I’ve worked in the SEO industry for over 15 years now. In that time, I’ve done just about everything when it comes to Search Engine Optimization; coded a website from the ground up, run projects that have doubled traffic, built tools used to analyze vast amounts of data in seconds and lead SEO teams for large websites getting millions of views a day. Here I’ll lay out the areas of focus that actually matter when it comes to growing your SEO traffic.
The Top 4 SEO Areas of Focus
Below are the 4 main areas of focus for any SEO strategy whether you are a 200 person organization or you are starting your own website.
- Indexability – “am I visible to Google?”
- Authority – “am I worth ranking?”
- On-page factors – “am I answering the question?”
- User metrics – “am I valuable to people?”
Indexability
Indexability refers to the ability of search engines to crawl and index a website’s pages. If you don’t know what the Google crawler is, this is a great resource to read. When your website is indexable, search engines will be able to find and display its pages in search engine results pages (SERPs). If your webpage can’t be found by Google or you haven’t set it up to be properly indexed, this is your first area of focus to tackle.
Authority
Authority refers to the perceived credibility and trustworthiness of a website in the eyes of search engines. Websites with high authority are more likely to rank higher in SERPs. Authority is primarily determined by the quality and quantity of external links pointing to a website, as well as the relevance and authority of those linking websites. If no one is linking to your then Google may not view you as the most authoritative source on whatever you are writing about. Ensuring you have content that is worthy of a link from another website is key here.
On-page Factors
On-page factors refer to the various elements on a website’s pages that can affect its search engine ranking. These include the page title, meta description, headers, content, and URL structure. Optimizing these on-page factors with relevant content can help improve a website’s relevance and visibility in search engines. Ensuring content is well written, is useful to the user, is multi-modal ( text + graphics + video ), and is catchy are among the things you need to think about in this area.
User Metrics
Probably one of the most important and overlooked portions of SEO is user metrics. This area of focus is all about how users interact with your webpage. Do they find an answer to their question on your website? Do they engage further with the content on your website? Are they able to get to the information they need in a reasonable time? How the user interacts with your website is a strong and always on signal to Google on how to rank your webpage in a personalized way to users.
So what?
Alright these are very superficial introductions to important areas for SEO. What do you do next? I’ll explore each of these 4 areas in depth in upcoming blog posts.