What Is SEO Or Web Positioning?

Index

• Why is SEO so important?
• SEOs, web positioning professionals
• What differentiates SEO from other digital marketing strategies
• quality traffic
• Perdurability
• Cost per acquisition
• Phases of the SEO work of optimization of a website
• keyword research
• SEO Audit
• Relevance
• Popularity and subject authority
• Additional references on SEO

SEO is an effective marketing strategy because users use search engines to discover new content and visit only the websites that appear in the top positions. Identifying what those searches are and being able to appear in the first positions for them is the objective of SEO. And since we cannot pay Google to show us in a better position, SEOs study how search engines classify content to improve said positioning .

Why is SEO so important?

As soon as the first search engines appear , several aspects are revealed that favor the appearance of SEO ( search engine optimization , search engine optimization or Web positioning) as a professional activity in high demand and with a clear role in any online marketing strategy :

• Users do not always pose their queries in search engines in a correct, logical or predictable way: identifying what exactly a user is looking for when using keywords such as "losing weight" or "operation" is not an easy task for a search engine. For this reason, search engines have perfected their algorithms so that they consider the context of the search. For example, they take into account what other searches the same user made previously (his "search history"), if he refined them in some way (for example, if after searching for "weight loss" he raised a new search of the type "diets to lose weight" ) as well as the type of device from which you entered the query and your geographical location. Know what the keywords aremost popular that our potential clients could raise is one of the fundamental tasks of SEO since it allows us to set our visibility objectives.
• The first results are seen more and get more clicks than those that appear further down: as it is easy to suppose, the first results capture the attention and clicks of the users more easily than those that appear in the subsequent pages. Trying to appear in the best possible position for related searches that our clientele and/or potential audience may raise is the main objective of search engine optimization .
• Search engines analyze content automatically, so it is important to know what limitations and problems could arise from the way we program and/or serve our content: SEO professionals study the way search engines crawl and analyze content to facilitate this task. At the same time, they take into account their limitations to prevent search engines from stopping crawling content due to errors, long download times or because they find pages with hardly any content (thin content or weak content) or with the same content that they have already crawled in others (duplicate content). SEOs learn how to improve their websites by studying search engine guidelines , analyzing their patents, carrying out experiments in controlled scenarios and using specific analysis tools. This type of SEO is often referred to as white hat or ethical SEO and is generally the safest way to optimize a website to avoid search engine penalties while getting the best possible results.
• It is possible to detect flaws in the way in which a search engine orders the results in order to position low-quality content ahead of other high-quality content: when the way in which search engines ordered the results began to be studied , it soon became clear that their algorithms were not perfect either and some SEOs tried to take advantage of these vulnerabilities to position certain content in a position that it really did not deserve. This type of optimization is often called black hat .and although it can give good results in the short term, when it is detected by search engines it is usually a reason for a penalty. In these cases, the results of the penalized website appear much lower in the results (partial penalty) or they do not appear at all. The website is then said to have been banned or removed from the index. These types of penalties can be algorithmic (the search engine automatically detects unethical practices and lifts the penalty when the situation is corrected) or manual (a Google quality rater detects the offending site), in which case we must request a reconsideration from the search engine. -If users do not find the content they need, they will stop using the search engine: that is why search engines are constantly perfecting their algorithm to prevent low-quality content from sneaking into the first results, displacing content that could best serve the interests of users. users. The first search engines of the 90s were very vulnerable to black hat practices, so their results used to be dominated by low-quality content aimed at monetizing advertising. Although Google was the last great search engine to appear in the 1990s , the basis of its algorithm – the analysis of the content as well as the relationships and references of this content through its links – has proven to be much more solid than the of his predecessors.
• In order for users to continue using them, search engines will do their best to perfect their indexing methods so that the best content for each search always occupies the first positions: we use search engines because they are still the most efficient way to find new content on the Internet . To continue fulfilling this role – enormously profitable for Google – search engines will do their best to continue perfecting their information retrieval methods to better understand the needs of users behind their queries, as well as to identify the content that can best satisfy these queries. needs. Upgrades like Caffeine, Panda, Penguin or Hummingbird– to name the best known – are aimed, on the one hand, at better detecting fraudulent or black hat practices and, on the other, at better classifying and ordering the information tracked.
• Based on the leading role played by search engines on the Internet, it is logical that a whole professional activity has been developed focused on optimizing websites so that they appear in the first positions for the searches that most interest us. And given that until very recently there was no type of regulated training on these matters, the truth is that SEO is a professional activity that is very conducive to intrusion.

SEOs, web positioning professionals

In fact, the professionals who dedicate themselves to it – the SEOs – have achieved this status of professionalism based on experience, study and work from a common beginning in which they all formed part of that intrusion. Even today it is difficult to differentiate, for the layman, who is a true professional SEO from the inexperienced beginner. And there are no professional groups that have established any type of good practice regulation or code of ethics regarding SEO practice. In this scenario, only the professional background and a client portfolio with abundant references and success stories is the only guarantee that can guarantee the professional worth of an SEO or a consultant.

The most experienced consultants are highly valued by companies as they can achieve, through improved positions in search engine results, large increases in quality traffic with a cost of acquisition (CPA) much lower than that of other strategies. of traffic acquisition, such as pay per click (PPC), display type advertising or e-mail marketing . For this reason, it is advisable to invest in optimizing our website to exhaust its potential for generating organic traffic before investing in other traffic acquisition strategies with higher costs per acquisition.

Hence, this activity is also related to an improvement in the visibility or in the " findability " of a certain content. If users use search engines to find answers to their needs, SEO strives to make said content visible or findable wherever potential customers look for it.

What differentiates SEO from other digital marketing strategies

Quality traffic

SEO traffic is quality traffic since it is generated from the users' own interest and just at the moment they have a need. There is a popular saying in SEO: “it is much easier to sell when your client is looking for you”. From this perspective, SEO traffic is usually made up of visits from highly interested users with better indicators of quality of visit (page views, time spent on the site, bounce rate) and conversion than that acquired by other means.

Perdurability

Another characteristic of SEO that differentiates it from other online marketing strategies is its durability . While it is true that it will be difficult for a new website to achieve a high volume of visits from search engines in the short term, it is also true that the benefits of optimizing a particular website will last long after you have invested time and resources in doing so. . From this point of view, SEO is a traffic acquisition strategy that has a high inertia: it is initially difficult to get the volume of organic traffic to grow but, equally, once the domain acquires a certain authority, it will remain well positioned even if temporarily stop investing in its optimization.

Cost per acquisition

SEO is a source of quality traffic with a lower acquisition cost than other tools and with high durability, SEO is today a basic and key online marketing strategy that is present in any digital marketing plan. Being in visible organic results for the searches of our users and potential clients is a first level objective for companies, media or professionals with an online presence. We are going to discover what are the fundamentals on which search engine optimization is based and what are the main phases of SEO work to achieve first positions.

Phases of the SEO work of optimization of a website

Keyword research

The first phase in any SEO work is to select for what type of searches we want to appear in the first positions. To do this, we must analyze what our market niche is, who or who make up our target and how they would search the Internet for what our website offers.

With Google Keyword Planner we can know approximately how many searches are made on Google each month with a certain keyword, as well as if that volume varies throughout the year.

In general, keyword analysis largely depends on whether the potential client we are targeting is another professional ( B2B business models ) or an individual end customer (B2C business models). While an end client will use colloquial or more familiar language, a professional with whom we share a sector will enter more specific searches and use the same professional jargon as us. One of the main mistakes in this phase is to believe that our potential customers will search for us with the same expressions that we would use.

Search analytics tools are useful for escaping this subjective approach and being able to compare what appear to be equivalent popular searches with data. For example, "used cars", "second-hand cars" and "second-hand cars" seem to be used more or less interchangeably to search for a car of this type. However, Google Keyword Planner shows that “used cars” is the most popular of the three.

The result of the keyword research is usually presented in the form of a list of keywords with which the positions in which our website is appearing will be checked monthly. This sample must be sufficiently representative of the most frequent searches that our target would do as well as the content present on the website.

SEO Audit

In the indexability phase, the SEO audit is carried out in order to check how friendly a website is to search engines. It may include, among others, the following points:

• Indexability: All aspects that influence how well Google can find, crawl and index a website are checked. The use of unique URLs is checked and attempts are made to detect accessibility problems for Googlebot, such as navigation through forms.
• Content: This is about discovering opportunities to generate duplicate content, hidden or inaccessible content, or weak content. The use of metadata and tags that are relevant for SEO is also checked.
• WPO: in this section aspects related to download speed , page weight optimization, http header configuration, use and cache controls, etc. are verified.
• Popularity Profile: the popularity profile of the website is checked in search of links that could be detected as toxic by Google, in which case the possibility of including them in the Disavow file or modifying or deleting them is considered.

At the end of this report, you have a much clearer picture of the current state of the website and the main opportunities for improvement that it presents. Only from this analysis can we really work on a work plan for its optimization, prioritizing the tasks based on the complexity of its implementation and the benefit that we expect it to generate.

Also in this section you can detect content gaps on the website to attack all the searches that we have set as targets in the Keyword Research phase, which sets targets for SEO-oriented content marketing .

Relevance

Once the indexability problems of the website have been resolved, the relevance consultancy focuses on identifying which content should be worked on, especially in order to achieve the visibility objectives that we have set for ourselves. That is, we try to associate each keyword with a specific landing page that we believe may be optimal for the user's search intent.

Once identified, these pages are optimized to improve their relevance and focus them so that they are positioned in the keyword or keywords that we have set as a goal. Among the aspects that are optimized are basic aspects such as the title and description , headers, texts that link to the page, its position in the architecture of the website, the structure of the template, etc.

Popularity and subject authority

In parallel with the on-page optimization work, a strategy to improve popularity and thematic authority must be designed. This generation of links is often called link building. A good starting point is to analyze where competitor websites are getting links and with what content or strategies with analysis tools such as SEMRush , Majestic or AhRefs .

Also improve our PageRank by creating content that acts as "hooks" and that encourages a good number of people to want to link to them, such as controversial, humorous, ranking or eye-catching content, and also link baiting tactics, such as rankings and rankings (the best…) that the aforementioned themselves are tempted to share.

Since Google is able to detect as suspicious an abrupt increase in the number of incoming links that a website receives, the generation of popularity must be done gradually throughout the optimization process of a website, and maintain it. continuously in the future.