SEO is one of the most recognizable marketing acronyms and after more than 25 years of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the process of ranking in search engines like Google and improving your website’s visibility is as important as ever.
“When done right, SEO is why you can usually find exactly what you’re looking for from Google and other search engines,” writes Rachael Nicholson in HubSpot’s “The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2024.” When it comes to business, at least in my experience, you face a digital uphill battle without some presence on Google.”
SEO’s goal is to get your website’s pages to rank higher in organic (unpaid) search results.
“SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important,” explains the Digital Marketing Institute. “In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.”
Let’s look at the basics of SEO and how Google SEO search works.
SEO: Still Relevant After All These Years
SEO has been around long enough that it predates your Gen Z employees!
“Although it could be argued that SEO and all things search engine marketing began with the launch of the first website published in 1991, or perhaps when the first web search engine launched, the story of SEO “officially” begins a bit later, around 1997,” says the Search Engine Journal.
Like many origin stories, there are competing tales of how the acronym was coined and the concept created. Search Engine Journal says the possibilities include:
“Ranking high on search engines in 1997 was still a pretty new concept,” says Search Engine Journal.
In 2024, the concept is not only relevant but a main area of marketing spending.
“SEO is one of the main areas marketers are investing in this year. In fact, HubSpot data finds that 32, percent of marketers plan to leverage websites, blogs, and SEO as part of their overall marketing strategy in 2024,” writes Nicholson.
The Nuts and Bolts of SEO
By now, you have heard SEO tossed around by marketing teams and others plenty of times but what exactly is SEO?
As we already said, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website to increase its visibility in search engine results.
In simpler terms, it's about making your website more attractive to search engines like Google, so they show your site higher up in the search results when people look for topics related to your content.
Key components of SEO include:
- Keywords: Words or phrases that people type into search engines
- Content: High-quality, relevant information on your website
- Site structure: How your website is organized and linked internally
- Backlinks: Links from other websites to yours
- User experience: How easy and pleasant it is for visitors to use your site
- Technical aspects: Things like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and secure connections
So, what does Google say?
“When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine,” says the Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.
Google also says that SEO “is about taking the next step and working on improving your site’s presence in Search.”
HubSpot breaks SEO down into two main components: rankings and visibility.
- Rankings: Where your website ranks on a search engine results page (SERP).
- Visibility: How prominent your domain is in the search engine results for relevant search queries.
“SEO works by optimizing a website’s content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase that content’s ranking and the website’s visibility,” says HubSpot. “While you can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, SEO efforts can take months to fully materialize.”
Understanding Google SEO Search
Google describes itself as a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to its index.
“You usually don't need to do anything except publish your site on the web. The vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically as we crawl the web,” says Google.
Google says that changes you make to your website may show up on Google’s end in a few hours … or it could take several months for the changes to appear!
“In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects on Google Search results,” Google advises. “Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in a noticeable impact in search results; if you're not satisfied with your results and your business strategies allow it, try iterating with the changes and see if they make a difference.”
Google offers the following tips for Google SEO Search:
- Check to See if Google Has Found Your Website: Make sure that Google has found your content by running the command site:yourwebsite in Google search. For example, searching for site:adwhite.com will return all the pages indexed by Google.
- Use the URL Inspection Tool: The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific page and allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable.
- Block Content from Google Search: In some cases, you may prefer Google Search to not find certain content and in this case there are ways to block content from appearing in Google.
- Organize Your Site: Logically organizing your site can help users and search engines understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Some tactics include:
- Use Descriptive URLs: Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them.
- Group Topically Similar Pages in Directories: Using directories or folders to group similar topics can help Google learn how often the URLs in individual directories change.
- Reduce Duplicate Content: Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation of Google spam policies, but it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don't even care about.
Content is Still King When it Comes to SEO
Google says that the most useful thing to influence your website’s presence in search results is creating content that is compelling and useful.
While "compelling and useful content" can mean different things to different people, Google says content like this generally shares some common attributes, such as:
- The text is easy to read and well organized: Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
- The content is unique: When you're writing new content, don't copy others' content in part or its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don't just rehash what others have already published.
- The content is up to date: Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it's not relevant anymore.
- The content is helpful, reliable, and people-first: Be sure that you're writing content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help people understand your articles' expertise.
Google also recommends anticipating your readers’ search terms, avoiding distracting advertisements, and linking to relevant sources.
Influence How Your Site Looks in Google SEO Search
Keep in mind that a typical Google search results page consists of a few different visual elements that can influence whether users decide to click on your link or not.
Google recommends:
- Influence Your Title Links: A good title is unique to the page, clear, and concise while accurately describing the contents of the page.
- Control Your Snippets: The description of the search result below the title link is a snippet and is important if users decide to visit your page. The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search results are linking to or it can be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag which should be a succinct one or two-sentence summary of the page.
- Add Images to Your Site: Many people search visually so images are important to SEO. Be sure to add high-quality images near relevant text and add descriptive alt text to the image.
- Optimize Your Videos: People may discover your site through video results in Google search. Create high-quality video content, and embed the video on a standalone page, near text that’s relevant to that video. Also, write descriptive text in the title and description field of a video.
- Promote Your Website: Promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery. Some of the ways to promote your website include:
- Social media promotion.
- Community engagement.
- Advertisement, both offline and online.
- Word of mouth, and many other methods.
Google does warn that “As with everything in life, you can overdo promoting your site and actually harm it: people may get fatigued of your promotions, and search engines may perceive some of the practices as manipulation of search results.”
At adWhite, we understand that you have likely invested a lot of time and money into designing and developing a beautiful website so it’s important that you appear in search results, especially for lead generation.
SEO and Google Search SEO is a constantly evolving field, and ranking high in search results is becoming more complex in 2024 as artificial intelligence (AI) generated overview results dominate the prime real estate on search queries.
It may seem like an out-of-this-world turn of events, but SEO still works – just ask Jefferson Starship (www.jeffersonstarship.com) which ranks as the first search result today … behind the AI-generated overview!
