websites, email, social media, etc.) you are already using to attract potential customers. Once you know your niche, you can begin to determine what keyword phrases and phrases to include in your content. Additionally, you can use your chosen keywords to create unique blog posts that will encourage your existing customers to share your content, attract new customers, and enhance your SEO.
To best optimize your SEO, it is important to consider how search engines rank websites. There are two important metrics provided by search engines that you must understand:
- organic search traffic
- rank position
The first, organic search traffic, measures actual visits from people who are searching for products or services related to your niche. This type of traffic is free to obtain and, depending on the strength of your efforts, can generate a significant amount of traffic to your website. Knowing how search engines work and how to play with their parameters is essential for obtaining high rankings on search engines.
The second metric, the rank position, is the spot a given website occupies on a search engine results page. The higher the rank position, the more visible the website will be in a given search engine’s results.
To put it simply, SEO is all about improving your ranking on search engines so that your website appears higher on the results page than your competitors’. A good rule of thumb is to assume that every click on a search result is a potential customer. In light of this, the goal of every piece of content you create should be to increase the click-through rate (CTR) to that content. If you can increase the CTR to a piece of content by 10%, that content will increase in value by 10% as well because more people are clicking on it. In this case, you’re not only helping the user, you’re also increasing the odds that the person exiting the search results will become a customer of yours.
What is the Strength of My Competitors’?
Now that you know the importance of SEO and the factors that affect its success, you can begin to determine the strength of your competitors’ SEO. To do this, simply visit Google, Bing, or Yahoo! and search for your niche.
If you’re searching on Google, you’ll see a number of results along the top of the page. These are your search engine results, and they will vary in terms of quality. If you read through the reviews on the right side of the page, you’ll see that some websites are ranked higher than others. Use this information to determine the strength of your competitors’ SEO.
To determine the strength of your competitors’, look at the review scores, the number of verified customer reviews, and the domain popularity of each result. The easier it is for you to find all of this information in one place, the easier your SEO journey will be. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of tools that can help you find all of this information in one place:
Keyword Magic Tool
If you’re looking for a free keyword suggestion tool, you’ve come to the right place. The keyword magic tool, developed by Moz, can help you find the perfect keywords for your SEO strategy. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can find a list of keywords that you can use to find your niche’s market.
This is a great tool for those who are looking for keywords and want to avoid overusing keywords for the sake of being able to find their content again. Simply enter your website’s URL and begin typing to find the perfect set of keywords that can help your website achieve its highest search engine ranking.
Now that you have a good sense of the strength of your competitors’, you can determine how much effort you should put into your SEO. A rule of thumb is to work hard enough to beat your competition, but not so hard that you become a spammer.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a free tool that can help you find keywords, track competitors, analyze traffic, and more. Simply enter your keywords and begin typing to find all of your content, including articles, blog posts, and web pages. From there, you can easily see how many competitors you have, the search volume of your keywords, and more.
One of the great things about SEMrush is that it allows you to track competitors’ keywords and track how well your content is performing on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This is important because it allows you to determine how well your SEO is going and if you’re hitting your targets. For example, if you noticed that a particular competitor was gaining a large amount of search interest for a certain keyword phrase, you might want to consider testing out that keyword with your next blog post or article.
SEO is a constantly changing field, which is great because it means that you can always learn something new. With that in mind, I’d like to leave you with a few last tips and tricks to help get you started on the right foot in terms of your SEO strategy. Remember: the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start seeing results!