SEO process – how does it look like?

Starting the adventure with your own website is like preparing for a marathon – what matters is the daily training and perseverance. Only self-discipline and consistent action will help you work out your success. Once you reach it, you can’t stop exercising because you’ll lose shape. Likewise with website actions. When it comes to online marketing, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the basics, especially with SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of actions leading to the appearance of a website as high as possible in search engine results and appearing on as many search queries as possible.

SEO positioning – what it is and how does it work

The question our clients often have is: how do you get to the top of the organic search results and meet your marketing KPIs? The answer is simple: by optimizing your site technically, content-wise, and creating engaging content by guest posting on portals thematically similar to yours.

SEO Positioning is the part of SEO that focuses primarily on the latter – activities not directly related to your website, but more on creating and optimizing a link-building strategy (off-site SEO).

It is important to create articles about the services/products offered by a particular company. You should not only post them on your site but also make sure to guest post on portals, blogs, and forums. Make sure that the links leading to your site have the “dofollow” attribute (conveying SEO power to your site), come from a variety of sources, and are not sponsored or spammy.

Posts should be unique and engaging enough to encourage users to share them.  The whole content must be properly optimized for keywords and have a link directing to your site. The more diverse the sources from which hyperlinks lead to your site, the better.

How to start SEO optimization?

Advertising agency specialists are usually people who not only have a degree in advertising, marketing, promotion, or PR but also constantly participate in various training. In addition, they have access to industry groups and forums where they can explore the news and keep up to date with any changes.

This translates into results, as professionals are able to make changes on an ongoing basis and improve the actions they propose to their clients. This includes both paid link advertising positioning services and online campaigns.

Doing marketing yourself is possible, but it can take plenty of time. Before you undertake it, make sure you have the right knowledge, for example, to avoid penalties for actions that are not in line with Google rules. Internet marketing is a broad topic that requires a lot of commitment

Experience

A marketing agency’s job is to develop a high rank for your website in Google search results. Specialists begin by examining the appearance of your website, analyzing errors, and checking for which phrases it can be positioned. The initial action is called an SEO audit. Performing it allows you to prepare an optimization document that includes:

• suggestions on how to best solve the problems found,
• detailed guidelines for changes in the current structure of the website – HTML code, content, internal linking, template layout, etc. (These recommendations should address factors that directly affect your ranks).

After an analysis of the website and competition, a list of keywords for which your website may be positioned is prepared. Keywords are matched to your business, the theme of the website, industry trends, and customer expectations.

It’s worth remembering that the person doing the SEO work isn’t always a programmer, so they don’t make changes to the site themselves.

The actual SEO positioning step

The SEO specialist then contacts the domain owner and notifies him of beginning the cooperation. Quick implementation of optimization recommendations and full optimization of the site helps to accelerate the first effects in the form of increased visibility in search engine results.

Analysis of statistics

After implementing the optimization and linking strategy, periodic analyses of website data are conducted to verify the progress. We check how customers and search engine robots react to the service. This phase includes:

• Analysis of website traffic in Google Analytics and Google Search Console,
• Monitoring the domain status and selected URLs using custom tools and data in Google Search Console
• SEO consulting – proposal of changes and additional activities and ongoing optimization of the website in order to increase the effectiveness of positioning.

Blogging

The next step is to get links and blog content. Blog texts are usually written by copywriters on behalf of agencies and relate directly to the product being sold. With extensive descriptions, your website is visible in  Google, which makes it easier to sell, as online stores rely on search engine traffic. Optimizing for Google helps shoppers get directly to the product they are looking for. Having a blog with links to products in articles leads to increased traffic to your site.

When blogging, remember to:

• do not copy content from other websites – it will damage your credibility,
• do not give too many keywords – use 3 phrases per 1000 characters, too many keywords will make the text not substantive and uninteresting for the recipient,
• do not publish large chunks of content without paragraph divisions and introducing a logical division into interheadings – this affects the readability of the text,
• avoid thin content – too short and non-substantive product descriptions – Google will not take this description into account,
• allow having a comment section – comments naturally lengthen product descriptions.

Scope of the promotion

SEO activities help to increase the visibility of your website in search results for selected keywords. Effective positioning allows, for example, to jump from Top50 to Top10 in the Google SERPs. The higher the position in the search engine, the greater the chance of reaching users interested in a given category of products or services. The positioning service, although mostly focused on adapting the website to the requirements of the Google search engine, also increases the visibility in other search engines – Bing or Yahoo.

How to manage the budget

The SEO agency provides a transparent cost estimation based on the presented conditions, so you can plan your marketing budget without worrying about unforeseen costs that may arise after a few months of cooperation. The task is made easier when the remuneration is set as a fixed value over time, possibly assigned to stages included in a specific schedule, such as an SEO audit. However, in practice, it is very common to look for solutions with a greater or lesser efficiency component. In such cases, a good offer should accurately describe the relationship between the amount of the bonus and the terms of its calculation by the media agency. Determining the number of expected bonuses and assessing the likelihood of exceeding certain values, considered as limits, will certainly help to gain a positive perception on the part of the offer recipient. Everyone appreciates offers where there are no asterisks or question marks.

Optimization as a part of SEO, or work on your site

Not only the SEO positioning itself but also the technical and content optimization of the website affects the appropriate results.

Elements of optimization or “on-site” activities of a website can include:

• Saturation of the texts with keywords.
• Correct placement of Hx headers.
• Adding meta tags to each page.
• Internal linking.

These are just a few examples, as specific actions for a given website will be indicated by the performed SEO audit of the website.

Implementing both of these strategies (on and off-site SEO) will pay off by increasing the position of your website in search results, which will translate into more visibility, which in turn can mean earnings for the site owner. Keep in mind that SEO works in every industry and this form of promotion is used by companies that have just been established as well as those that have been in the market for decades.

Is SEO positioning effective?

SEO positioning is one of the most effective methods of promotion, but you need the right strategy and a budget to drive action. The strategy should be thought out in terms of positioning the site locally and also in the bigger picture. This mainly concerns phrases such as “car purchase London” – a local phrase and “car purchase” – a nationwide phrase. Its visibility is also influenced by geolocation, personalization of results, but it is the proper optimization and link-building that will make your site rank higher on a given keyword.

Also important is the group of recipients to whom you direct your offer with a product or service (companies/individuals), the scope of activities (performing the service in the company’s headquarters/at the client’s place/remotely), and working hours. This can be important when positioning a vulcanizing shop that is open during the day and an emergency vulcanization service that operates mainly at night and on holidays.

Positioning as a part of internet marketing

SEO is just one way to promote yourself online. It should occur alongside the popular Google Ads campaign, email marketing, and social media, and these channels often cross over to help promote your business.

The use of one or all of them depends on the chosen promotion strategy, which we mentioned above. A popular combination is keyword positioning and promoting them in a paid Ads campaign.

Good SEO takes time

It is important to note that the results of SEO positioning will not be visible immediately. This process is long-term and allows the website to gradually climb up the search engine pages to the top10, i.e. the first page of SERPs. The duration of the process is related to the fact that Google wants to serve its users with pages that meet their expectations. To assure Google that your site is the right one – you need to build the search engine’s trust with your site, and that takes time.

It is also impossible to give a specific deadline or time frame for positioning a particular keyword. Sometimes it’s a week and other times it takes several months. It all depends on the keyword and its competitiveness.

Reaching a high position in Google or any other search engine requires a lot of time and commitment from both the media house and the client. Only by working closely together can you count on real results. Thanks to that, your website will not only be favorably visible in Google search results, but more importantly, the number of users reached organically will increase. Usually, more traffic = more sales or brand recognition. In our opinion, the question of whether the positioning is effective can be answered in three words. Yes, it is.

Content optimization

Your website is judged by its design and content. Editing, optimizing and promoting content is a river topic. Most marketers have come across the phrase that content marketing is the king. It suggests that content is the magnet for potential users. Good product texts, supplemented with infographics or photos, attract customers and encourage them to read your offer. They can be evidence of your expertise or a denial of it – it all depends on you and the work you put into preparing the content..

To make it easier for you, we’re sharing some basic rules that we follow ourselves:

• Publish regularly, try to update your website at least once a week.
• The content must be unique. Do not copy fragments or whole texts from other sites. This also applies to graphics. If you download them from the internet then make sure you have the rights to them.
• Texts should be properly saturated with keywords (for a text of 2000-3000 characters a phrase should appear 4-5 times in different variations).
• Use H2, H3, H4 headers, which set a hierarchy and make your content easier to read.
• Divide the text into paragraphs. It will be more readable for the user.
• Bullet (bold out) your keywords, as well as the information that is important to you.

The comments are actually very simple, they cost nothing to implement, but surprisingly few sites stick to them.

Keyword optimization

Before you start optimizing your content, think about the right keyword selection. You should opt for ones that are not too generic and completely reflect what you have to offer on the website. Tools such as Ads Keyword Planner or Senuto may help you make the right decision. These SEO tools contain a wide database of keywords and additionally indicate values such as the competitiveness of a given phrase or its potential (average monthly number of searches).

The strategy is of great importance here. Avoid keyword stuffing wherever you can. This can result in a penalty for your website. Instead of helping you – it will distance you from your goal to be present in the top ten search results. Place phrases in the text in a natural way, using their variations or even synonyms.

You may also consider local SEO, which will be easier than building a nationwide reach. A lot also depends on the business you have (local/wide range) and the city you operate in. The keyword “roadside assistance Baltimore” will be much easier to rank than “roadside assistance”. Keep in mind that the city is not the same and “roadside assistance New York” will take more time and money than the above-mentioned Baltimore. Bigger cities, more competition – unless we’re talking about tourist cities.

Graphic/image optimization – alt

Seemingly nothing complicated and difficult but it’s an essential thing that gives solid SEO results. If you add a photo to a page, remember to describe it properly. Search engine robots can’t see the image, so they have to rely on the description. Therefore, we can achieve a much better result by captioning the photo “red boots on anchors”, where “boots on anchors” can be the keyword. For that, little or no success will come from the image signed as “DSC08276”.

This point applies not only to alternative descriptions but also to graphics on the technical side. Make sure they are the right weight. Do your best to make the published version weigh no more than a few kilobytes. If possible, add them in PNG format (eliminate JPEG and GIF). Take advantage of image compression, and keep the quality of your images in mind with all of this. Don’t post files where pixellosis appears or products are blurry.

Internal linking optimization

Creating a site architecture and connecting different subpages with internal links will allow search engine robots to move freely around your site.  The more links that lead to a product or category, the better. Remember that links should lead to subpages that have some value, e. g. have descriptions, photos and do not contain errors, e. g. 404.

Sometimes a headache comes from too much, so when linking you should pay attention to several aspects:

• Linking pages should be thematically related.
• Links should be placed within selected keywords or through URLs containing the keyword phrase.
• Assuming that the main page is an entrance page, any other subpage should be reached by a user with no more than 3 clicks.

Page code optimization

If you are not a developer this point will probably scare you a little. As a consolation, we can say that we are not programmers either, but we managed to do it (although there were elements that were optimized by a specialist).

First of all, you should take care of properly constructed meta tags, i. e. data about a particular subpage displayed in search results. They are taken into account by Google’s robots, plus they are the ones that encourage the user to visit your website.

The hierarchy of headings, known as H1, H2, H3, is also important. They determine the validity of specific descriptions. They are included in the page code, so you don’t see them “on top of the page”, but search engine robots know exactly what to do with them.

Make sure your website loads quickly and is accessible to search engine robots. Remember to set the “index, follow” parameters, and if you have a large site, create a sitemap. xml file.

The Page Speed Insights tool can help you improve the speed of your website and its reception by search engines. It allows you to easily optimize your website for both laptop or desktop computers and mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. When you type in your website address, you get statistics and optimization tips. This was the stage that the programmer took us through, which we recommend to you as well.

To sum up

SEO is a time-consuming process that requires commitment from the client, the media agency, and often the web developer. While you can try to go through the cycle on your own, making changes will many times require the intervention of a professional. We encourage you to experiment and search for such a form of cooperation that will fully satisfy you.