Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of understanding how search engines work and creating web content to maximize your visibility within them. When done well, SEO creates a steady flow of traffic to your website from folks interested in the problems you can solve for them.
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Search engines (particularly Google) have evolved significantly over the years. The science that powers them has become incredibly sophisticated and therefore harder to fully understand.
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Today, marketers spend a lot of time researching, experimenting, and sharing their findings about what’s working and what isn’t. The complexity and fast-moving nature of search has created a growing community of marketers committed to chasing after the algorithms that decide what goes where. They’re constantly testing ideas to understand where to turn the dials to get the best results.
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At the same time, new tools for searching, such as in-home voice assistants and mobile devices, as well as the daily avalanche of new content being published and optimized, makes SEO ever more challenging.
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All of this has prompted major changes in “how we SEO.” What used to work reliably well eight to ten years ago has a very small chance of achieving the same level of success today. Simple keyword placement and link building, for example, are still important foundations, but they’re only a start.
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Today, your entire website must be optimized for a network of keywords and phrases bound together through context and meaning.

So what does all of this mean for a company looking to get found through search? This guide offers a clear and concise look at what’s most important and what you can do right now to move the needle.

We’ll cover the age-old principles and more modern components of SEO as well as our agency’s own philosophy when it comes to building an SEO strategy suited for success today and tomorrow.

Why SEO remains so important

Before we get any further, let’s get this question out of the way. Yes, SEO is important and a few statistics are all I need to explain why:

• As of 2019, almost 30% of web traffic worldwide came from a search engine. (Statista)
• 86.6% of the total search engine market is dominated by Google (Statista)
• The #1 result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks (Backlinko)

Give those stats a second to sink in and the point becomes clear: you need to be on the first page of results for keywords searched by people who are considering, or may consider, buying from you.

But to understand how to rank well in search engine results, you first need to know how search works. Let’s briefly take a look under Google’s hood.

How search works

Basically, search works like this: Search engine spiders (bots) crawl around the internet reading and indexing as many pages as they can. Then they decide which pages are most valuable to searchers and display that content to them in search results. Put even simpler: search engines find and organize information, then offer it back to those looking for it—often in the form of answers.

The two functions of search engines

SEO Essentials

These nine elements are critical factors that must be built on the foundation we just established. Top-performing pages and sites typically score well in most, if not all, of these SEO essentials.

Query-targeted content

This is the core of SEO. It should be the goal and guiding principle of your work. SEO gives you the unique opportunity to deliver exactly what prospects are looking for, when they go looking for it. In order to target a question, you need to know what people are searching for.

This is done through keyword research—a whole area of search marketing onto itself. In general, there are three types of data you should use keyword research to uncover: the query (what people search for), search volume (how many times people search for it), and difficulty (how competitive it is to rank for that query).

By comparing these factors, you can understand which keywords and phrases you should pursue based on relative interest and difficulty.

Actions

• There are many guides that lay out multiple approaches to keyword research. Here’s a five-step process even a beginner can use once armed with a keyword research tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Ads Keyword Planner, or Moz Keyword Explorer.
  • Use your keyword research tool to analyze keyword ideas, gauge demand, and reveal unknown opportunities.
  • Survey the current top-ranked pages for those keywords.
  • Develop content that’s better than existing content.
  • Test your content through paid search ads targeting those keywords. You can learn the difference between paid search and unpaid search here.
  • Use this data to determine the relative value of the keyword and build a content strategy around them.

Crawlability

Like we said before, search engines do two basic things: crawl and index the internet, and decide which parts of it should get served back to searchers. No matter how much work you put into SEO, none of it matters unless search engines can crawl and index your site.

Actions

• Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking parts of your website you want to make visible in search.
• Use an SEO audit tool to uncover hidden crawling or accessibility issues that may be hindering your ability to rank in search results. Google Search Console is the simplest and easiest tool for conducting a technical SEO audit.
• If you want to dive in deep, check out Ahrefs’ guide to technical SEO.

Links (quality & quantity)

While SEOs speculate on the declining power of links, Google’s own statements and many outside experiments demonstrate their continued value as one of the strongest SEO signals used today.

Again, think of links to your site (from reputable sites) as votes for you and your content. Depending on the context of a link (who is doing the linking and what’s being linked to), search engines determine the authority, trust, and relevance of that link.

Actions

• Make sure you’ve established an appropriate internal linking structure that connects related pages and topics together while pointing to your most important pages.
• For external linking, consider an appropriate ethical link building strategy. Brian Dean of Backlinko has created a wonderfully comprehensive reference to find the one that’s right for you.

User-intent alignment

When creating something for your prospects and customers, you need to ask whether what you’re doing actually satisfies their intent. Don’t let keywords and all the other “best practices” become the driving force behind what you create. Your work has to provide an answer or solution that people are looking for.
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SEOs use a few different terms to refer to this and the way it’s measured: time-on-page, dwell time, return-to-SERP, etc. They’re all trying to get at the same question: do users find this page to be the most satisfying answer to their question or best solution to their problem?

When search engines notice people clicking on your pages only to quickly click back, it’s a clear signal that the answer is no. While this is very important, it’s also frustratingly hard to measure. However, there are a few ways to optimize accordingly.

Actions

• Determine the format and type of content Google likely considers best for satisfying users. If you notice all the top-ranked pages offer videos, for example, it’s a good idea to make a video. Just make it better than the rest.
• Make sure you’re providing the most complete answers possible. Attack your topics and questions from every angle and anticipate other related topics and questions they might be interested in. Again, if others are competing in your content space, you need to do better than them.
• Measure and improve your work by paying attention to bounce rate, time-on-site, pages per visit, and goal conversion rate. All of these are available in Google Analytics.

Fresh, original content

If your content offers the same thing as other content on the web, Google has no reason to award it with a better position. Your work needs to rise to the top by being both original and high-quality. Original content also means not duplicating your own work. I sound like a broken record, but it’s really that important.

Actions

• Make sure your content isn’t just copied and re-worked from other resources online. “Content curation” is a self-important way of saying you aren’t willing to put the work into doing something new. Look at what’s ranking well, highlight the gaps, and get innovative to fill them.
• Plan to update and refresh older content periodically.
• Control duplicate content across your site. Google’s own guide is helpful here.

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT)

These three factors have become major measures of trust, both for users and search engines. When Google was easy to game, the internet was flooded with low-quality pages. Eventually, Google combated this with its “Panda” algorithm update, which used machine learning to separate high and low-quality pages.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines define “high-quality” as, in part, demonstrating the “EAT” traits. Other qualities include a satisfying amount of high-quality content, a clear indication of who’s responsible for it, and a positive reputation.

Actions

• First, check out this best practices article by Devrix to see if you are following these EAT best practices.
• If you detect room for improvement (and even if you don’t), consider using the on-staff expertise you already have or create a network of reputable content creators who can improve this score by authoring amazing content with authority baked into it.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) on search results pages

Search results page CTR is another hotly-debated Google ranking factor. Whether or not Google uses it as a signal, however, misses the point. Research has shown that improved CTR typically brings more traffic and other benefits such as links and opportunities for engagement. Many of these benefits influence rankings to varying degrees.

Actions

• Experiment with title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page content, including CTAs, to optimize for conversion on the pages your visitors land on.
• A great first step is identifying high-traffic, low-conversion pages and experimenting to influence actions on pages you know people are looking at.
• Set up a 404 page alternative to redirect visitors who land on a page that no longer exists

Speed

Page and site speed have been confirmed ranking factors since 2010. Your site, and its pages, have to be fast. That’s all there is to say.

Actions

Use Lighthouse to conduct a performance audit. It analyses your site and spits out actionable steps to take to improve it. Follow its advice, test your speed, and monitor your improvements.

Responsiveness

Everything built for the web these days should be accessible on any device. Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor and much more. It influences engagement, satisfaction, quality metrics, and general useability. In addition, Google rolled out Mobile First Indexing in 2018, meaning the mobile “version” of your website is the one it will be paying attention to most.

Actions

• At the very minimum, your site should be mobile-friendly. While most modern website platforms make this standard, older or custom websites may be behind the times.
• Given Google’s Mobile First Index, make sure your important content isn’t stripped for mobile users. Use this tool to test this.

Advanced SEO for today and tomorrow

So far, we’ve covered the well-established pillars of SEO. Before you go, though, we’ve laid out some important “forward-thinking” parts of SEO. These concepts are on the frontline of research and experimentation. They’ll likely expand and become more significant as time goes on.

RankBrain

User experience signals—what people click on, how long they stay on a page, and what they do on that page, have become Google’s new focus. (They’ve previously announced that RankBrain was their third most important ranking factor.)

We described RankBrain earlier, but a major part of it is the way it measures user behavior and factors it into ranking. Dwell time (how long you stay on a page), and click through rate (the percentage of people clicking on a result), are the two biggest factors here. You want people not only clicking on your pages, but staying there.

For example, if a #1 result gets a lot of clicks, but people leave the page right away, and instead head to the #4 result, which keeps people there for quite a while comparatively, chances are #4 will become the new #1 sooner or later.
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A study by SearchMetrics found that the average dwell time for a top 10 Google result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. No matter where your pages are ranking for valuable search terms, getting a long dwell time (making people stay on your page) is key. Here are three ways to do it:

Actions

• “Bucket Brigades.” This a copywriting technique that uses certain words and phrases to keep users on a page longer. These words have been shown to make people want to keep reading by introducing an information gap that people subconsciously feel compelled to fill by continuing to read. Simply opening a paragraph with “Look:,” or “I can’t emphasize this enough:,” or “Here’s the bottom line,” can make pages much stickier.
• Benefit-Driven Subheaders. Subheaders are important for breaking up text and helping users skim. Benefit-driven subheaders grab and pull at their attention by signaling what’s in it for them.
• The APP Formula. This is a framework for introducing content designed to grab and hold readers to the page. “APP” stands for “agree,” “promise,” and “preview.” It’s simple: introduce your content by introducing an idea or concept your searcher will agree with. This shows you understand their problem and sets the stage for more. Next, give your reader a “peek into a better world” by describing the solution-state they’re looking for. Finally, preview the meat of the content by telling them exactly what they’ll learn and what they’ll be able to do with that information.

Featured snippets

Featured snippets are Google’s attempt to answer a searcher’s question without needing to leave the search result page. They come in many forms, but most look something like this:

The way these work is simple: Google scrapes a snippet of information it deems relevant to the query and displays it in a box toward the top of the results. This way, users get their answers without needing to head to another website.

Some SEOs lament featured snippets since they may hurt their prized clickthrough rates. But, if you’ve ever come across these snippets yourself, you may have realized they’re far from perfect. Unless your query has a simple answer, they don’t provide enough real estate to go in-depth.

That’s why others consider these coveted spots an opportunity to intrigue users with a nugget that leads to more.

On the other hand, you also have the opportunity to rank in the snippet box with a longer chunk of text. These chunks are called “Google Passages,” and are essentially a longer snippet pulled from a section of your content.

Actions

• Find opportunities for being featured in a featured snippet. Ahrefs is an SEO tool that can tell you which keywords you rank for, or have a shot at ranking for, and which of those have a featured snippet.
• Create “snippet bait.” This is a 40-60 world block of content, short list, or small table specially designed to rank in a snippet within a larger piece of content such as an article, blog post, or guide. Learn how to do this here.
• Backlinko recommends dividing your content into thorough, logical sections with successive headings that describe what the section is about. This helps Google identify stand-alone segments that might make good passages.
• Use common questions people ask in headings. More and more, people use mobile devices and smart speakers to search Google with their voice. Often, their device plays a featured snippet that matches their question. Identify common questions that you answer in your content, and include those questions in headings. This may help you rank for these questions. Learn more here.

Comprehensive content

Years ago, search engines would analyze your pages to see how many times you used a keyword and whether it was in certain places (title tag, URL, image ALT text, meta description tag, H1 tag, etc.)

While they’re still looking at content, they’re also focusing on context. It’s very rare that keyword-stuffed content is the best content. Instead, #1 results are often awarded to pages that cover a question or topic from top to bottom. This way, users get everything they need in one place and everyone wins.

For example, a study by Backlinko found that long, in-depth content tends to rank best.

Actions

• To write the types of in-depth content Google wants to see, shoot for 2,000-word articles and guides to topics and questions deserving of it. This is a good way to force yourself into a “comprehensive mindset” and develop a knack for in-depth writing. Remember: It’s key to find topics that lend themselves to a deep dive that your audience is actively interested in. After all, if your content doesn’t satisfy a need, or is long for the sake of being long, your audience won’t take the time to read it. Learn more about finding the right content length here.
• Write authoritative evergreen content. This is the type of content that’s gaining more shares and links compared to less substantive content. Focus on writing about topics you can demonstrate expertise in while crafting that content to be useful not just now, but well into the future.
• Consider the “pillar page” format for presenting and organizing information. Pillar pages cover a topic from top to bottom as long-form content broken into sections or chapters which link out to blog posts and other resources.

Mobile-first index optimization

Users are spending less time on desktops and more time on mobile devices. As a result, Google announced its Mobile-First Index in 2018.

There’s a lot to it, but the important point is simple: Google is now considering the mobile version of your site the “real” version. Here are are a few things to do to ensure nothing falls between the cracks.

Actions

• Make content consistent across desktop and mobile. Bottom line, don’t hide anything on mobile that you’d otherwise show on desktop. Google won’t see it, so it won’t index it.
• Employ responsive design rather than a separate “mobile version” of your website.
• Make sure your website offers a great experience on mobile devices. Don’t settle for a website that “technically” works on mobile despite being a pain to actually use. Remember, Google is paying attention to how users interact with your site. If they’re hitting “back” right away, none of this matters in the first place. Start by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to get a baseline and work from there.

Our approach to SEO

A guide to SEO could go on forever. The more granular you get, the more complex and expansive it becomes. In our experience, however, success in search is less about checking the boxes on an endless list of “best practices” and more about creating quality content that abides by the fundamentals we touched on here.
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If you think about it, focusing first and foremost on quality aligns perfectly with Google’s goal: giving users the best possible search experience—as well as the user’s goal: getting the very best answers and information.

In short, if your content doesn’t closely align with what the user is looking for, you’re missing the point. It’s not about ranking first, it’s about getting people to your website to take action.
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Here at Deuro.net, search engine optimization is baked into our broader content strategy. We spend hours conducting in-depth keyword research, competitor analyses, and editorial planning to ensure our efforts are spent creating and optimizing content that moves your prospects to act.

More and more in search, success begets success. Small wins in ranking more general, search-heavy content give you a platform for ranking the niche, original content that differentiates you from competitors and fills your sales pipeline with qualified leads.

Talk to us today about putting these concepts to work for you. We’d love to learn more about your company and what kind of SEO program fits your goals for growth.