SEO: the complete guide for you in 2024
SEO: the complete guide for you in 2024
However, being on the Internet is not enough to guarantee that your site, e-commerce or blog achieves a place on the first page of Google: it is necessary to invest in a specific strategy to optimize the results and ensure that your business achieves good positioning. web for the most important keywords in your segment. Master the strategies that top websites use to succeed with SEO. Our guide offers insights into creating content that ranks well, optimizing your site structure, and measuring SEO performance effectively.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the set of optimization strategies and techniques that are carried out on a web page so that it appears organically in Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo or YouTube. The correct application of SEO can cause expressive increases in traffic and the visibility of brands on the Internet.
One of the biggest goals of companies that invest in Digital Marketing is to reach the top positions in search engines — after all, who doesn’t want free clicks and more visitors to their site?
But in a field as fierce and competitive as the Internet, making your website stand out among the millions of pages on the net seems like an impossible task. And I say that it seems because in reality it is not.
With SEO or Search Engine Optimization — Search Engine Optimization — you can make your website appear in relevant searches, connecting your content with people who are looking for products or services like the one you offer.
It’s the perfect operation!
But you should know that doing SEO requires a lot of study to understand terminology, build strategies and apply practices that will take you to the top of the Google results pages .
Don’t worry! Whether you want to take your first steps in the world of search engine optimization, or you want to refresh your knowledge, in this complete SEO guide we will explain everything you need to know on the subject.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which means “search engine optimization”. It consists of a series of optimization techniques, disciplines and strategies that are implemented on the pages of a website or blog to improve its search engine positioning.
This Marketing strategy is essential for your company to gain prominence, visibility in the digital world and, consequently, more leads , customers and billing for your business.
How?
Optimizing sites and blogs through the use of techniques to improve the web positioning of your pages and positioning your company in the first results of Google, for example, increase (and a lot) your business opportunities.
After all, 90% of people who search on Google only click on the results that appear on the first page of the engine.
The main objective of SEO, therefore, is to increase the volume of organic traffic and ensure more visibility for web pages.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
We do not want to leave out of this article a topic that causes a lot of confusion among professionals who are starting out in the world of Digital Marketing and this is the difference between SEO and SEM.
Although at first they may seem to refer to similar actions given the similarity of their acronyms, you should pay close attention because they refer to completely different actions. Let’s see one by one.
SEO = Organic positioning
As you already know, SEO refers to all those actions that you can take inside or outside your website to optimize its positioning in search engines organically. This last point is key since organic means “no payment” .
With an SEO strategy you don’t pay Google or any other search engine to gain positions in the SERP. It is your valuable content and your optimizations that earn those places in their own right.
SEM = paid positioning
On the contrary, SEM —Search Engine Marketing— refers to those strategies that include the use of paid advertisements.
That is, with a SEM strategy, you create an advertising campaign so that when a user types a search, your site appears before the organic results in the form of an ad, as long as it matches the user’s search intention.
Which to choose?
A complete Digital Marketing strategy should not opt for one and exclude the other. That is, you must include in your strategy a combination of SEO and SEM strategies to increase your results .
With the use of SEM, results are generated instantly in a short term, necessary when you want to increase visibility or brand recognition quickly or when you want to launch products or promotions for a limited time.
In addition, SEO is a strategy that works in the medium and long term, constantly bringing better quality visits.
If you want to expand this matter further, we recommend you read our article on SEO vs. SEM .
But what are the advantages of this SEO strategy and how efficient can it be? Here we present the main ones.
7 advantages of implementing an SEO strategy
1. Increases the visibility of a brand
Implementing an SEO strategy is one of the best ways to increase your brand visibility organically.
Imagine the following scenario: your business is in charge of selling washing machines. A user, let’s call him Pedro, is having problems with his washing machine, so he googles how he can fix it himself.
Coincidentally, you have an article that shows a step by step to repair washing machines, so you get that visit to your website.
And although the article talks about repair and not about sale, this is only the beginning of a customer relationship with your brand. It is what in Inbound we know as the attraction stage.
2. Attract qualified traffic
Like Pedro, many other users will come to your content to answer their questions or find solutions to their problems.
With the creation of valuable content, optimized for search engines, your website will be able to organically attract the leads you are looking for, at the right time.
In this way, the more visitors you receive, the more people will know about you and the more likely you are to close a sale, which brings us to the next advantage.
3. Generate leads
Imagine that, although Pedro repaired his washing machine, he definitely needs to change it, as it continues to present other faults.
As Pedro already knows your brand, thanks to the fact that he has found the solution to his questions in your articles, surely he will already trust your business and will think of you, as the first option, to buy his next washing machine. This is the decision stage in the Inbound methodology.
4. Position a brand as an authority in the market
Continuing with our example, in Pedro’s mind and in that of many other users like him, your company will occupy their Top of Mind , that is, it will be the first brand that comes to mind when they think of washing machines.
SEO allows you to achieve this by facilitating correct indexing and improving the organic positioning of your content.
Thus, whenever Pedro or anyone else searches for information about washing machines, your website will be the first to appear, or at least, the result they are looking for.
In this field, a concept that has been highlighted is that of EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), an acronym used to represent the three fundamental elements of quality content.
Google has recently looked favorably on content published by authors who have recognized technical authority and credibility on the respective subject.
For example, on a disease content website, you might want to have articles written by doctors, with an author page containing information about their professional history.
5. Educate the market
Users like Pedro have surely been educated with your articles on the operation, care and maintenance of their washing machines.
Likewise, they have managed to understand what are the specifications they are looking for with their washing machine, according to their personal needs.
As you can see, the importance of positioning content lies not only in closing sales, but also in educating the audience to make better decisions.
6. Win over the competition
Finally, if it is your brand that produces the most complete and relevant content on washing machines, who do you think users will look for when they want to know something about washing machines? Who will they trust if they need to make a purchase?
Although it takes time and a lot of work to implement an SEO strategy, in the long run it generates constant and lasting results.
7. Better return on investment
SEO requires a much lower investment than other strategies such as SEM or traditional advertising.
The investment that SEO requires translates into the payment of some tools such as the ones we saw previously, the salaries of the SEO specialist or the content creator and the payment of the domain and hosting of the web page, for example.
However, the return more than multiplies the investment and the best thing is that the work that was done once continues to generate returns in the medium and long term.
Now we are going to explain to you, step by step, the most important SEO concepts and teach you the strategies we use to reach the top of Google.
And it all starts when the user does a search.
What types of search are there?
Search psychology revolves around the user: their needs, their way of looking for answers, the results they expect when searching for something, etc.
Companies that invest in Digital Marketing should respond objectively to all these doubts and needs.
One of the first steps to understanding user search is knowing the intent of their navigation, which is essential in order to attract the right audience to your site.
So we are going to explain to you what brings the user to Google. There are three types of search:
1. Navigational search
This type of search — also known as a shortcut search — happens when the user already knows which site they’d like to visit, but maybe they can’t remember the full URL or are too lazy to type.
2. Informational search
As the name itself says, in the informational search the user looks for information, either through news, product launches or explanatory articles.
Unlike navigational search, the user does not know exactly which site they will arrive at to find the content they are looking for, since it is not possible to clearly identify their search intention.
In an Inbound Marketing strategy , this organic visibility is essential to attract users to the pages of a business and begin their journey to become customers.
Because they do not know exactly which site they want to visit, the user tends to use the organic results to find the solution to their question or need, and it is at that moment that the good web positioning of the blog or site is an advantage for businesses.
3. Transactional search
In this type of search, the user wants to carry out a transaction, such as buying a product directly or finding a store. This search is extremely valuable, especially for e-commerces .
Now that you have understood the 3 types of search, in the next topic we are going to explain how the world’s largest search engine, Google, works.
4. Local Search
Local searches are searches with a geographical component, within a certain region, for example, when the user searches for restaurants, cinemas, shops, hotels, schools, offices, among other types of establishments with a physical location.
Other search types
There are also other types of searches that users can perform, such as:
- news;
- institutions;
- songs;
- academic searches;
- specific information (weather, date, etc.);
- images;
- videos.
Keep in mind that for each type of search, Google has been trying harder and harder to deliver specific results.
For (transactional) product searches, for example, it shows Google Shopping results or when searching for a song, it shows the YouTube clip and lyrics.
The intention is to improve the search experience with quicker and more precise responses for the user .
Brief history of SEO and how the Google algorithm has evolved
Since people realized that the best way to deliver their content to Internet users was through search engines , they devised a series of techniques to conquer their first places. These techniques were baptized with the name of SEO.
However, in the 90s there was an abundance of content that was more concerned with positioning than with the user experience. That’s why Google began to constantly update its algorithm to deliver the most relevant results for each search.
Next, we will take a look at the main algorithm updates.
Google Panda
In 2011 came the first major algorithm update. Google Panda began to analyze and evaluate websites based on the quality of their content, reviewing aspects such as grammar and duplicate content, while rewarding original and valuable content.
Google Penguin
A year later, in April 2012, Google Penguin was launched to monitor the link building health of websites.
Basically, Google Penguin checks that the external links that are sent to the pages are natural and of quality. Therefore, it stimulates relevant backlinks and that add value to the user who reaches another website from them.
Google Hummingbird
In 2013, with Google Hummingbird, content began to be classified according to semantic factors and user interest.
It is with Hummingbird that Google understands natural language, expanding its way of interpreting content to variations of keywords or related keywords.
Google Pigeon
In 2014, with Google Pigeon, the search engine began to organize search results according to the geographical location of the users. It is from here that local SEO begins to gain prominence.
Google Mobilegeddon
In 2015 the boom of mobile devices arrived and Google adapted to it with Google Mobilegeddon. With this update, Google rewards sites that are mobile-friendly: those that have a responsive design and that optimize their loading speeds .
Google RankBrain
One of the most radical changes in the algorithm occurred with Google RankBrain, in 2015. With this update, Google delivers the most relevant content to the user according to their search intention.
In this free infographic that we prepared you can find more detailed information about this story and how Google currently works.
How to put together a good SEO strategy and conquer the top of Google?
Now, it is time to know the step by step that you must follow to create and implement a successful SEO strategy. Take note!
1. Define your goals
The first step of the strategy is to define what your objectives are when optimizing your website, blog or ecommerce . For this, you need to know what SEO is, some possibilities are:
- increase organic traffic;
- generate more leads;
- generate more sales;
- reduce the cost of acquiring customers (CAC);
- educate the market;
- increase brand authority.
You should always align these SEO goals with your macro brand goals . If you want to increase your brand awareness, for example, SEO can help you with that by getting your company’s website to the top of Google.
By defining objectives, you can also identify goals and KPIs. If you want more authority, for example, you can use the Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics. You just have to define what score you want to achieve in these KPIs and in what period of time.
In this way, you will be able to monitor the strategy using these indicators to be sure that you are on the right path to achieve your objectives.
2. Create a buyer persona
The first step is to define who you want to reach with your content, that is, define who your ideal client would be. For this, the concept of buyer persona will be completely useful. In short, a buyer person is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client built from data.
Unlike the target audience, a buyer persona is a character with a specific and detailed description, created to better understand your customers, their interests and their problems or needs.
The creation of a buyer persona is the first step to implement an SEO strategy because it allows you to define the communication language, the content expected and the best content distribution channels.
That is, it will give your digital strategy a direction and allow you to write for real people and search engines at the same time.
Remember this: everything your brand produces must be addressed to your buyer persona in order to make sense and lead them to naturally move through the stages of the customer journey until concluding with the purchase.
3. Install initial and basic SEO tools
To start an SEO strategy you must have, at least, the basic tools to diagnose your current situation, support planning, make the first optimizations and start monitoring the impacts of each action.
We are mainly talking about two indispensable tools for SEO: Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google provide them for free and they will always help you monitor your strategies. Let’s get to know them better!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a widely used data analysis tool that offers a wide variety of resources for evaluating the performance of digital strategies. In SEO, it can help in different ways:
- get to know your audience better to build the buyer persona;
- identify which are the most visited pages and with the best performance;
- monitor the amount of organic traffic;
- identify the channels that generate the most traffic (email, social, organic, etc.);
- understand engagement (bounce rate, pages per visit, session length);
- monitor the conversions generated by the SEO strategy.
These are just some of the analyzes you can do with Google Analytics that can help you from planning to monitoring SEO. Undoubtedly, you will find many other data in the tool to help your strategy.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool that facilitates communication between a site and Google and offers valuable reports to apply SEO techniques. Here are some of the features it offers:
- find out if there are problems with the indexing of the site;
- it helps you to know if the site has been hacked or penalized by Google;
- monitor the average position of your pages in the SERPs;
- identify the click-through rate (organic CTR) of your pages in the SERPs;
- identify which keywords triggered your website in the SERPs;
- asks Google to rework dubious backlinks to your site.
- identify which sites direct backlinks to yours;
Google Search Console is a bit more technical, so it’s geared towards webmasters. But the interface is very friendly, so anyone can use it to make diagnoses and direct more complex demands to specialized professionals.
The tool can also generate various ideas for content optimization, as well as being the primary source for identifying queries that drive traffic to your pages and the click-through rate for your top keywords.
4. Do keyword research
Now that you know who you are going to talk to and what are the topics that might interest them, it is time to land those ideas to create relevant content for your buyer personas.
What separates your content from your users is called keywords. A keyword is the term that users enter into search engines to find content that solves their concerns.
For example, if a person is planning a trip to Japan, they will surely type “best destinations in Japan” or “cheapest destinations in Japan” in the search bar.
What I put in quotes are the keywords, which have different types of terms that cover interesting topics for your buyer persona.
Doing keyword research is a whole process:
- you start with an idea about a topic,
- you use tools like SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner to identify keywords that you can use in your articles,
- determine if its search volume is relevant or how difficult it is to position content for that word,
- you create a list with the best keywords.
In this search for keywords it is also very important to know the location of your audience, since this information will guide all the content production of your website.
If you have a company in Mexico but want to expand your operations to Colombia, you will have to do some specific research to find out what terms are most common in this country.
To achieve this territorial domain in Google for different regions of the world, there are international SEO techniques, which you can learn more about in the last link.
Among them are the use of hreflang tags and the production of content adapted to each national market.
We recommend you read our article on keywords to understand in depth how to carry out this process.
Keyword Tools
SEMRush
An indispensable tool in an SEO’s work kit is SEMRush. With this platform you can, among other things, analyze the general positioning status of your website and identify the keywords in your sector.
But perhaps one of the most valued features of SEMRush is competitor analysis. Thus, you can identify the strengths of your competition’s SEO strategy and adjust yours.
In this article we present a complete tutorial on how to use SEMRush .
Ahrefs
If you want to know the status of your link building strategy and the health of your backlinks you should use Ahrefs. This platform has the most comprehensive link index on the Internet.
Ahrefs, which now has a free version , allows you to perform different functions: find link building opportunities, find broken links on your website or that of your competition, find ideal pages for guest posting and analyze the backlink profile of your own page.
To take care of your link building strategy, and avoid being penalized by Google Penguin, you must use Ahrefs.
MOZ
MOZ is a whole suite of tools that, correctly used, will boost your SEO strategy through its optimization recommendations in positioning, the definition of the topics of your content and the improvement of your strategy in social networks .
For example, with the Crawl Test function you will be able to identify the technical SEO problems of your website. In addition, only with MOZ you will have access to two metrics that are essential to understand Google PageRank: the Page Authority and the Domain Authority.
5. Analyze the competition to identify opportunities
Another essential step before starting content creation is to review what your competition is doing .
With tools like SEMRush you can identify which are your most successful keywords, which of your articles are the best positioned and how they are being found by users.
With this information you can make adjustments to your strategy, adopt their best practices or try to position with their keywords by creating more complete content.
6. Organize the contents with the Topic Clusters methodology
After identifying your best keywords with their different types , it’s time to write your articles.
It is necessary that you explore the main topics of your market with complete contents, which must be reconciled with smaller and more specific articles on topics related to the most outstanding issues.
Once you have several specific articles on a general topic, you can organize them into Topic Clusters , which means gathering several related articles into one main post, creating interconnections between them.
It is important that you pay attention to this methodology since more and more, Google is paying attention to the user ‘s search intention and not only to the keywords that appear in an article.
With Topic Clusters, you let Google understand that your article is the most complete on a topic and thus you will gain better positions in the SERP.
An example from the Rock Content universe is the pillar content we have on the concept of Marketing, which has almost 10,000 words. But to talk about this topic it is impossible not to cover related concepts, such as:
- Marketing Digital;
- How to put together a Marketing strategy;
- The 4 P’s of Marketing;
- What is the relationship between Marketing and Advertising;
- What types of Marketing exist;
- among others.
The concept of Topic Clusters tells us that it is advisable to write specific articles on each of these topics, making these contents send internal links to the “Marketing” page, and vice versa.
Thus the algorithm can better understand the semantic structure of the domain and reward it for this organized work.
In this free form that we prepare, you will be able to use this methodology to guide the production of your content. Download it for free!
What is On-Page SEO?
Here it should be remembered that On Page factors refer to what the website administrator can optimize on their own pages to improve the visitor experience and make the site easier for Google to read.
These optimizations must be integrated into the Content Marketing strategy, since a large part of them is implemented in the content published on the website or blog.
SEO On Page brings together all the variables that you can control directly within your web page, such as:
- title length,
- user intent,
- content size,
- author pages (EAT),
- number of posts,
- scannability ,
- meta description,
- Friendly and easy to understand URL,
- use of keywords,
- image optimization,
- upload speed,
- subtitle Formatting,
- internal links between pages,
- among others.
From now on we are going to break down the main SEO on Page optimization factors and their best practices:
User intent
SEO is not about what people are looking for, but what they want to find.
Therefore, on-page optimizations should focus on the user’s search intent, which varies with each search, so that your pages and content match what they want to find.
This is what Google focuses on to offer what the user wants and, for that, natural language processing and analysis of the user’s location are elements that help to decipher this intention.
Therefore, the challenge for an on-page SEO and Content Marketing strategy is to understand search intentions, as Google does, to deliver what users want.
And the best way to understand user intent is by turning to Google itself!
Let’s understand better with some examples:
After keyword research, you need to search Google to analyze which results are in the top rankings. After all, these are the pages that Google deems most responsive to user intent .
Let’s look at the results page for the search “SEO”:
As you can see, all the first contents are educational, focused on teaching what SEO is and how to use it, therefore, to position yourself you need to have content following this line.
But what if my intention was to find a “Batman costume”? What would I like to find?
Exactly, pictures of the products!
Can you imagine someone renting or buying a costume without seeing it? To reach the top positions you must use images!
So, analyze the top results for specific keywords and identify the topics you need to address and how to improve your content with topics that those results don’t already address.
Get over them and offer optimized and more complete content!
Content size
Content size generally has an impact on rankings, although it is not a direct factor in the algorithm’s ranking.
Long content tends to be more comprehensive, detailed, and in-depth, and therefore better able to answer user questions.
But, of course, there is no rule: for each subject and for each person, the ideal extension may vary. Here at Rock Content we have super comprehensive posts, like this one about advertising.
It is a head tail keyword , with a lot of competition, search volume and that requires extremely complete content, due to the breadth of the topic.
Already a post about 18 Instagram hacks, for example, is much more specific, with less searches and competition, and therefore can be shorter and more direct.
In concussion: the best size is the one that best answers the user’s question . To get insights into how long your post needs to be to get to the top of Google, you can also take a look at the websites that are already ranking well for each keyword.
Volume of publications
The volume of publications also tends to favor positioning. After all, the more content you post, the better chance you have of ranking better.
However, you can’t just think about the number of posts, okay? We need to combine quality and frequency.
There is no point in posting hundreds of pieces of content that are not relevant or do not answer user questions. That would be a waste of energy. Publishing a lot at the beginning of a blog and then abandoning it is useless.
It is necessary to maintain the frequency of the publications to retain the public and show Google that you always have new and updated content.
However, there is no ideal volume or frequency of publication. You must identify the demands of your topic, its identity and, in addition, evaluate the content production capacity of your business.
Remember that the most important thing is that quantity and quality work together!
Featured Snippets
On the other hand, Featured Snippets are a type of featured snippet known for being Google’s famous position zero. They are boxes that appear above all the results with a specific answer to a user’s search.
Generally speaking, to win a Featured Snippet you must create highly valuable content presented in a simple way that fully answers a question in a short space.
Therefore, lists, definitions, and short answers are the most common content found in Featured Snippets.
As additional information, you should know that when you perform a voice search , the result you get will surely be read from a Featured Snippet. That is why it is so important to try to conquer position zero.
There are three types of featured snippets:
- lists;
- boards;
- and paragraphs.
Images for SEO
Google still doesn’t fully understand what an image says, which is why it needs your help. And how can you help him? With image optimizations for SEO .
This strategy serves to provide data in the form of text over the images. We’re talking about alternative text (alt tag), file name, image title, image URL, and context (environment words).
The most important thing here is alt text, which is essential for the visually impaired experience, as the alt text is read to the user by the screen reader.
Therefore, the alternative text should be a description of the image and, whenever possible, contain the keyword. Look at this example:
All of these elements make Google understand what the image displays, index it for Google Images search, and make it another source of traffic.
Optimizing images for SEO also includes some attention to file size and format, so they load and index quickly.
Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are boxes that appear with expanded information about your website. They occupy the position that your website occupies for a given search.
If Snippets are a combination of website title, short description, and URL, Rich Snippets are an enriched version of them that include more detailed information that is relevant to users.
To enrich your website with these resources, it will be necessary to establish a solid and organized structure of information that can be understood by the algorithm. This is achieved by configuring the pages with the code snippets available in the Schema Markup.
An example of a rich snippet is the rating of content in the SERPs. The positive evaluation of the users can help that others who arrive at the page have more confidence in a content and access it.
Internal links
The network of internal links of your website is also part of the SEO onpage strategies.
Linking to internal pages has one main function: to guide navigation and direct the user (and search engines) to other content that may interest them .
But that action also serves a technical function in SEO. The internal linking network helps Google find your content and better understand your site by showing the hierarchy between pages.
For example, the closer a page is to home and the more internal links it receives, the more important it is.
We link, in addition to our most important blogs and pages, more relevant content directly from the home page of our website:
Another example of Rock Content’s internal linking is in our super comprehensive post on “ Digital Marketing ”, many other more topic-specific content (email marketing, SEO, social media, etc.) link to that post and thus form, strengthen their authority.
This is how a topic cluster strategy works .
EAT
This acronym caught the attention of SEO professionals and stands for Expertise (specialty), Authoritativeness (authority) and Trustworthiness (reliability). Google uses these words as guidelines to evaluate the quality of search results.
They are presented in the document that guides the group of evaluators who carry out a manual analysis on the relevance of the results offered by the search engine. Therefore, they also show what Google considers important for the content to be considered quality:
- the specialty of the author of the content;
- the authority of the author of the content, the content itself and the website;
- how trustworthy the author of the content, the content itself, and the website are.
Therefore, follow these guidelines in your content strategy and SEO optimization to be aligned with what Google thinks. To learn more about the subject, read our article on EAT .
What is off-page SEO?
Now, it’s time to look outside your pages for off page SEO. What can you do to gain more authority in the market and show Google that you are a reference?
Here you need to realize that, unlike on-page SEO, in off-page SEO you do not have full control over optimization. The decision to give backlinks to your site and mention you or directly search for your brand depends on third parties.
What you can do is increase the chances of that happening by adopting a link building strategy, guestposting, and redirecting broken links, among other ways to strengthen your backlink profile and generate more authority for the page.
You will learn more about these strategies below!
What is link building?
Links are the foundation of the internet. They connect one page to another and allow the user to navigate discovering content.
Like users, bots also traverse this interconnected network to index new content and understand which pages are most important, as one passes link juice and authority to the other.
That is why a link building strategy is so important in off page SEO.
Link building is the construction of a network of links that direct the user to your pages (called backlinks ) and strengthen your authority on the web. For the Google algorithm, the more quality links the page receives, the more relevance it will have in the market.
Keep in mind that quantity and quality must go together. There is no point in getting hundreds of backlinks from the same domain or website that is questionable or out of context.
For a link building strategy to work you must be able to get quality links.
What are quality backlinks?
As we have already seen, Google makes a great effort to avoid actions of black hats.
Link building was once a widely used tool for artificially increasing authority, with artificial link building systems and “super optimization” of anchor texts, for example.
A quality backlink, therefore, is the opposite of these actions, it is a link to your domain that you receive on your own merits and shows that you are related to reliable sites and references in your market .
Quality backlinks, therefore, are those that:
- come from sites with domain and page authority;
- they come from several different domains;
- they fit naturally into the context of the page;
- use consistent anchor text;
- they are in a privileged position on the page (at the beginning of the text, for example);
- they come from sites related to your area of expertise.
These are the main characteristics to look for in backlinks when designing a link building strategy.
Nofollow Links
There is also an important point in backlink characteristics: the difference between dofollow and nofollow links .
By default, all links are “dofollow”. This attribute tells the bot to follow the path indicated by the link and pass authority from one page to another.
The “nofollow” attribute, on the other hand, prevents the bot from following that path and assigning authority to the linked page.
It is used, for example, in blog comment boxes and social media links, which are often for spamming and creating artificial authority.
This does not mean that nofollow links are dispensable in off-page SEO. While they don’t directly convey authority to your pages, they do drive traffic and make more people aware of your brand.
Link Building Techniques
Let’s see, then, what link building techniques can you adopt to strengthen your market authority? Next, we will talk about the main ones. Keep reading!
Link Bait
It is the most natural and efficient strategy. It is about creating content that is so good that it generates backlinks naturally, without having to search for or propose associations.
For this, you can invest in in-depth content, disseminate exclusive research data, create rich materials, offer your own tools, among other types of content that become assets with great potential to be linked or shared.
Interactive content is an example that usually brings natural backlinks, as it surprises the user with its immersive nature and encourages them to share it on their social networks.
There are several types of interactive content, such as:
- calculators,
- infographics ,
- questionnaires
- and ebooks.
For you to visualize it better, I show you the example of the interactive calculator that Lansinoh made, in which the user can know how much he would save with breastfeeding instead of standardized baby feeding formulas. It’s interesting to share, right?
Guest posts
Guest posting is a strategy for publishing guest posts on a partner blog. Usually it is an exchange: you produce content for the blog audience and you can place one or more links to your website.
In this way, you attract new visitors and gain more authority, if the link is “dofollow”.
It is very important to adopt this strategy in moderation. If Google realizes that you acquired a lot of links quickly, it may understand that you are using black hat techniques and penalize your pages.
Mentions to the brand
Brand mentions, even without a link to your website, are already valuable for SEO. Google analyzes this criteria to recognize the brands that really exist and have a good reputation in the market.
You can also look for these mentions without a link and identify opportunities to get a quality backlink . Just contact the admin and suggest adding the link.
Broken links
What happens when the URL pattern of a site changes or the content ceases to exist? Several broken links are created on the site.
That is, the user who tries to access that previous link does not find anything, lands on a 404 Error page and you lose both the visit and the authority that transmitted the link.
Also, you can find these links on websites with topics related to yours and show your content as a solution to that broken link.
You can find these links on other sites using tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs or by using a free tool like Check My Links:
Link building tools
There are several link building tools on the market. Some are paid, others are free; some are specialized, others help with certain actions.
Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz’s Link Explorer, and SEMrush offer comprehensive analysis of a page’s backlink profile, from citation volume to anchor text quality.
Some of them have their own indicators that help in this analysis, such as Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow and Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority.
These tools are paid, but offer some free features.
Also, you can work with more specific tools for certain actions. Google Search Console , for example, should be used to ask Google to disallow questionable backlinks.
Google Alerts can alert you to mentions of your brand that are good opportunities to get backlinks.
How does technical SEO work?
The SEO universe is vast and includes many technical aspects of the structure of a website, which is why a very important part of on-page SEO is technical SEO .
When we talk about technical SEO, we are referring to all the optimizations that you can do in the internal structure (that is, in the codes and architecture) of your website, with the aim of making it more secure , fast, understandable, crawlable and indexable.
Next, we will tell you what the fundamental elements are and how to optimize them. Don’t stop reading!
Sitemap
A sitemap is a text document that numbers all the pages of a website , as well as information about them, such as the date of the last modification and the frequency of updates.
Its SEO function is to show this information to search engines so that they can easily find and index the URLs.
Although search engines already do this job when crawling, sitemaps make life easier for robots and ensure that all pages are indexed.
You can create the sitemap manually or with tools and plugins and then submit it via Google Search Console.
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file is also a text document, inserted in the root folder of your website, that tells Google which pages of your website it should not crawl so that they will not appear in the search engine. .
You can use robots.txt to prevent Google bots from accessing sensitive pages, such as the admin login form (the “/wp-admin/” of WordPress sites , for example), script files, or styles they are not important.
Also, it’s important to know about robots.txt for cases where your pages have a problem appearing in the SERPs. They may be in that file by mistake.
UX (user experience)
User experience and SEO are concepts that must go together. We have already said that the priority of the engines is to offer the best search and browsing experience until the user finds what he is looking for.
And that includes their experience on your website.
But, what does UX, User Experience (in Spanish user experience) mean? It is a concept used in the development of websites that centralizes all the measures in the actions and responses of the users to satisfy their needs.
According to Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios, seven features are essential for a website to have a good user experience. Needs to be:
- Useful;
- easy to be used;
- desirable;
- locatable;
- accessible;
- valuable;
- trustworthy.
charging speed
Loading speed is one of the main criteria for classification. Google itself has already stated this openly: in 2010, for desktop searches and, in 2018, for mobile searches.
It’s very important to remember that while speed doesn’t get you ranked, without it you’ll never get to the top.
A fast pagespeed won’t rank you above your competitors, but with a bad pagespeed you won’t even have a chance to compete.
For Google, the quality of the user’s search experience depends on the agility of the information , since nobody wants to wait more than a few seconds to find what they are looking for.
It is no coincidence that the search engine has provided a free testing tool – PageSpeed Insights. The reports provide a speed diagnosis, as well as tips for improving loading, optimizing images and website codes.
Mobile First Index
If cell phones are already used more than computers, if mobile searches have already surpassed desktop searches, if mobile traffic is already higher, what do you think Google should do?
Of course, the search engine is an excellent reader of reality! Therefore, it began prioritizing sites that offered a good mobile experience in search results .
In 2015 Google announced that mobile searches would become a ranking factor which motivated several sites to become responsive .
One impact that was also impressive was the announcement of the Mobile-First Index , starting in 2016, which started prioritizing the mobile version of sites to rank them.
So, if you haven’t yet adapted your site to this trend, hurry up to improve the usability and loading of your pages on mobile devices!
Responsiveness
Creating a responsive website is one of the most appropriate ways to make your website mobile friendly. With this technique, the site only has one version, which best adapts to the different screen sizes that users may use.
In addition to responsive design, you can also adopt two other techniques, although they are less indicated:
- Mobile URL, where the mobile version has a different URL than the desktop version (m.domain.com, for example);m . domain . com , for example);
- Dynamic service, where the two versions have the same URL, but have different CSS and HTML for each device.
AMPs
Accelerated Mobile Pages is another initiative to improve the mobile search experience. This is an open source project, spearheaded by Google, whose goal is to develop static content pages that load faster on mobile devices.
They are identified in the mobile search SERP with a seal, a small lightning bolt next to the URL, and are given priority ranking.
The red arrow in the following image is fixed in the symbol that indicates that the page will be displayed in its AMP version.
SEO audits
In technical SEO, one of the main actions is to carry out audits, especially at the beginning of an optimization project.
An SEO audit identifies issues with tracking, loading, usability (especially on mobile), among other errors that affect user navigation and website ranking.
Here are some items that an SEO audit can point to:
- broken links;
- tracking errors;
- redirect errors;
- duplicate content;
- blocked pages (robots.txt, noindex, nofollow);
- slow loading pages.
One of the most complete tools for this is Screaming Frog that offers complete reports on all those elements that we mentioned. But the audit can also combine other tools, such as SEMrush and Google Search Console.
What is local SEO?
One of Google’s priorities in recent years is to search with local intent. Understand why this is!
The search engine interprets that a user looking for solutions in a certain region should receive answers in a different way, with more practical and objective information, instead of a list of links as in a traditional SERP.
In this type of search, Google activates the local search algorithm, which prioritizes results in the region in which the user is located or that the user types in the search terms.
In the results, the search engine usually presents information from Google My Business directly in the SERPs, so the user does not always need to enter the brand’s website (in the same vein as we explained about featured snippets).
Therefore, optimization for businesses with a physical address, called local SEO , has some peculiarities. What does this change in an optimization strategy? Understand it better below.
Local keywords
To display local results in the SERPs, Google tries to interpret the user’s local search intent.
If you type “hotels”, “nearest hotels” or similar terms, Google considers the user’s location at the time of the search to show them the options in that region.
On the other hand, if the user types “hotels in Medellín”, the results will focus on the region that they typed in the search, regardless of their location at that moment. This can happen when we plan a trip, for example.
Therefore, keyword research for local SEO strategy should consider search intentions with all of these variations, not just the one that includes your city.
Think about the following:
- terms that identify your business, for example: hospitality, hotel;
- modifiers of industry terms, for example: best hotel, best cost benefit hotel;
- geographic modifiers, for example: Medellin hotels, downtown hotels, hotels near the airport.
Google My Business
Google My Business is the top ranking factor in local SEO . At the top of the local search SERP, Google displays the Local Pack, which is a box with the top three results for the user, whose information is pulled directly from Google My Business.
It is there, therefore, that you must strive to appear, for that it is essential to register your company in Google My Business. This tool offers various registration features for local businesses.
You can place your name, address, telephone number, hours of operation, and also receive comments, respond to users, post photos, inform your menu, among other specific functions for different types of businesses.
Take advantage of all this variety of ways to register and interact with users to have more chances of appearing in the Local Pack.
Google gives priority to companies that provide the most information on the platform, especially those with the most reviews and high ratings.
Ranking factors
Google uses three main ranking factors for local searches: relevance, proximity, and prominence. The search engine itself presents these criteria on its recommendation page to improve local positioning in Google.
These factors are analyzed and combined to provide the best answer. If a company is more distant from the user, for example, but more likely to deliver what they are looking for, they may appear to be better positioned.
We will better explain each of these factors below.
Let’s keep going!
Relevance
The relevance criterion considers the correspondence between the search keyword and the product or service offered by the business. If the user is searching for hotels, for example, they don’t want to see restaurant results, right?
That is why it is so important to complete the Google My Business registration with as much information as possible, since that is where Google does this correspondence. For example, if the user searches for “hotel restaurant”, Google will only show hotels that have that feature.
Proximity
Proximity refers to the distance of the business in relation to the user’s location or geographic terms placed in the search. It is clear that Google understands that the best results are those closest to the user.
Prominence (prominence)
The highlight criteria evaluates whether the company is popular in its region, based on online and offline factors. If the business does not have as strong an online presence, but is a well-known brand and is used offline, it may rank better.
But user ratings and ratings in Google My Business also count a lot , in addition to the traditional on page and off page SEO optimizations that the site adopts.
The more confident Google is in your business, based on these elements, the better your local ranking will be.
What is SEO in Social Networks?
Using SEO techniques in social networks can increase the useful life of your content and promote the reach of many more people.
In this way, you strengthen the reputation of your brand in its segment of action and ensure a good position in the digital environment.
Despite indirectly influencing the positioning in the main search engines, through good tactics you manage to capture more leads and have better results with your marketing strategies.
For example, with the combination of SEO and social networks, you motivate more users to share your content, you manage to potentiate the recognition of the brand in its business, there are ample opportunities to launch link building actions, online presence brands, among others. Benefits.
How to use SEO in social networks?
Social networks and SEO must go hand in hand for your blog to obtain the best organic results in Google.
Currently, networks such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn are very valuable tools to implement Digital Marketing strategies .
For this reason, it’s worth adopting some social media-specific ideas that can add value to your page and improve your blog’s search engine rankings. Next, discover how to use SEO correctly:
Publish quality content
Producing valuable content is critical to any SEO strategy, regardless of the channel through which it is distributed.
Whether it’s on the website, blog, paid media, blogs, or social media, creating good content contributes to attracting a qualified audience and increasing your authority on the topic .
In this way, the perception of value in social networks also helps to receive more visits to the blog. This joint work allows you to improve engagement in various digital media.
Facilitates content dissemination
An important aspect of content distribution is to encourage more and more Internet users to share it among their contacts. The simpler this process is, the more users tend to send your material to friends and people in their circle.
This is a great way to reach new followers and increase customer volume.
Therefore, it is worth investing in buttons that make it easier to distribute your posts on social networks (get more people to share your posts) and also create attractive CTAs .
By implementing such changes, followers tend to share your material more frequently.
Optimize your profile
Often, before becoming your customers, people investigate the image and reputation of your company on their social networks.
In addition to discovering these specific points, taking this step makes it possible to obtain relevant data on the operation and commitment of the business with its public.
In this way, a good way to achieve good results is to keep the profile updated and optimized.
For example, you can use keywords related to the solutions you offer, refine the description of the biography, create content that adds value to your visitors and offer a lot of free content with information that is attractive to your potential consumers.
Promote your content
A good way to use social networks to improve results in Digital Marketing is through content promotion.
For example, let’s say you posted a wonderful piece on your blog. Also, you think it can add value to your Facebook page followers.
So it’s a great idea to promote this article and ensure that everyone who follows your work on this channel can access it.
That way you can use some paid traffic to reach more people.
By adopting these SEO tips on social networks, you certify that your company will achieve good positioning in the digital environment in the future.
SEO success stories
Nothing better than reviewing some examples to understand how this strategy can generate positive results for your business, right? Take a look at some SEO success stories that can inspire you!
1. Rock Content
Why not start with those who were part of the development of Digital Marketing in Latin America? Right here, at Rock Content, we began to invest in Content Marketing strategies to attract more potential customers, based on the best positioning in Google.
This work continued to develop to nurture these leads and later convert them into customers of Rock Content’s services. The numbers reinforce the impact of this strategy, which managed to attract more than 370,000 visitors in just 31 months of operation of the Rock blog and also 2 million reais with a single blog post .
A job that started very simple, with several posts to attract a larger audience and, little by little, presented a better search engine ranking. This is proof of how SEO is an effective strategy not only to strengthen brand awareness , but also the business as a whole.
2. Rock Content LATAM
What if your business wanted to expand its operations? This was Rock Content’s challenge when entering the Latin American market . For this, it was necessary to understand how to communicate with a new audience, adapting the terms and even identifying which keywords are necessary to stand out in another country.
Based on studies on which terms make the most sense for each country, the team responsible for the expansion to LATAM managed to structure a strategic plan focused on conversion. The results were positive, with numbers that, once again, prove the effectiveness of SEO.
In total, there were more than two million page visitors in the first months of the project . But what stands out the most is the proportion of organic traffic to the blog: 87% of visitors were attracted by the organic position gained in Google. Not bad, right?
3. Ticket Now
Using RD Station’s strategies, the company Ticket Agora managed to optimize its organic traffic , reaching an impressive figure of 25% of its visitors coming from the best positioning strategies within the main search engines, such as Google.
Based on this work, the company was able to attract an increasing number of visitors, boosting the reach of the brand and also contributing to the conversion of qualified leads. And the best: all without the need for large investments in paid media .
4. Locate
Using a local SEO strategy, Locate, a car rental company, managed to increase the number of positions in the top 3 of Google searches .
In practice, this represented a growth of more than 70% in the total number of visitors to the company’s website since the beginning of the implementation of the strategy, which makes it one of the SEO success stories to take into account. bill.
Conclusion
Although SEO is an extensive subject and subject to constant updates, with what you have learned in this post you are ready to start executing your first web positioning strategies.
However, we recommend you expand your knowledge with the articles that we have linked throughout the post to complement your learning.
After all, obtaining good results with search engine optimization depends to a large extent on the correct planning, execution and measurement of the SEO strategy.
Other very useful tools for SEO: