The 3 pillars of SEO: Easy strategies to grow your business

Whether you’re hiring an SEO company, or looking to do some DIY work yourself; having a sound understanding of the three basic pillars will ensure you make the best possible decisions.

The first pillar: Onsite Optimisation

We’ll get the most intimidating one out of the way first. Onsite optimisation is where you play around in the website’s HTML code in order to make sure it’s as “friendly” for search engines as possible. You’ll tweak things in the back end of the website that the audience will never see; but Google and other search engines will use them to make sure your site holds the most accurate information for your audience.

Simple examples of onsite optimisation include:

1. Title Tags

This is where the title of each of the articles on your website, as well as the headings and subheadings, are always “on topic”. For example, if you run a dental business, your ‘Title Tags’ should include words and phrases like “dentist,” “dental surgery,” or “tooth replacement” so that Google knows to send people looking for dental work to your site.

2. Content

Search engines like good content, and Google and others have spent a great deal of time developing their own technology to automatically tell the difference between good content, and poor content. Having a minimum of 400 words that are grammatically correct, original (not taken from another website), and informative are all essential for good SEO.

3. Meta Descriptions

These are the “tags” that you put into the HTML of the website that helps tell Google and other search engines what your website is about.

There is plenty more that you can do with onsite optimisation, but it can get complex;  simple, easy fixes, like those above is a good place to dip the toe in first.

The second pillar: Content Marketing

Many people think “content marketing” means setting up a blog and writing a lot of articles, but there’s much more to it than that. Content marketing is effectively an advertisement; the purpose of writing it, is to get the consumer to buy your product. Unlike an advertisement, it’s done in such a way that to the audience it simply appears as an informative article.

Content marketing is effectively about taking on the basic role of a journalist; to tell a story by laying out the problem, and then describing the solution. It just happens that the solution is your product or service.

Why is this relevant to SEO?

As mentioned above, search engines have been tweaked to value good, meaningful content, and will reward it by ranking it higher on the search engine results. Really good content is also shareable; it can be distributed through social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, or republished on other websites. Journalists might even refer to the articles in their own stories.

The links that you’ll get back to your website by having your article shared around the internet is SEO gold. Speaking of links…

The third pillar: Link Building

A good link building strategy begins with the NAP (name/address/phone). Once you have that correct, your business details are more likely to appear in a Google search on the product or service you offer.

The most important thing about NAP is that you have the full details of your company on every page of your website. Furthermore, it’s critical that the format of the website is exactly the same as it appears on every other website with your business address.

Google needs that information to be reliable before it can place it on the front page of a search result.

To make it easy for you, here’s the recommended code for formatting your website’s address details. Remember, it must be on each and every page:

<div itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/LocalBusiness”>
<p itemprop=”name”>COMPANY NAME</p>
<p itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<p itemprop=”streetAddress”>ADDRESS LINE 1</p>
<p itemprop=”addressLocality”>CITY</p>,
<p itemprop=”addressRegion”>REGION</p>
<p itemprop=”postalCode”>POSTCODE/ZIP</p.
<p itemprop=”telephone”>PHONE NUMBER</p>
<meta itemprop=”latitude” content=”LATITUDE” />
<meta itemprop=”longitude” content=”LONGITUDE” />
</div>

Where to go from here

The more comfortable you are with these three pillars of SEO, the more confident you’ll be developing a digital marketing strategy that allows you to take full advantage of your brand, and build its presence in the market.

Equally, you’ll be able to have more productive discussions with your SEO company, as you’ll have a better idea of what you want them to achieve.

Does your website rank high on Google? What techniques have you used to improve your SEO?