What is search engine optimization?
You have probably heard about search engine optimization or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In many meetings I have realized that the knowledge of the details of what it is and how it works is relatively low. Therefore, I thought I would take a few minutes to tell you about the basics of search engine optimization.
We all search for information today via different search engines on our phones, computers or tablets. Google is the largest search engine in the world but there are many more like Bing, Baidu (largest in China), Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and many more. Since Google is the largest search engine, SEO usually adapts websites according to what Google's rules and conditions think is important already when developing the site. Not sure if your website is built correctly? You can easily check this with technical tools. You can book a free consultation with me, where I will go through your website before our digital meeting and check if everything is correct.
On-Page SEO & Off Page SEO
To make it simple, we usually divide search engine optimization into 2 main groups. On-Page SEO relates to all the work that can be done on a website to improve the ranking on Google and Off Page SEO is all the work that can be done outside the website such as marketing with the purpose of drawing relevant traffic to the website which is an important part of the search engine optimization work. In this article I will talk about on-page SEO work. If you are interested in how you can drive traffic to your website through marketing, we have several other posts about that.
Before you make a configuration with SEO tools on your website, you need to do some research. A configuration of the wrong keywords does not do any good. Usually, the following points are followed.
- Check what your competitors are doing
- Check how you rank on Google so you don't change something that is already good.
- Find the right keywords for your services
- Decide which pages should be optimized to generate traffic.
- Find the right schedule type
- Check for possible redirects
- Update all tags, extracts, titles and texts
- Configuring the seo tool on the website
- Put links on the website
- Create a relevant sitemap and upload it to the search console
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A competitor analysis helps you gain insight into the digital positioning of your competitors.
When you want to appear on selected keywords, it is possible that you will start competing digitally with your industry competitors. SEO tools can help tell us if keywords are easy or hard to compete with and we can also find out what keywords your competitors have on their site. Sometimes it can be better to choose a keyword with less traffic that is easier to compete with but still generates relevant visitors - this decision is made together after a competitive analysis. We perform keyword, current situation and competitor analysis to ensure that you can make fact-based decisions on how you want to position yourself in the digital market.
A situational analysis helps us analyze how you appear on Google today.
If you have a website that has been live for a while, it can be smart to perform a current analysis to see which keywords you are already visible on Google and what rank (place) on Google these have. If you appear on the front page of Google, the first 10 results, with keywords that generate a lot of traffic, you do not want to destroy what is already working well! A current situation analysis can also be good to perform before rebuilding a website so you can plan which pages and URL addresses you need to keep in the new page structure. If you plan to rename several pages in your new website and old pages generate a lot of traffic, the old links will remain on Google and if you visit the page that no longer exists, it says - 404 - page not found! Then you want to plan in redirect links to get a smooth user experience.
A keyword analysis helps you find the right keywords.
If you want to appear on the first page of search engines, you must first decide which keywords you want to be good at. Then you should take the opportunity to do a keyword analysis with a company that works with SEO as they use better tools and can perform a relevant keyword analysis. An experienced agency knows how to search effectively for the right keywords and can make suggestions in addition to your own. Often companies I work with are surprised that the keywords they suggested have so few searches and that we can suggest better keywords. As I said, you can guess - but it helps to know what the real situation is.
Start on-page configuration
Now that you have an insight into your current digital positioning and a plan of where you want to be, the work on the site begins. We usually help our customers to write excerpts, titles and copy on the pages so that they can be optimized in the best way for the keywords you want to get in. It's not about typing the keyword x number of times in a text. You should write helpful and clear texts to get the best possible results. When the work is done, we upload a sitemap in the search console that tells Google which pages to index and what information to retrieve.
Find out how you can get started with Atom Agency
Want to know more about search engine optimization and whether it is the right strategy for you? Contact us today to discuss your opportunities and challenges - book a free consultation. If it's the right strategy for your business, it can be a successful path to explore.
