What Is SEO? Meaning, Examples & How to Optimize Your Site

You can also select “Queries” to see what keywords are driving traffic BHS Links to your site. The tool will then provide a list of directories where your business is listed. You can monitor your listings, handle duplicates, and correct inaccuracies right from the dashboard. You can use Semrush’s Site Audit tool to examine over 140 technical and SEO-related factors.

Keyword research tools let you discover and analyze keywords based on the seed keywords you enter. Keyword research is the process of identifying the most relevant and promising keywords for your business. At any given moment, billions of people use search engines to find information. With this understanding of how search engines rank pages, let’s explore how SEO works. Keywords are words or phrases that users type into search engines to find information.

Off-page SEO refers to SEO strategies that happen off your website, such as building links to pillar content. Then, scroll down to the “Queries” table to see up to 1,000 keywords your site is ranking for. To see how strong your organic traffic performance is compared to your main competitors, use Traffic Analytics. User experience (UX) is how visitors interact with and perceive your site (its design, usability, etc.)—and Google values a positive user experience. High-quality content is accurate, helpful, trustworthy, relevant, and user-friendly, which is exactly the type of content Google wants to reward.

✅ Install Analytics

As a result, it will reward a website with well-optimized technical SEO with a higher rank in the search results. As the go-to search engine, Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches per day. Thus, ranking higher on Google search results has the potential to drive significant traffic to your site. To better understand what SEO is, this article will walk you through the search engine and SEO basics, explain how search algorithms work, and what factors influence your site’s ranking. Content is your brand’s voice in today’s information-saturated environment and must be heard.

✅ Does the site offer unique, valuable content?

Google doesn’t always show the one you’ve provided in the SERP; it likes to build its own based on the query, but it’s still important to optimize for SEO. Google reads this description when crawling the page to understand what it’s about. But capturing 92% of the market share, the terms “Google” and “search engine” are synonymous for the intents and purposes of this post. SEO is about making improvements to your website’s structure and content so its pages can be discovered by people searching for what you have to offer, through search engines. If you invest in link building as part of your SEO efforts, target links from topically relevant, popular websites in your niche. Learn more about how marketers use search engine optimization to rank higher and increase traffic.

Guide users and search engines to relevant content within your site through strategic internal linking. SEO refers to search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing a website in order to make it easy to find via search engines like Google. For example, with this list of potential keywords, the keyword “link building” has a high CPC and search volume… but it’s way too competitive. On-page optimization is the process of improving the technical and content aspects of your webpages.

Some content management systems (CMS) may even do this automatically for you. However this isn’t required, and you should first focus on making sure people know about your site. Using the “Competitors” tab, you can compare your backlink profile against that of your competitors and identify opportunities for new links. Few free SEO tools are as powerful and insightful as Google Search Console and Google Analytics for SEO. You can use them to track these metrics and gain valuable insights about your website’s performance. SEO key performance indicators (or KPIs) are measurable values that give you an idea of how effective your SEO strategies are.

• At the same time, the best kind of topics are the ones that hold business value to you.
• These pages help search engines understand where you operate and make it easier for potential customers to find you.
• Notice how the different types of SERP features match the different types of query intents.
• When writing your content, ensure your target keyword is present in your H1 title to aid higher ranking.

Following these simple steps will help you avoid common SEO pitfalls, and set you on the path to success. They’ll also provide a starting point to learn the fundamentals, so you can raise your SEO traffic levels to new heights down the road. You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional. If you end up looking for expert help, it’s important to know that many agencies and consultants “provide SEO services,” but can vary widely in quality.

These help you identify issues with your website so you can make necessary changes to improve functionality. Best of all, Optimizely’s Visual Editor allows you to make changes to a site without having to write a single line of code. User experience considers the ease, smoothness, and accessibility of use for visitors to your site.