How to do SEO in 6 Simplified Steps

If your website is an important asset for earning revenue, then you simply cannot go without SEO. While paid adverts will get you a lot of traffic, SEO is what help search engine bots understand your content and ensure your page is not just created as click-bait by being filled with Black Hat SEO (bad SEO techniques like stuffing keywords, using irrelevant keywords or content, and abusing internal or false inbound links).

 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it involved all the steps needed to ensure that internet browsers, like Google Chrome, can crawl your website pages and clearly understand its content to correctly display it as one of the best matched web pages for specific keywords used on SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO is used to promote visibility for your website and focusses on increasing unpaid traffic, unlike adverts that aim for direct / paid traffic.

 

The benefits of SEO

• It boosts your websites visibility by getting you better ranking spots on SERPs
• It promotes your brand as a trusted industry authority
• It contributes to quality lead generating (more actual sales)
• It supports content marketing and is part of the marketing funnel (the customer journey)
• It saves you money that would have been spent on PPC adverts
• It can be analyzed to see what works and adjust what does not work

 

What are keywords and how do they work?

Keywords are the words and phrases people use when doing online searches. For example, someone looking for VoIP solutions may search for “Best VoIP provider in South Africa” on Google, and if you offer VoIP solutions in South Africa, that phrase should be one of the keywords you’re targeting. And yes, the term “keyword” is used for both individual or up to three words (known as short-tail keywords) and for longer phrases (long-tail keywords). While short-tail keywords usually have high search volumes and are great to increase brand awareness, they also have higher competition, which could mean that your page will lose its ranking spot to competitor websites with better content and SEO. Long-tail keywords are more specific and usually have lower search volumes as well as competition, meaning that your page may not rank on the first page often, but when it does the chances of a quality conversion is higher.

 

Search Engine Optimization in 6 Simplified Steps

 

Step 1: Establish your strategy

The first step is to think about your target audience and how they would get exposed to your brand and products. What mindset would your customer be in, and what would they type into the search box that would lead them to your website or specific landing page? Always keep the customer in mind when selecting keywords and writing SEO-friendly content. While SEO’s main purpose is to ensure that search engine bots will rank your page on SERPs, these bots are constantly being reprogrammed to think more like humans. Keep real people and how they search for content in mind when implementing SEO.

 

Step 2: Do Keyword research

Looking at your products and services, create a list on Microsoft Excel / Google Sheets of both short-tail and long-tail keywords that are relevant. Relevancy is vital and site crawlers will look at the relationship between the keywords you target and the content on your website. If you use keywords that do not relate to your website content, your site will be penalised and you can say goodbye to ranking on the first page of Google search results. With your list of keywords, use tools like Google Keyword Planner to see how often these words and phrases are used in searches and what the competition for these words are. Google Keyword Planner only gives “low”, “medium” and “high” as indicators for the competition, but you can use the keyword in a Google search and simply add the “allintitle:” syntax at the start (example: “allintitle: Best VoIP provider in South Africa”). This trick will show you all the websites that actively target that keyword in their SEO strategy, giving you a number to work with. Go back to your Excel sheet and add the search volume and competition numbers. Now you can work out the estimated success rate of each keyword by simply dividing the search volume with the competition and then multiply by 100.

 

Example:

“Best VoIP provider in South Africa” is the keyword.

Google Keyword Planner shows that this keyword gets 100 – 1000 average searches per month (the volume), we’ll focus on the lowest estimation to get the worst-case scenario.

Doing a quick Google search, we can see that the keyword is picked up in 1 710 000 results, BUT if we add the syntax “allintitle:” to our search, we only get 2 results. So only 2 other websites are using this phrase in their page Title Tag and is directly competing for this keyword.

 

Now the math:

(Volume / Competition) x 100 = Performance

(100 / 2) x 100 = 5000%

 

We chose a very specific keyword, hence the low volume and competition. The equation shows us that the keyword we chose will perform very well…if searched. However, it also shows that not many people search for it, so we would need to look at more common keywords to ensure our SEO strategy has both broad and more specific reach.

 

Step 3: Edit webpage Title and Meta Description Tags

Once you have your list of keywords all sorted, it’s time to put them to use. The most important places to add keywords is in the Title and Meta Description Tags of each webpage. You will find these tags in the HTML code of the webpage inside your Head Tag. This can be a daunting task and may require the assistance of a website designer or developer to implement depending on how comfortable you are with editing your website code. If you have a WordPress website you can take a peek at this video to see how to edit your Title and Meta Description Tags using Yoast SEO.

 

Step 4: Edit the webpage URL

You will need to edit the slug or each webpage URL. We’re not talking about slimy slugs from the garden here, we’re talking about the part of the URL that usually follows the domain name and explains what content can be expected on the page. If we write a blog about “Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Website in 2021”, then the URL and slug will look like this: https://arc-tech.co.za/top-5-reasons-why-your-business-needs-a-website-in-2021/ . Always keep the slug relevant to the content.

 

Step 5: Do On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO involves optimising all the elements directly within your website. This includes:

• Using header tags (H1 – H6) wisely for titles and subtitles, to indicate important text to crawlers.
• Adding internal links to other relevant pages, keeping in mind that overuse of irrelevant linking will negatively impact your site’s ranking.
• Using NPL (natural language processing) by not repeating the same keywords like a broken record, but instead using synonyms and secondary (or supportive) keywords throughout webpages.
• Adding an XML sitemaps so browsers can easily index your website’s most important pages for faster loading. Faster loading equals better user-experience, which adds to SEO and boosts your website ranking.
• Making sure image files are small enough to load fast without impacting quality, and that they have Alt Tags to describe them.
• Keep things user-friendly by ensuing the layout flows naturally and that the copy is not too overwhelming for the viewer. You want to keep visitors on your site for as long as possible, without frustrating them, to keep bounce rates low. A bounce occurs when someone visits your website, but then leaves within seconds, either because they did not find what they were looking for or your content appeared too onerous for them to process.
• Keep things mobile-friendly. Google has adapted its algorithms to favor websites that have mobile or responsive versions, allowing for quicker loading on devices with smaller screens, as most people use their mobile phones to browse the internet. Having a mobile-friendly website will ensure you get ranked above your competitors that only cater for desktop layouts.

 

Step 6: Do Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO involves actions that do not take place on your website, instead it focusses on having external sites link back to your website. Off-Page SEO includes:

• Backlinks – When other websites use hyperlinks that lead to your website. You can use collaboration and influencer campaigns to build backlinks.
• Domain authority – A score of 1 – 100 given to your website by search engines based on how long you’ve maintained the domain name, how many backlinks your site has, the number of pages with errors, and your site’s general performance (visits, bounces, average time visitors spend on your site, etc.).
• Social Media – Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer a huge audience that may find your website content useful. Sharing posts with links back to your website or blog is a great way to promote brand awareness and build external links.
• Local SEO – This mainly involves online reviews and having your geolocation listed to ensure you show on area specific search results. You should list your business and website on Google My Business where you can list your location as well as join the review system, allowing your customer to leave online reviews about your business. Business reviews get top billing on Google SERPs.
• Advertising – while we’ve mostly focused on SEO solutions that exclude spending money, advertising is a big part of Off-Page SEO (more specifically SEM – search engine marketing) and contributes towards inbound links and can helps boost a page’s organic ranking as well.

 

The 3 SEO Tools that employers expect you to know

While free keyword planning tools are always a boon, there are additional benefits to some of the paid alternatives that can give your next SEO update a real edge compared to your competitors. There are numerous SEO tools out there, but some have proven to be more popular when it comes to advertised jobs for SEO Specialists. If you plan to hone your SEO skills and become a keyword connoisseur, be sure to master these online SEO tools:

 

• Google Keyword Planner – the free go-to tool for all SEO and Google Advert planning where you can start finetuning your list of keywords and get recommended keywords. You can also use the Forecast tool to get an estimated idea of performance and cost if you plan to use your keywords in Google Ads.
• SEMRush – has a free trial and is considered the best all-in-one marketing tool and a top choice for keeping track of link building.
• Ahrefs – also has a free trial, great for analysing content performance, and comes with free learning material to boost your SEO skills.

 

At ARC-Technology, we strive to help clients set up stable internet and VoIP infrastructures, because we know how important it is to be accessible online. If your customer cannot find you easily, then you’re losing out on revenue. Having an online presence for your brand is must, and SEO is a big part of ensuring your potential customers can find you. If you are planning to bring your business online and need the best recommended Internet Service Provider for your area, get in touch and one of our ARC Solution Architects will get your started.

 

Feature illustration by pch.vectors