Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about being able to organically rank your website at the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). This entails a lot of different components working together to ensure that your website gets to the top of SERP and maintains the position. Unfortunately, most people tend to simplify the SEO work to just one word – keywords. While not entirely wrong, a successful SEO strategy is actually more comprehensive in practise. To truly be successful in your SEO strategy, look beyond just the keywords research process. 

So how do you ensure that your SEO strategy is successful? We share with you the 3 key features in mapping out a comprehensive SEO strategy for your website.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way for your business to reach out to your prospective customers. This is done by ranking highly on the SERP when the customer inputs a certain keyword. Higher rankings greatly improves your visibility to your customers onlne. Greater visibility will result in increased website traffic. Thus, it will also increase your chances of making a sale and boosting your profits.

It sounds straightforward enough, but the difficulty is that search engines do not reveal how it ranks websites on its SERP. Instead, they will provide you with ambiguous guidelines in what contributes to a high ranking page. Generally, most search engines will take into consideration 3 SEO features:

1. On-Site SEO
2. Off-Site SEO
3. Technical SEO

1) On-Site SEO

On-site SEO can also be called on-page SEO, which refers to any content that is on every webpage of your website. Most particularly, it involves the relevancy and frequency of the keywords that is being used.

As on-site SEO largely revolves around strategic use of keywords, having a solid keyword research process is crucial. Valuable keywords are those that have a significant search volume and relatively low levels of competition. After you have identified these crucial keywords, align the content on your website around those keywords.

Your keywords need to be present in different elements of your webpages. Do consider incorporating your keywords to the headlines and titles, meta tags, meta descriptions and even the image tags. This may require some basic knowledge on HTML code. Take note that any changes made when you are doing on-site SEO will also be visible to your audience. Additionally, avoid “keyword stuffing” or mindlessly adding keywords to all elements of your webpages. Search engines can detect this as “spammy” and not relevant to your audience. As a result, your ranking position will be adversely affected and you may even experience high bounce rates.

Spend some time to regularly review your on-site SEO. Revisit the keywords used and conduct another keyword research to make sure that the article remain relevant to the users.

2) Off-Site SEO

Similar to on-site SEO, off-site SEO is also called off-page SEO. These are simply backlinks that point back to your website. A backlink happens when a separate website contains a link to one of your webpages. In Google, this is seen as proof of authority and popularity. What this means is that the content in your website is considered so useful that other people are also citing you in their website. Effectively, the more backlinks your website generates, the higher your relevancy score.

However, not all backlinks are seen as equal. It is important to differentiate between high quality backlinks and low quality backlinks. For example, backlinks from official government portals, or high ranking ranking education sites will carry more weight as compared to backlinks from a blogging site.

The significance of backlink management should not be ignored. A good tip would be to look into doing guest posting. This is where you work collaboratively with another reputable brand to exchange backlinks to each other via articles. Undeniably, this would result in a win-win situation for both websites.

3) Technical SEO

Technical SEO refer to the SEO techniques which consist of “behind-the-scenes” code on your website. Factors that go into technical SEO are:

• Mobile-responsiveness
• Page Speed
• Site Map
• Duplicate Content
• And many more

In other words, technical SEO comprises of elements which helps the search engine better understand your site. When successfully implemented, search engines will be able to crawl for information on your site at the fastest possible speed. On quick glance, technical SEO may also fall in the category as on-site SEO. However, the main distinction is that technical SEO requires more technical knowledge and focuses more on how the search engine communicates with your website.

Overview of A Successful SEO Strategy

The illustration below shows you a quick-glance into the differences between these 3 features of SEO. Each one of these is important and should not be overlooked.

Source: Quicksprout

Conclusion

If you are just starting out, your first priority should always be developing a strong on-site SEO, including implementing a robust technical SEO. Once you are confident that your on-site and technical SEO is solid, the off-page SEO may come into play. Building on your off-page SEO will further strengthen your overall SEO strategy. In fact, if your on-site SEO is strong, and your content is relevant and fresh, you will notice a natural growth in your off-site SEO. This is because people will start organically back-linking to your site.

SEO is a huge factor in determining the success of your website. It is also the cornerstone to forging long term relationships with your customers. Contact us now and share with us your business goals and objectives. We will work with you to come up with a sustainable SEO strategy that will be the foundation of your business success.