5 Most Important Concepts of SEO That You Should Know Today
SEO is a jungle – It is vast and scary.
We know how difficult it is to understand SEO tools, what is SEO, and how it works.
We are here to answer all your questions related to basic SEO concepts.
So, here is everything you need to know about what is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how it works – the five highly effective tricks that guarantee success.
1. Basic SEO Concepts: Relevant Content
One of the first basic SEO concepts is having relevant content on your website.:
What is relevant content in SEO fundamentals and concepts?
If users find your content to be worth their time, you have what’s called relevant content.
Content relevance is the degree to which your content matches the search query.
Content can be text, images, videos, PDFs, and so on. Search engines prefer websites that give the user what they’re looking for in the best way possible.
Why relevant content is an important part of basic SEO concepts?
Search engines like Google work for people. They want to give their users relevant information with as little effort on the user’s part as possible.
This is why search engines reward websites that feature relevant content.
Your reward comes in the form of better rankings in SERP (SERP meaning: Search Engine Results Page).
A secret of SEO success and one of the major ranking factors is consistently generating the types of content that your audience wants.
Ranking higher means you’ll get more organic traffic.
The more relevant organic traffic, the higher the conversions.
Most businesses care most about the bottom line. And here’s a direct method to increase it.
How to write SEO-relevant content?
Producing high-quality, SEO-relevant content isn’t art. It’s formulaic.
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Identify your target audience – If you want to write a blog post to answer the question: “What is HTML?”, begin with understanding the kind of people who might search for this (construct user personas). In this case, it could be students, IT newbies, and so on.
Understanding your target audience is the first step toward giving them what they need.
Find out what your target audience is looking for – You begin your article on “What is HTML” by defining computer systems. Their history. Their evolution.
While your content might be factually correct, it isn’t what your users are looking for.
Let’s say, your target audience is students. You give them correct, to-the-point, relevant content. This ensures that they return to your website. Maybe even subscribe to your newsletter, or buy your product or service.
Dig deep into the search/user intent – Find out the reasoning behind queries.
When a searcher asks Google about, say, pizzas, Google studies the semantics of the search query, along with the context, and at times, the user’s search history. Depending on that, the searcher sees either pizza recipes or the nearest pizza places.
Create content relevant not just to users but to search engines too – Do intensive keyword research. Include relevant keywords. You might’ve written the best, most relevant content. But if your target audience can’t find it, what’s the use?
Let the search engines know what your content is about. This will help them display it in front of the people who’re looking for exactly that.
Now that’s called relevant content.
Basic SEO Concepts: Analyzing User-Intent/ Understanding User Intent
The next step in understanding basic SEO concepts is looking at user intent.
What is the meaning of user intent?
As previously stated, user intent is the ‘Why’ behind a search query. The reason behind/the intent of a particular search is called the user intent.
Why did someone enter ‘LED TV’ into Google?
Do they want to find out what LED TV means? Are they looking to buy LED TVs?
Why user intent is important in SEO
User intent is a central part of basic SEO concepts. It plays a huge role in generating relevant content.
No matter what the types of search intent may be, every user wants to see relevant results – fast. Quality content that satisfies the search intent of that particular query, is shown front and center. That, in turn, drives massive amounts of traffic to certain websites.
How to find relevant keywords – There is a growing need to base keywords on the user intent.
It is with the help of this carefully curated list of relevant keywords, that your website will rank for search queries.
If your website ranks high for a particular user query and is exactly what the user wants, the probability of scoring potential customers increases that much.
Knowing user intent in SEO is like water to fish – crucial for surviving.
3. Basic SEO Concepts: Improved User-Experience
What is user experience in SEO fundamentals and concepts?
As mentioned above, search engines work for people.
If you give users a great experience on your website, search engines will give you good rankings.
Factors that improve the user experience:
Secure website: Having an HTTPS website is far better than an HTTP one. It ensures that your visitors enjoy a safe online experience.
Improve site navigation: Empathise with your user.
Make sure that navigating your website does not feel like a maze. That means having easy-to-understand buttons, simple instructions for unique functionalities, and other such factors that can get visitors to return.
Mobile-friendly: A vast majority of traffic and search volume to most websites comes from mobile devices, and not desktops. However, even today, most websites are designed with a desktop-first view. This causes some viewing troubles for mobile users.
Design your website with a mobile-first mindset.
Why? So that it will give the majority of users a better user experience.
Fast load speed: In today’s fast-paced world where there are always options and worthy competitors, if you don’t give users what they want and give it fast, they’ll go somewhere else
That isn’t the way you want to lose potential customers.
Follow standards and set practices, and increase your website’s page load speed for a great user experience.
Easily skimmable content structure: With today’s environment of over-stimulation, nobody spends more than a couple of minutes on a website.
And in the first few seconds, if users cannot find what they’re looking for, they’re going to leave.
As part of your on-page SEO, work on giving users what they want – a skimmable content structure.
Make sure they get to your Call To Action at the end of the page. That’s the way you will be able to make business.
Don’t miss out on opportunities to make money because your content was too long, too confusing, or too exhausting to navigate.
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4. Basic SEO Concepts: User-Engagement
What is user engagement?
A measure of all the ways visitors to your website are interacting with it.
Zero user engagement would be if a user exits immediately after clicking on your website link. Or if the user goes through the entire website/webpage without interacting with it in any way.
How to increase user engagement?
Increase CTRs (Click Through Rates) – Increase the number of people entering your website through its link on SERPs.
Displaying interesting information in your title tags and meta description helps. When your website shows up in SERPs, catchy titles and descriptions generate curiosity, causing a possible increase in CTRs.
Bounce Rate – Percentage of users who leave almost immediately, without taking action of any kind, after viewing only one webpage.
Page Load Time: Once the user is in, how long does it take for the information to be displayed? The faster, the better. This is one surefire way to decrease bounce rate.
Thinkwithgoogle states that as the page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce rate increases up to 32%.
Dwell Time – The amount of time a user spends on your website.
It can be increased in many ways:
- Have fresh content that is useful and interesting. These are the types of content that are widely shared on social media.
- Keep navigation clean, and easy to use and understand.
- Have interactive features like a chatbot.
- Display content in a variety of different ways, including videos, GIFs, and images.
5. Basic SEO Concepts: Tracking Metrics & Analytics
A very important part of SEO fundamentals and concepts is the SEO tracking metrics.
Metrics are, simply put, numbers. They are the factors on which you determine whether or not your online activities are a success.
The analysis of your tracking metrics isn’t a one-time activity. You should monitor them routinely, and take action in accordance.
If asked, “What are the 3 components of SEO?”, tracking metrics and their analysis almost always come up.
Organic Conversions – Let’s get straight to the point: How many new subscriptions did you get? Or how many people ended up buying what you offer? Monitor the number of visitors to your website versus the ones that comply with your call to action.
Organic Search Traffic – The number of people who found and visited you from SERPs. If you attract more relevant, organic traffic, it proves that your SEO efforts are paying off. The higher you rank in organic search results, the better your chances are of getting more traffic.
Domain Authority – Moz created it as a way to measure “how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs)”. This is also a way to know how much search engines trust your website.
Increase your Domain Authority (DA) by:
- Having relevant, well-structured content.
- Getting other, trusted websites to link to you (backlinks).
- Paying attention to technical SEO. This means getting rid of broken links, having a sitemap in place, an HTTPS website as opposed to HTTP, a mobile-friendly site, and less page load time.
Bounce Rate – A metric to gauge how many visitors felt like what you offered wasn’t what they were looking for.
This could have many different reasons, including, not ranking for relevant keywords, needing content improvement, better page load time, and cleaner navigation.
There are several tools out there that can help you with tracking metrics. These include Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and more.
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And there you have it. Knowing the basic SEO concepts is a crucial step in successfully running your business online. We hope you got a brief idea of the most important SEO fundamentals and concepts. Let us know in the comments below if you have any suggestions.
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