What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is the process of improving your website or brand equity to increase your website's visibility in Google and other search engines. As your SEO performance improves, your website will rank higher and receive more visitors. If you want to know how Google and other search engines work, this is a great place to start, but you don't need to know that. Unless you're actually doing SEO, you need to know what impacts SEO performance.
The activities that improve SEO can be categorized into three primary areas: website configuration, website content, and brand equity. In this article, we'll discuss what these categories are, how to measure them, and who is responsible for performance.
The Three Fundamental Components That Drive SEO Performance
The strategies and activities that drive SEO performance can be categorized into the three primary areas below. We like this classification because it mirrors the distinct roles involved in improving SEO performance. It also provides guidance on accountability.
Configuration
The technical configuration of your hosting, content management system, and individual pages, and the load-time of your website.
Brand Equity
Google ranks websites and pages higher when they have stronger external quality signals such as brand equity and links from other websites.
Content
Creating content designed to provide the best answer to a specific search keyword or closely related group of keywords.
Configuration
Most of the popular CMSs that are used to build websites today are 'SEO friendly' out of the box. However, as content editors rush to add content, delete content, and make updates, mistakes are often made. Over time, those mistakes mount up and need to be resolved before they negatively impact your SEO performance. Below are some of the activities that need to be performed to keep your technical SEO in good condition.
- Cleaning up broken links.
- Deleting (and redirecting) old pages with outdated content.
- Making sure the site's pages load quickly.
- Configuring your server and routing to make sure you're not errantly generating duplicate content.
How to Measure It:
Site auditing tools from SEO software platforms provide scores of a website's overall technical health. You also need to track a KPI for the average load time of the site's pages.
Who is Responsible:
This is the responsibility of your in-house SEO or an agency/contractor you partner with to ensure your technical SEO is in good condition.
How to Improve It:
Resolve any errors found by technical SEO professionals or reported in SEO auditing tools.
Brand Equity
We define brand equity as the product of brand awareness and brand reputation. Awareness alone isn't enough. How many users want to see search results from ftx.com, spirit.com, or comcast.com? You need awareness and a positive reputation.
Google doesn't have a direct measure of brand equity. They have to approximate it based on data they collect from user behavior and from the internet. Below are some of the signals Google uses to approximate brand equity:
- Other websites link to your site. When authoritative websites link to your website, Google sees this as a vote or citation and is a signal of quality.
- User behavior on Google: How often do users search for your brand? How do they interact with your brand when you show up in a search result?
How to Measure It:
A great KPI for this is organic traffic to your website from your brand keyword. If more people find you by searching for your brand name, that's a clear indication you're gaining awareness. To measure your reputation and customer attitudes, use reviews on Google, G2, Amazon, and other review sources.
Who is Responsible:
The CMO and CEO.
How to Improve It:
- Make a better product and deliver more value to customers.
- Make brand image and messaging a C-level priority.
- Increase your advertising budget.
- Change marketing leadership.
Content
Users perform a wide variety of searches before selecting a product or service. A lot of these searches are informational. Below are the factors that give your website more opportunities to capture this traffic.
Relevance: If users are performing a lot of different searches when researching your industry and company, you're going to need a lot of pages to answer these questions. For example, if a user searches for the term "term life vs. whole life insurance," you're going to need a specific page focused on this topic to rank for that keyword.
Quality: For a specific search term, there will be hundreds or thousands of relevant web pages. Which one has the best answer? Which one is the most comprehensive, well-designed, and most authoritative? Quality is about delivering the best answer for a user's search query.
How to Measure It:
- Organic search traffic to articles and content marketing resources.
- Engagement rate for articles and content marketing resources.
- Organic search traffic to new content written in the past 9 months.
Who is Responsible:
Whoever is making the decisions about what gets written and approving content to go live.
How to Improve It:
Perform keyword research to find search terms relevant to your products and services. Then, create pages or write articles that offer comprehensive answers to these search terms. Dedicate enough time to each piece of content to produce something that is better than the competing results.