For example, the SEO for beginners course, the WordPress for beginners course and a course on structured data. If you’re a Yoast SEO Premium user, you get access to all 16 courses on there. Which will really help you dive into the different aspects of SEO and how to tackle them. SEO is all about optimizing your website to increase your online visibility. Well, there’s a lot you can do and it can be divided up into three main areas. In my role as Chief Revenue Officer at Insivia, I am at the forefront of driving transformation and results for SaaS and technology companies.
Track Keyword Positions Over Time
If you have an authoritative page with a link to another page on your site, that helps your visitors find the other page and pass on some authority. You’ve likely heard inbound links referred to as “backlinks.” You aim to get as many highly authoritative sites to link back to you. That also means you want to have very few inbound links from low-quality domains. Open a Google search in your in-private browser and type in your keyword. See which results are currently ranking and determine whether or not your content would be a good fit. If so, take this opportunity to see SEO Anomaly why certain pages are ranking.
Yes, random internal linking is probably better than no internal linking at all. Just like with your filename, you want to write descriptive alt text that lets search engines know what your image is all about. You can also see the exact keywords that people use to find your content… and where you tend to rank. When considering search intent, SEOs focus on producing text-based answers, overlooking visual search intent. For example, when someone is researching roof types, they’re looking for more than a definition — they’re looking for a visual that shows what these roofs look like on buildings.
Track Performance and Adjust Your Strategy
So… this question of… how should I order my H1, H2, H3, headings and what should the content be, that’s something from my point of view isn’t really that relevant. I think in general, headings are a bit overrated in the sense that it’s very easy to… get pulled into lots of theoretical discussions on what the optimal headings should be. In Darren’s excellent talk on the 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors, he also shared the most important GMB conversion factors that the experts believe are most likely to affect user behavior. Beyond ensuring you have the most relevant and up-to-date category set for the business, and adding your business’s name, there isn’t much you can legitimately do to “optimize” these. In fact, ensuring the “completeness” of your Google My Business listing has become even more important this year.
These elements align with other search engines and their ranking factors, like Google. Next to content, backlinks are often considered to be the second most important SEO ranking factor. To attract search engines to your content, you also need to consider on-page SEO factors. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing each individual page on your site for a target keyword. By optimizing your content for one specific keyword, you tell the search engines what the page is about and what it should rank for. Now, let’s look at how to help improve SEO rankings by optimizing your online presence to appeal to 12 important SEO ranking factors.
If they can’t find it easily, they will leave your site and pick your competition. This is the rate in which people click on the link to your website compared to the number of people who had the chance to click on your result. You’ll need to reach out to industry editors, bloggers, and other sites to get them to check out your content.
- Many have business directories, event listings, or partnership opportunities that can help boost your local authority while strengthening community connections.
- If you want your site to claim the top spots on SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to optimize your online presence to cater to these factors.
- This emphasis on UX has introduced the importance of Core Web Vitals, a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience.
- You can use Rank Math’s Topic Research AI tool to create in-depth, well-optimized articles that cater to your audience’s needs and improve your website’s SEO performance.
- Within the top 15 local pack ranking factors, we can see ‘keywords in Google reviews’, ‘high Google ratings’, and ‘quantity of Google reviews with text’ all being important.
Based on the rating guidelines above, Google shows searchers the most relevant, high-quality results related to what they’re looking for. The most relevant are shown first, with the rest shown over successive pages. Third, when people search Google, it shows what it thinks are the most relevant results based on the search terms they enter (out of the trillions of pages in Google’s index).
Moreover, regularly updated content signals to search engines that your website is a reliable source of information, which can improve your site’s overall SEO performance. It’s especially crucial for topics that are rapidly evolving, where new information can significantly impact the content’s accuracy and usefulness. Optimizing for user intent involves a deep dive into keyword research, audience analysis, and the customer journey. This way, you can also generate revenue through organic marketing. Semantic search optimization is the art of refining your content to align with the intent behind user queries, rather than merely matching keywords. This approach requires a deep understanding of how your audience phrases their searches and the context surrounding those queries.
But only 5% see them as most important for regular organic rankings. As long as you’re delighting your customers, your online reputation will grow on autopilot and rankings should improve. Local SEO is a game of two halves because Google shows two types of search results for local searches. Since SEO can benefit every funnel stage, from awareness to purchase, businesses need to create a smart SEO optimization strategy. A smart strategy, for example, focuses on bringing qualified traffic to drive sales to make SEO worth the investment. Keep in mind, the above list of sub-buckets just gives a glimpse of the available ranking factors.
By having descriptive alt text on web pages alongside quality content, sites can improve rankings and traffic from search engines. Internal links and quality backlinks are vital for strong rankings because they signal to search engines that a page is valuable and useful. Given the complexity of search algorithms, it’s not practical to focus on all Google ranking factors.