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Every day, 3.5 billion Google searches are made, translating to roughly 1.2 trillion searches annually.

Nowadays, we search Google for almost anything: from finding out the latest movies worth watching to making a purchase decision to finding business opportunities and new knowledge.

As a marketer, how can we tap the 3.5 billion searches every day, which translates to 3.5 billion potential leads? As you might have guessed, the answer is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Yet, many marketers and business practitioners are skeptical about SEO without understanding its concept.

However, they are not to blame, as black hat SEO practices and Google’s constant poGoogle’ s changes have ruined SEO’s reputation over SEO’s years.

So, as a marketer, you might want to ask: What is SEO? Do I need it? Let us debunk the myths and uncover the facts to answer those questions.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is an effort to improve your website ranking on search engines, mainly Google and Bing. This is done by executing on-site and off-site optimization activities. Below, we will discuss these on-site and off-site optimizations further.

This is the hard fact for marketers: SEO has been and still is the best form of inbound marketing strategy. It provides the best ROI compared to other inbound marketing practices, generating 14% of leads on an average basis.

On the other hand, traditional and telemarketing inbound marketing only generate 6% leads for both.

However, there is another hard truth: SEO can be expensive, on average using 12% of the total marketing budget in big companies. It is also not an easy process, requiring long-term consistent effort to get to the top. However, it will be worth it in the long run.

Do You Need SEO?

Let us answer this question by doing a little experiment. Now, open SEMrush in your browser. SEMRush is simply one of the best SEO analytic tools out there. There are other options, but let’s focus on this one for the sake of this experiment. Now, type in a keyword or two related to your products or services, and click the orange Start Now button.

Now, start on the next page and look at the ORGANIC SEARCH section on the top left of your screen. Is there any traffic volume for your keyword(s)? Is the volume significant enough?

If you answer yes, you might ask yourself: Do I need SEO to capture this search volume as potential leads? Most likely, your answer will be another yes.

Besides SEO, if your business’s organic search is significant, you might want to consider investing in Adwords on the same keyword(s) while waiting for your organic search ranking to grow.

Now that you are interested in investing in SEO, what should you do first?

Why focus on SEO?

This is a relatively cheap method of attracting audiences. It requires some resources in the beginning, but it will pay off lavishly in the future.

Whereas pay-per-click advertising is a short-term campaign, search engine optimization will keep your website afloat times and times more with a minimum effort. Increase your online visibility, find your niche, and build your brand reputation. You can do all this alongside your SEO tasks, which are fulfilled smartly.

Optimized websites have a higher chance of ranking at the top of Google’s search results. Ensure that Google’s resources have no broken links or resources, that internal links are correct, and beware of spammy links that manipulate page rank. You will soon feel the lasting effect of SEO compared to timely PPC campaigns.

What SEO data are important for business owners?

This is a big mistake that site owners make when they ignore Google website analytics and walk in the dark, trying to build their content by intuition.

SEO involves many aspects, but to measure its effectiveness, you should consider these main figures in your Google Analytics report:

1. Organic search traffic

Just general figures to know the website’s success pages’ success. pages’es ‘ the better. However, you should think of quality over quantity. You should be aware that black-hat SEO might bring you profit over some time, but finally, your SEO will end up in tears and no money.

2. Unique visitors

You should know the users’ intent and determine where to meet their expectations.

3. Sessions (daily, monthly) and session duration

Know your audience behavior: how many people return to see your pages, how often they do it, how long it takes them to read your pages on average.

4. Click-through rates directly measure your SEO KPI, showing how many people click on your website when they see it in search engine result pages (SERPs). You compete with thousands of other sites on similar topics, and SEO should help you reach your target audience. The higher your CTR, the better your site breaks the message.

5. Audience breakdown: You need to better understand your audience’s needs and values. See how many people view your site from mobiles or desktops and their ages and interests.

This analysis will help you in two ways: first, adapt content to better serve their intent; and second, develop your business so that you can engage larger audiences and make it fit a broader circle of interests.

6. Domain authority

This is very s. Start from the beginning and be very high in Startle when your website grows in reputation. It’s great when yIt’so. It’s links from authoritative resources quoting you, cool when you are on top pages in SERPs, and superb when people get stuck on your website for many minutes and perform conversions.

7. Social value

This is extremely important in the social media era, which brings many advantages over mass media, broadcast media, word-of-mouth media, and the rest. Run social media profiles to talk to your audience, analyze social buzz to know the tendencies, and build your brand reputation.

What SEO tools will bring you this data?

Google prevails in the search engine market, although nothing prevents you from adding more traffic counters to your website. Google Analytics is a must-have and a great tool that will give you hundreds of ideas for improving your site.

Whether you get your Google statistics from an SEO consultant or do your site SEO audit yourself, you should operate with these figures like Ronaldo with a ball.

Check out the Audience, their Behavior, and conversions to see how well your articles perform.

In addition, you can deploy some SEO ozation software like Website Auditor in this example. It is a real helping hand for website optimization to integrate Analytics and Google Search Console to gather factual data quickly.

It will also detect all kinds of possible errors and give clues on how to fix them. Every error is explained why it is important to get rid of it.

So, discussing SEO-optimizers with site owners will be brief and easy: just hand in the report, summarizing what needs to be fixed. Draw attention to successes and failures, and provide a concise reference if the point is vague.

The real beauty of this SEO reporting tool is that you can automate the workflow and schedule report delivery with all the necessary figures. Get weekly or monthly reports to your email without jumping into accessytics data, and monitor your website performance even when you are away from your desktop.

How can I use this site analytics?

The online performance analysis fine-tunes your business processes and guides your site growth.

1. Optimizing your website by investing in only your own resources will pay off in the long run. It helps build your relations with your audiences and create your brand name.
2. Your site becomes a visiting caror a s, hop or a feedback medium. All these purposes should be served at their bwelldo some competitor research further and know where you stand in your niche, what steps you need to take to keep up with your competitors, to outrank them, or maybe to borrow some techniques that they You might enjoy some keyword rank checker tools here like Rank Tracker.

Let us take a deeper look at your options.

How to Optimize Your Website with On-Site SEO?

As mentioned, there are two different strategies for achieving top search ranks: on-site and off-site optimization. Let’s focus on the Olet’seOlet’se SEO strategy, which accounts for roughly 20% of your potential success.

Here is a step-by-step guide on what you can do:

1. Analyze Your Keywords

Remember SEMRush, which we have used? For this step, you’ve? You can use it or other SEO analytic tools like MOZ Keyword Explorer. Are there keywords that are possible for our niche? Analyze those keywords to determine what is currently popular or trending in your niche.

The number of options might vary greatly between different niches and industries. However, after your analysis, you should get a clearer picture.

It would help if you also considered the competition for the keyword: a keyword might have an excellent volume, but the competition might be too tight/e or pensive for you.

Depending on your industry, a volume of 5,000 with a keyword difficulty of 80 and below is a good start.

2. Content Development

Now that you’ve got the list of effective keywords, select several as your primary targets and develop content to optimize the keywords on-site.

Content can take the form of blog posts, landing pages, product pages, or others. It doesn’t matter as it is engaging and optimized. Remember to develop content for your audience, not search engines.

This is one of the most common SEO mistakes. Instead of stuffing your website with keywords, focus on creating helpful and engaging content.

Optimize meta tags and descriptions, add images and other media with optimized tags, and optimize the user experience on your site.

Off-Site Optimization

Now that we understand on-site SEO optimization, let’s focus on off-site optimizations. Off-site optimization strategies will account for 80% of your SEO success.

The basic principle of off-site SEO is straightforward: your ranking is determined by the number of websites linking to yours (called backlinks). Who made the links is also important: only real and quality websites will count, and big websites will help you rank better.

So, work slowly to build your back. Don’ts. Don’t ryou’llr Don’tee Don’tee was flagged as practicing black hat SEO. Two or three backlinks per week are sufficient.

Here is a nice guide to help you with ideas for building backlinks.

Remember, only DoFollow links will count, not NoFollow links. Understand the differences between both here.

Do not buy backlinks or use automation software. You can earn an algorithmic penalty that will last years, rendering further SEO practices futile.

Other SEO Techniques You Can Try

Here are some other SEO techniques you can try. Some will only work with certain niches or industries, while others are universal.

1. Local SEO strategies for brick-and-mortar businesses

You can try several Local SEO practices if you are a brick-and-mortar business. Create a pin for your business on Google maps and oMapsize it. Aim for online directories, citations, and claiming Google My Business. Here is a very nice guide by MOZ for local SEO practices.

2. Frequently update your on-site content

As mentioned, SEO is a long-term practice. In general, you should update your blog posts at least once every week. Also, consider guest-posting on popular sites in your industry. Offer them the opportunity to contribute content for free; this is a very nice way to build backlinks and a good reputation.

3. Participate in Expert Roundups

Expert Roundups are one of the most effective forms of content optimization nowadays. Again, this is a very nice guide to get started with expert roundups.

4. Get Reviewed

If you sell tangible products or services, you should always aim to get more reviews, especially on Google Maps and other popular website review sites.

5. Register In All Directories and Catalogs

Make your company and products/services as visible as possible. There are a lot of directories and catalogs for just about any industry or niche.

Bottom Line: You now have a clearer picture of the SEO strategies you can try. Here is one last tip: keep track of your efforts and their progress.

Begin by installing Google Analytics, your most trusted advisor, and the search console to track your traffic, impressions, and ranking. Track your keyword rankings frequently and always evaluate what you can improve (and eliminate non-working strategies).

Remember that SEO is always evolving, and you must adjust your strategies to keep up with the times. Quora is a good place to look for currently working strategies by browsing recent digital marketing and SEO questions.