Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or web page to users in non-paid search results (also known as “organic search results”) using targeted optimizations and a number of best practices.
While paid advertising, social media, and other platforms can generate traffic to websites, most online traffic is driven through search engines. Your audience depends on searches to find anything and everything on the internet — SEO is a practice that builds trust with search engines, meaning more traffic and awareness will reach your website.
Organic traffic is any traffic that results in visitors finding your site from a search engine (and not via ad clicks, social media, referral, or direct). So, if you’re spending more on paid search ads, the people who click on them would not be considered organic traffic.
But, not all traffic is created equal. You need to think about the quality and quantity of the organic traffic reaching your site before considering your SEO efforts a success.
Even though people may land on your website via a search engine, that doesn’t mean you’re right for each other. If someone is looking for stationary, but your website sells stationary bikes, that visitor would not be categorized as quality traffic. You need to attract the right people, those who are genuinely interested in buying what you’re selling or viewing the content you’ve created.
Once the right people find your website, it is time to focus on getting more of them to visit more frequently. Remember, the more “quality” traffic you have, the better.
Even though search results pop up in a fraction of a second, there’s a lot that goes on in the back end of search engines to make results populate.
Essentially, search engines have web crawlers who are programmed to read everything they can on the internet and evaluate it. After crawlers have discovered your web pages, search engines then use sophisticated algorithms to rank each page appropriate to the intent behind each user query.
SEO works to optimize websites so they can be compatible with a variety of search engine algorithms. These algorithms are updated continuously and, for the most part, kept secret, so this process is highly involved. SEO analysts need to rely on their research and experience to determine the best ways to optimize websites.
During the research phase, SEOs reference data, historical context, and documentation from the search engines themselves to make the best decision at the time of implementation. But, because SEO is always evolving, it’s a long-term strategy and investment into your website that will ultimately pay off in spades.
Think of SEO as a pyramid. Now, split that pyramid up into three sections – content, links, and crawlability. In a successful SEO strategy, great content will always be an essential piece, so it lands on the top of the pyramid.
Then, links come in to support the content, and, finally, architectural items support both content and links. Let’s dive deeper into each slice of the pyramid.
High-quality content is the cornerstone of SEO. To create it, our team identifies top keywords, pages, and potential visibility gaps to build out strategies that will supplement your existing content. Additionally, we help improve page rendering, website structure, markup, and page experience to enable search engines to read through your content more easily.
Ensuring that you have good-quality internal and external links is also an important part of what we do. We guarantee your links are in tip-top shape by disavowing spam, reclaiming lost equity, building new backlinks, auditing link equity flow, and optimizing anchor text usage.
Our team also focuses on making your website as crawlable as possible for search engine bots. We evaluate and provide recommendations to improve indexability and crawlability by checking things like the robots.txt file, sitemap(s), log files, and metadata directives.
SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) are often confused, but their core functions are different. SEM ads are typically found at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), while organic results are right below. To have your website appear in an SEM ad, you must pay the search engine, whereas to appear in organic results, you simply need a great website.
SEO has been around for a long time, so it’s no surprise that people have tried to find shortcuts and workarounds. This practice is referred to as ‘black hat SEO’ and includes things like stuffing your page full of keywords or buying links from other websites. Search engines have caught on to these tactics and do not look kindly upon them, and they often result in severe penalties.
White hat SEO, on the other hand, entails working to make your website the best it can be for users. White hat SEO requires hard work, and there is no shortcut for quality. Here at Go Fish, we work as a white hat SEO agency exclusively. As part of our services, we do help sites recover from known or suspected penalties as a result of black hat SEO practices.
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of content on your page (both written and within the HTML source code) to make the page more discoverable. An on-page strategy will typically organize the page’s content so search engine bots crawl the material and categorize the page appropriately. On the other hand, off-page SEO focuses on strategies outside your own website that impact visibility across the web. Links from other sites are a great example of off-page SEO, as they are signals of your content’s quality and of your site’s overall trustworthiness and authority.
To have the best SEO efforts and strategies in your corner, you need to have a dynamic, experienced SEO team by your side. Go Fish Digital has a long history of continuously setting the bar for the SEO industry while also ensuring that we approach each project with tried and true methods that have proven results.
If you’re in need of SEO services, give Go Fish a call. Our SEO experts know that it takes in-depth research and strategic planning to push a site forward.
Get in touch with us today! We’re always happy to set up a time for us to talk about your digital marketing goals.
