What is SEO? A Beginner’s Guide to SEO [2020 Edition]

This article aims to give an overview of what SEO is, why it is important, how Google functions, and a guide to what you can do. This article is not a definitive guide to every aspect and subtlety of SEO — search engine optimization. SEO is a vast subject that cannot be fully covered in a single article.

Definition of SEO

SEO is the art and science of persuading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.

If you want search engines to offer your content in results, you need to do three things:

Ensure these search engines understand who you are and what you offer.
Convince them that you are the most credible option for their users.
Make your content deliverable.

How high in the rankings and how often you appear is merit-based; these engines will show the results they consider to be the best fit for their users.

Why is SEO important?

SEO traffic (also known as organic traffic) is “free” — when a search engine shows your content to its users in the organic part of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you do not pay for the ranking. When the user clicks on the result and visits your site, you do not pay Google for the visit.

On that same SERP, there are often paid results; they are identifiable by the ‘Ad’ icon to the left. When a user clicks on a paid result and visits the site, the advertiser pays the search engine for that visit.

So for ads, you pay to be the top, front, and center, and with organic search results (“SEO results”, if you prefer), you are top, front, and center through merit, and it is free.

The big advantage of SEO traffic is that, if your SEO strategy is effective (and we will look at how to make that happen below), then it is an ongoing source of free traffic.

How Search Engines Work

The fundamental aim of search engines is to satisfy its users. They want to provide the best results when a user searches for something. When someone uses a search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, they are looking for the solution to a problem or the answer to a question. These engines want to provide the most helpful, relevant, and credible answer or solution.

Keywords

In SEO, we often refer to ‘keywords’ — this is slightly misleading. ‘Search queries’ is a much better term. We are not looking at individual words; we are looking at combinations of words that express a problem or a question.

Note: even when a user searches with just one word, they are still expressing a problem or question — they are just not being very clear!

What is your audience searching for?

To work effectively on your SEO, you need to figure out what your potential customers are searching for. Find the phrases that they use to search, and then create content that brings a clear, simple, and helpful solution to the problem that the user expressed. SEMrush offers a tool that allows you to find out based on your market and your competitors.

Google Versus the Rest of the Search Engines

Google dominates search in most countries across the globe, almost to the point of being a monopoly, particularly in English. In English, worldwide, 88% of searches on desktop are on Google. On mobile, that figure is a whopping 96%. Bing and Yahoo combined account for 1.5% of searches on mobile and 8% of searches on desktop. That makes Google vastly dominant. And by far, the most important search engine you should be focusing on.

Desktop Search Engine Share Worldwide

Mobile Search Engine Share Worldwide

So, as a business with a website, your reliance on Google is pretty much a given. Great SEO is not an option. It is a necessity.

How Google Works

Google says, “we are organizing the content of the web.” That is a lovely way of putting it. Google organizes the content of the web to be able to deliver to its users the best answer to their question or solution to their problem. You can look at this as Google being a reference system for all the information on the web. It keeps references to every page (and the information it contains), and then when someone asks for specific information, Google can point them to the content that best supplies the answer or solution.

It is very helpful to approach SEO from the perspective that you are providing solutions to Google’s users, and you are asking it to recommend your solution.

Google is striving to recommend the most relevant answer from the most trustworthy source in the most appropriate format for its user.

Relevant – Google aims to match the best answer to the question it has understood. That is relevancy in a nutshell.
Trustworthy – Google wants to send its users to content from a source it is confident will satisfy its user — a credible brand or person it trusts.
Consumable – This is an awful word, and I apologize, but Google wants to send its users to the kind of content they want to engage with, in a format they can consume.

Matching User Intent to Truly Useful Content

So here are two things Google needs to match. On one side, user intent: when someone searches on Google, they are expressing a problem they need a solution to. But they often express that problem incompletely or ambiguously. Google tries to understand what they mean. What is their intent? What is the specific problem they are trying to solve? Google needs to understand the question or the intent. We will look at that in more detail a little bit later.

On the other side, what is the best content to satisfy the user, given their intent — the most accurate and most helpful and useful content on the world wide web that reliably solves that problem? Google needs to understand the available solutions, their relative merits, and their appropriateness. And this is what SEO is practically about. SEO is your means to present your content to Google in such a way that it is confident that your solution is the most helpful, the most trustworthy, and the most appropriate for their user. In short, convince Google to recommend your answer or solution.

Google’s Algorithm

The word “algorithm” can seem scary, but it is simply a computer code that understands the question and evaluates the relative merits of the answers. In SEO, we are mostly focused on the second part. We aim to send the right signals to Google’s algorithm to convince it that our answer is the best, most useful, and most appropriate for the question it has understood.

Google Updates

You have certainly heard about Google’s updates. The most famous are Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. It is very essential to understand several things:

Google is constantly updating its algorithm on a daily basis. But most of these updates are small and won’t lead to noticeable changes in ranking or traffic for individual brands like yours.
From time to time, Google implements major updates. These can affect your site’s rankings and traffic quite drastically.
Some updates in the past were specifically aimed at reducing the impact of cheating by some brands and websites. It gave these updates names — Panda (related to the quality of content) and Penguin (about quality of links) are famous examples.
Today, Google announces most major updates, and you can find those announcements on Twitter via @searchliaison.

Machine Learning in Google’s Algorithm

As the name suggests, “Machine learning is functionality that helps software perform a task without explicit programming or rules.” Google gives some examples of tasks machine learning may perform:

Personalize product recommendations based on customer behavior
Look for keywords in massive numbers of text documents
Enable software to accurately respond to voice commands

Machine Learning at Google

RankBrain and BERT are the most famous machine learning updates. Rank Brain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system Google uses to help sort through its search results. BERT is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP), and it stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is used to understand the nuances and context of words within searches, and it helps provide better matches to the queries with more relevant results.

Quality Raters

Google has thousands of quality raters, and they are used to help improve the search experience. According to Google, “quality raters are spread out across the world and are highly trained.” Google is always experimenting with search results, and they use feedback from third-party search quality raters to make sure changes are useful.

So what are the raters looking for when they are analyzing the results? Let’s find out.

Quality Rater Guidelines

Quality Raters are considered “highly trained” because they are expected to follow a very long and detailed document — 168 pages as of January 2020 to be exact — that explains what constitutes a good result and what raters should look for to identify bad results. The document is worth reading because it sets out what content Google wants to serve its users and how Google judges the fit-for-purpose content quality. It does not tell us what the ranking factors/signals are or exactly how the algorithm works (more on that later).

These guidelines are updated frequently.

Here is a brief overview of what Google raters are looking for to identify quality content (and by extension, this is an overview of what you should aim to achieve).

Intent of the Query

When looking at the results, the raters stay focused on the intent of the user — the problem they are aiming to find the solution to. So they are asking themselves, “Is this result a good solution, and does it help the user?” If Google is to recommend particular content as a solution, that content must have beneficial value to the user in the search for a solution to their problem. The content must be user-centered and user-focused.

Credibility Signals (known as E-A-T).

Google uses the acronym E-A-T — Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — which could also be expressed globally as credibility. They are judging credibility or E-A-T at three levels — the page, the author, and the website. Furthermore, they are looking to see if the content is credible in the context of the solution it aims to provide.

E-A-T is incredibly essential to Google; in the guidelines, they use the words expert, authority, and trust (or variants) over 200 times.

Let’s look briefly at each component of E-A-T.

Expertise – Is the information accurate? Should this writer or brand write about this topic?
Authoritativeness – Is the author well-respected in their field? Is the brand widely recognized in the industry? Is the content referred to elsewhere on the web by other authoritative websites, brands, and people?
Trustworthiness – Do the brand and the writer have a good reputation and is the content reliable?

YMYL Pages

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It is a very important concept for quality raters. As Google explains in guidelines, this term describes pages or topics that “could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.” Here is a list of such topics:

Google claims to have “very high Page Quality standards” for such pages because low-quality YMYL content can directly affect readers’ well-being.

Quality of the Content, Page, and Site

Google wants to send its users to websites that give a great user experience (UX). The raters look carefully at the quantity and quality of the content, the user-friendliness of the design, and the navigation of the site.

The raters also identify explicitly bad content — they will flag content that is low quality, or has no credibility, or is outright misleading. Google aims to exclude this type of content since it does not give a good user experience for their users.

Here is a screenshot of the quality scale they use:

Google Ranking Factors

Google’s algorithm takes thousands and thousands of signals into account when evaluating a page to determine where it should rank for a specific user query.

When we talk about ranking factors, we are simply identifying which groups of signals have the most influence on how well a piece of content will perform in Google search.

From your perspective, we are identifying which aspects of your content, website, and reputation you can improve to most effectively boost Google’s opinion of your content, and thus gain a higher position in the search results.

Here are the main factors you need to get right to help your content to rank higher in Google (there are more than 200, so we have only detailed the most important ones in this guide).

On-Page

As the name implies, on-page signals are those that Google finds on the page of your website. They are the aspects that you control directly, and so the easiest to get right.

Technical

Speed – People don’t like to wait, so Google wants to send its users to a page that loads fast. Make sure all your content loads quickly, even on a slow internet connection.
Mobile-friendliness – The content needs to look great and provide a good user experience on mobile devices. Google’s index is now mobile-first, so usability on mobile is a major influence on rankings.
Code quality – Google needs clean, clear code to be able to digest and understand your content efficiently and effectively. To date, Google can “understand” some programming languages better than others (i.e., HTML over JavaScript); however, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using the latter on your site. It just means you need to ensure Google can access its contents efficiently in every case.
Security – A secure site is a credible site.
Schema.org markup – Put simply, schema.org markup explains your content to Google in a format it can easily digest and understand. Schema.org markup is a BIG help to Google, and it can also prove invaluable in helping you rank at the top of SERPs when these include a Featured Snippet or Quick Answer.

Content

Titles – The meta title and heading on the page are very critical signals to Google.
Content copy – As we saw previously in the section about Quality Raters, Google is looking for quality, accurate, credible content that serves a real purpose and brings benefit to the user (content that has a beneficial purpose). And, in the context of the user’s search query, content that answers the question or solves the problem that the user has expressed to Google.
Rich content – As the web becomes more multimedia, people expect richer content, and Google wants to provide that to them. So Google is looking for more than just reams of text. Google wants to see images, sound, video to make their user’s interaction with the content better.
Internal linking – Needs to be clear, logical, and simple. Google relies on internal linking to identify which content on your site is most important, and it also relies on internal linking to find all the pages on your site.
Freshness – Regular updates of your content indicate to Google that you are providing up-to-date information. Once again, it wants to satisfy its users with relevant and accurate information.
Outbound links – Google uses these to check that your information is accurate and also to confirm the credibility of the author and website. Despite what you may hear, outbound links (to authoritative and relevant sources, of course) are a positive signal to Google.

Off-page

Off-page factors include those signals sent to Google not by any changes you made to your site’s code or content but from third party websites. This is why this category of factors mainly includes links or mentions of your pages on other people’s sites or social media profiles.

Inbound Links

This is the biggest off-page factor — links to your content from relevant, authoritative sites are a very strong signal to Google that the content is popular and worthy. We can consider links as “votes” — people link to content from their websites or their social media accounts because they appreciate it. More links = more “love.” And if you think back to the part about E-A-T, links indicate that this piece of content, this website, and this author are a trusted, authoritative source of information.

Link authority – Earning links from highly authoritative sites is more valuable than earning links on websites with a lower Authority Score.
Link relevancy – Google prefers links from relevant sites — usually in the same industry, or news sites or review sites that cover multiple industries in a credible manner.
Page relevancy – Google looks at the content surrounding the link and evaluates how relevant that piece of content is to your content. Links from highly relevant content send a stronger signal.
Anchor text – Relevant anchor text (the text that people click on to visit the link) is an important signal because it helps Google better understand the context of each link.

Social Signals

Sharing on social platforms, and the general social buzz around your content is a signal to Google that the content is useful and appreciated. And when recommending content as a solution to its user, useful and appreciated are high on the list of priorities.

Unlinked Brand Mentions

A mention of your brand is a signal to Google, even without a link. Google understands that someone is talking about you when they use your brand name. Obviously, you are looking for mentions with a positive sentiment in a relevant context.

Influencer Marketing

When influencers in your industry talk about your brand and cite your content, they are essentially vouching for you. That peer approval from a trusted, authoritative expert will help improve the credibility of your brand, your author, and your content in Google’s eyes. Once again, we are looking for relevancy — approval from an authoritative figure within your industry.

Trust Signals

Trust signals indicate to Google that your brand, your products, and your content are appreciated by your users/customers. Trust signals are things like product and service reviews, positive mentions in forums, comments on your blog posts, etc. In short, any positive activity by your users around your products, brand, or content.

How SEO Works

This section covers what you can do to improve your chances of being recommended by Google as the appropriate, relevant, and helpful answer to the question a user has asked.

We can divide this into three main areas: technical, content, and links.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about the quality of the infrastructure that delivers your content. Good technical SEO means that Google will find your content easily, and that content will be easy for it to digest and understand.

What are your top priorities for technical SEO?

Crawlability – Google needs to be able to access your pages and digest your content. The term “crawl” basically means access and read a webpage. If Google cannot access your content, it cannot offer it in its results. Examples of crawlability issues are not allowing Google to crawl your pages — a file called robots.txt is where you can give or refuse permission to Google to access specific pages of your site. Another issue for crawlability is having pages behind a paywall, or login page — Google cannot access those pages and so cannot know what content they contain.
Indexability – Once Google has seen your page, it needs to be sure that you want it to show that page to its users. The noindex tag in the head section of your pages allows you to indicate to Google whether or not you want it to consider a specific page for its search results.
Site architecture – You need to organize your site in a manner that makes it easy to understand sections and catégories and make it simple for Google to navigate through every single page on your site. If there are pages on your site that have no internal links pointing to them, Google will have trouble finding those pages. And even if it does, it will consider them as relatively less valuable than pages that do have internal links. Great site architecture is also a big bonus for user experience.
Schema markup – This factor is fundamentally important. Think of it as Google’s native language. Schema markup explains your content to Google in a manner it understands, making it easy to digest and understand. Google has a tool to test the schema.org markup on your pages.
Speed – Every page needs to be fast. Users don’t like to wait, and Google knows that; It wants to recommend faster pages to its users since they give a better user experience. Google has a tool to test your pages for speed.
Mobile-friendliness – Every page on your site needs to be mobile-friendly. Users need to be able to consume your content easily on a mobile device. Google evaluates your content according to its performance on a mobile device, so it is vital you get this right. Google has a tool to test your pages for mobile-friendliness.
User interface – As we saw earlier in the raters section, Google wants to recommend sites that appeal to users both in the design and the comfort of use. Your site layout needs to ensure that when the user lands on your page that they find it attractive, they understand at a glance what your page offers, and they grasp the navigational options that they have. You want them to interact with your content and then want to investigate further. In short, you want them to stay.

Content SEO

Meta titles and meta descriptions – These areas of a page determine, in many cases, what Google shows its users in the search results.

An accurate meta title that describes clearly and unambiguously what the content of the page offers to the user is supremely important — it is the reason they click on your result or not.
More on this

What NOT To Do When Writing a Meta Description

Post

Gabka Koscova

Meta titles and meta descriptions are essentially sales copy that needs to pull the user in, and also help Google better understand the content and purpose of each page. Ideally, the meta title will include the main keywords the user searched for. This is essential for Google’s algorithm, but also for the user; people feel more at ease and are more likely to click on text that contains the words they used in their search.

Heading – The title the user sees when they land on your page is a critical signal to Google. Like the meta title, it needs to be clear and unambiguous and include the terms the user searched for. Again, this is an important signal to Google, but also reassuring and helpful for the user.

Writing style – Keep your writing simple, clear, and focused. Keep sentences short, break the content into logical chunks, and stay on topic. Help readers get right to the solution to their problem. Organize your content so that the value it provides is easy to identify, understand, and engage with.

Rich content – Include rich content such as audio, video, and illustrative images whenever feasible. Google is not capable of understanding the content of images or videos. So, when you do include these richer formats, accompany them with the appropriate meta tags to help Google and those with visual impairments understand what the image/video is about. You could also include a written version to make it easier for users who prefer written content.

Outbound links – These kinds of links lead to sources that confirm the accuracy of your content and that validate your credibility and the credibility of the author.

Authorship – Identify the author explicitly where appropriate. If they have great E-A-T, this will bring credibility to the content.

Taking it further, your content does not live in isolation. It is vital to see each piece of content as part of an overall, coherent content strategy. As soon as you do that, you are thinking in terms of content marketing.

What makes great content?

Great Writing

For all content (written, audio, and video), correct grammar, proper spelling, and a clear style are essential both to Google and the user consuming it. Write naturally, write for your audience, and don’t be tempted to try and trick Google by adding the words you want to rank for multiple times (called ‘keyword stuffing’). That tactic does not work, and it makes for a bad user experience. Google wants to exclude this (they explicitly tell their quality raters to reject it). And with recent developments such as BERT, Google is becoming very good at understanding natural language.

Relevancy

Having content that truly addresses the problems your audience is facing is vital. If you want Google to recommend your content to its users, that content needs to bring value to them. That means being highly relevant information and providing a helpful solution to the user’s problem or question. On a wider scale, consistently creating relevant, helpful content that solves users’ problems demonstrates to Google that you understand your audience and that you are striving to bring beneficial content to them — and that breeds credibility.

So focus on bringing real value to your audience with every piece of content you create. To bring real value, you need to focus on user intent.

Search Terms

What are your audiences looking for? You can find out the search terms, or keywords, they use by looking at tools such as SEMrush, and also by asking your sales and support staff what questions people ask them.

When you put together a solid and researched list, think very hard about the intent behind their searches and questions. Sometimes it will be obvious? Often, searches and questions are ambiguous, and the intent is not immediately obvious. You need to understand your audience and provide valuable content that serves the intent of their query.

What formats of content are appropriate?

Different types of content are appropriate for different stages in the funnel, different users. and different user contexts (location, device, etc.). A good content strategy will contain a mix of the different formats I am about to describe.

Lists – Both people and Google love lists. They are easy to digest, easy to understand, and easy to engage with.

How-to guides – These are perfect for providing a step-by-step approach to a specific query.

Long-form guides – These may involve a lot of work, but this type of content can really help your audience understand a specific or a wider topic in depth.

Tables – Tables of data or information on your pages are easy for Google to understand, and they are also incredibly useful and helpful to your audience when they need to process data in relation to a topic.

Graphics – Images, photos, illustrations. Google is including these in the SERPs more and more, especially on mobile. Plus, images – when appropriately used and tagged – can drive visits from Google’s image search, which is particularly popular with some industries and types of queries (i.e., fashion or travel).

Infographics – Infographics are images that contain information (usually illustrations + text) that makes them standalone content. They are great as content to push out to your audience via social media as they can generate great engagement. And, they are also a great way to build links.

Video – Google is including more and more video in search results. This is particularly true of how-to videos.

* Additional benefit: If you post your videos to YouTube, then you benefit from greater brand visibility and referrals on that platform. YouTube is the second most visited website on the planet.

Podcasts – These are audio-only content. Podcasts are on the rise and very popular, especially within specific niches. Like videos and images, Google shows them in the normal search results.

Webinars – A webinar is a live online meeting or presentation that is open to the public. It is a great way to engage and build your audience, but they also provide great longer-term content because, after the live event, you can post it to YouTube as a video people can watch at any time.

Ebooks – are downloadable books, usually in the format of a PDF, that brands often give away for free. They are perfect for in-depth content that is too long for an article, and they can be used in a clever way to acquire more information about your audiences. Ideally, you would have a landing page with an introduction to the ebook then require an email sign up for the user to download the ebook. This not only gives you valuable SEO-related traffic but also allows you to collect prospects’ emails for future marketing efforts.

What is Link Building – The Basics

Links in SEO

For better ranking in Google, your content needs to have inbound links (also known as backlinks). It may have some internal links from your own site, but they only indicate the importance of the content within the context of your site. They don’t help Google see it’s importance in the context of the wider world. Inbound links from relevant and authoritative sites indicate to Google that your content is popular (peer approval), authoritative, and trusted. These are all very strong signals to Google that your content is a good result to recommend to its users for relevant search queries.

An important concept here is “from relevant and authoritative sites.” When looking to obtain inbound links, especially for a new website, webmasters tend to focus on quantity. However, quality in the form of acquiring links from websites with high authority, which are relevant to your content. should be the priority.

In 2012, Google released a very strong algorithm update called Penguin that aimed at eliminating “link cheating” (meaning to prevent sites with spammy link profiles from ranking high). In 2017, they announced that the process of identifying, and then ignoring these spammy links is now running in real-time, which means that any link to a site’s pages that is considered low quality will be ignored and will not help to rank.

How to Build Links

In a perfect world, your amazing content will earn links on merit without any effort on your part. People (website owners, journalists, bloggers, your fans, etc.) will link to your content because, after finding it and consuming it, they consider it to be a valuable resource for their audience.

However, the world is imperfect, and this simple process doesn’t happen naturally very often. Link building is simply helping that process along.

Link building consists of identifying people with the capacity to link to your amazing content (website owners, journalists, bloggers, etc.), pointing them to your content, and encouraging them to link to it from a relevant page on their site; sounds simple. And it is. But it is also time-consuming. Contacting people, building relationships with them, and convincing them that linking to your content is beneficial to them and their audience all take time.

What are the best candidates for link building?

Sites that would potentially see value in linking to you, who will be relevant to your business, and have the necessary authority are often sites your audience uses. So if you can get an understanding of which websites they visit, which authors they read, and which industry thought leaders they engage with, then you have a good idea of the sites and people that you can approach.

Take note, when looking at opportunities for links, relevancy is the number #1 factor you should consider, then the #2 factor is credibility, and #3 is popularity. To really help your SEO efforts, you are looking for links from quality, relevant content, preferably on websites that are authoritative in your industry, and if possible, popular.

Outreach

Once you have identified who you want to link to you, you ‘simply’ need to reach out to them and point your content out to them, indicating why it would be valuable and interesting for their users, and suggesting a link. If you have targeted correctly, this process can be quite natural (this process can be slow since people will rarely link to you when you first contact them, as mentioned above).

For it to work, your content HAS to be of great quality and bring value to their users — exactly the same conditions that we mentioned for Google earlier.

Quality content that brings value to users is what everyone is looking for — website owners, journalists, influencers, bloggers, Google, and even us as users.

Guest Blogging

Writing articles for other relevant and authoritative websites not only can help build an author’s reputation but also allows you to create inbound links from a trusted, authoritative source.

Ideas for Engaging Content That Earns Links

Pieces using data – Create content that includes unique and helpful (or interesting) analysis of data, especially original data.
Emotional – Content that appeals to people’s emotions is great for earning links.
Humorous – If you can hit the right note and your humor appeals to your audience, then this type of content is a big winner for gaining merited links. It is also great for creating a buzz and gaining brand visibility on social media.
Collaborations – Create content that includes an industry influencer/leader: quotes, co-authorship, and interviews are three great examples. This type of content will have authority ‘built in’ since you are associating your brand to a recognized and relevant industry leader. With this type of content, you already have one link right out of the box — from the party you collaborated with!
Authoritative/definitive pieces – Creating this type of content is tough but pays dividends when done right. If your content covers a topic thoroughly and accurately, it brings value to the target audience, and that makes links easier to get.

How Social Media Helps SEO

Is social media part of SEO?

Whether social media activity, including likes, replies, comments, and shares directly help with ranking is not clear. For most major platforms, we know that Google crawls a great deal of the content. However, there is so much content being generated; Google cannot catch all of it. For example, according to The Social Skinny, there are 510,000 comments, 293,000 status updates, and 136,000 photos added on Facebook every minute. But Google is crawling and indexing these sites and large amounts of their content. So we can safely assume that a healthy presence with ongoing engagement from a relevant audience helps SEO.

* Additional benefit: Social media is vital to your marketing efforts beyond just SEO, so having a well-thought-out social media strategy is an essential aspect of your digital marketing strategy. Social media activity helps enormously with building your reputation, brand awareness, and your audience. Over time it is a great channel for maintaining contact with your existing audience, expanding your reach, and distributing the content you create.

How fast does SEO work?

SEO is a long term strategy. As we saw earlier, SEO has three main pillars — technical, content, and links. For your strategy to bear fruit, all three need to be solid, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

Some of your efforts will pay-off in the short term after they are implemented. Changing meta titles, headings, or improving the content on a few pages are typical examples.

Other efforts, such as implementing Schema.org markup across a number of pages, creating a substantial volume of informative content, building links, or attracting positive reviews, take time and will pay off in the long term.

No one single thing will revolutionize the performance of your SEO strategy. All the elements I described above work together, and it is the combination of all the signals Google reads that will make the needle move for you.

Conclusion

Is SEO dead?

Almost every time Google makes an update to its algorithm or to its SERPs features, this question is trending. The answer is “no.” But SEO does not exist in isolation. It is one (very vital) pillar of your digital marketing strategy. New customers will see your brand multiple times before deciding to do — not only in Google search but also on many other platforms such as social media, TV, radio, YouTube, on review sites, Google My Business, etc. As you now know, these can all help with your SEO, and they all bring benefits to your business in their own right and, therefore, can all necessary for your digital marketing strategy to be successful.

So, an intelligent digital marketing strategy will use SEO to help drive other aspects of your marketing, and vice versa.

What are the most important elements of an SEO strategy?

For your SEO strategy to be successful, you must trigger as many of the signals that Google is looking at as possible. A helpful way of looking at how all these individual actions fit into an overall strategy is to think in terms of serving the three following pillars:

Understanding, credibility, and deliverability.

Understanding – if you want Google to recommend our content as the most suitable solution to their user’s problem, it must understand clearly and precisely what it is you are offering. Actions such as clear copywriting, adding schema markup, relevant inbound links serve the purpose of helping Google understand and be confident it has correctly understood what it is you are offering.

Credibility – If Google has understood that multiple pieces of content offer a solution that brings a similar level of value to the user, then it will recommend the one it perceives as the most credible. Actions such as improving E-A-T, link building, linking out to relevant sources all help with your credibility and the credibility of your content.

Deliverability – Google wants to recommend content that provides a great user experience – fast, attractive, great quality, and in the most appropriate format according to the user’s specific needs at that time (geo-location device, bandwidth, etc.). Actions such as mobile-friendliness, download speed, using videos, and text in your content all help to ensure Google considers your content deliverable.