SEO Company

SEO

The Essential SEO Checklist for New Websites

Finding yourself running a business right smack in the middle of the digital age means it’s a must to have your own website. This allows you to have a wider reach by giving you new channels to market your product or service. A website also helps you stay relevant in your industry and deliver top-notch customer experience while giving the competition a run for their money through effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

This may all sound simple, but while having a website could help you reap a ton of benefits, you must first go through a laundry list of items to complete before going live. Similar to building a skyscraper, you should first draw the necessary plans before starting to break ground, allowing you to cover all bases prior to running the show.

The whole point of building a website is to establish an online presence, which is crucial if you’re trying to market a modern brand. Many companies have already been taking advantage of this for years. However, you can’t just have a skilled web designer to create one for you and have a developer to make it work. The key is to lay a good foundation by going through an SEO checklist, so you don’t get lost in the mix.

Why Is SEO Important for New Websites?

SEO has been around since the early days of the internet. Up to this day, search engines are doing their job to crawl and rank websites so they can deliver all the right information that you’re looking for. Consumers are heavily reliant on search engines to help them find everything from the best places to eat near you to recommended B2B software providers.

Optimizing your website for search engines regardless of what you offer makes it easier to reach your target audience. It’s a surefire way to attract them to your site through keywords that are relevant to what you offer. Your strategy will determine how you’ll rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), giving you more brand visibility and driving quality traffic. Here are important reasons why SEO is needed for your new website:

1. It helps build your brand

While branding may often be considered as a more traditional approach, SEO is firmly classified into the digital marketing category. Despite their differences, the two involve similar steps, and the key to understanding how to build your brand is by considering both what you offer and what others say about it.

2. It draws more traffic

The primary goal of SEO is to improve your site’s rankings in SERPs. However, it goes beyond this since the purpose of gaining high rankings is to attract more traffic, which would ideally convert into leads and eventually customers.

3. You don’t have to pay for ad space

One of the best benefits you can get from SEO is not having to pay for ad space. Unlike traditional ad campaigns, you don’t have to determine a location where you want your brand to appear and pay the company that owns that media channel for placement. SEO happens “organically.”

4. It helps your target audience find your website

SEO can help your business appear in front of your target audience while they’re actively searching for information about the product or service you’re offering. And if you take a moment to think about how common it is for consumers to use search engines to look for information about products and services, this is a massive opportunity.

A convincing  of consumers use search engines if they first want to learn more about a new business, its product, or service, with 41% using them when they’ve made the decision to make a purchase.

5. It establishes and increases both your credibility and authority

When SEO is combined with content marketing, you have the opportunity to create informative and valuable content, which can build trust and credibility with your potential customers during the research phase.

6. It can let you stay ahead of the competition

Not only does your site rank well on SERPs when you optimize, you can also steal search share from your competitors, enabling you to dominate the market.

Consider these stats: the first result on any given SERP gets an average of 20.5 percent of the clicks, and it goes down from there. The second result gets 13.32 percent and the third 13.14 percent. So, as you move up in ranking, you’ll get a higher percentage of clicks for your target keywords while the competition will be earning less.

7. It enhances user experience

Google’s single goal as a search engine is to deliver the best possible results to its users. This has resulted in many algorithm updates that are focused on making sure they point their them to the right direction, which are sites that not only provide relevant content, but also a fantastic user experience.

This is why technical factors such as mobile-friendliness, site speed, and usability play much bigger roles in rankings than ever before.

8. Results are easy to measure

SEO allows you to measure virtually every aspect of your results using tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs to monitor your traffic, conversions, referral sources, and other metrics that matter to your business. This way you can keep an eye on what’s working and what’s not.

SEO Checklist for New Websites

Now that you know how important SEO is in building a website, let’s go through the checklist, so you know what to address when you plan to launch:

The proliferation of mobile devices has led to people using them more often than desktop or laptop computers for browsing. For this reason, Google now indexes and ranks the mobile version of your website before the desktop.

In this regard, if your site delivers a similar experience both on desktop and mobile, this probably won’t have a big effect on your rankings. However, it’s important to note that if you have different content across your desktop and mobile versions, mobile-first indexing may cause you to rank lower in SERPs.

If you’re planning to benefit from this, you may want to make some changes on how to set up your website. Remember, mobile searches tend to lead to more purchases. In fact, around 76 percent of people who used their smartphone to perform a search visit the business within 24 hours, and 28 percent of those end with a purchase.

How fast your site loads is crucial for retaining visitors, since a high bounce rate will eventually make waste of all your SEO efforts. So, if you optimize your website’s speed, you’re already one step ahead of the competition.

The bad news is, more than 70 percent of the pages analyzed by Google during a study took seven seconds to load visual content above the fold. On average, most landing pages take 22 seconds to load fully, but more than 50 percent of mobile site visitors will leave if it takes more than three seconds to load completely.

To make things worse, as page load time increases to seven seconds, mobile site visitor bounce rate increases to a whopping 113 percent. You’ll have to consider the number of elements on a page, which not only increase loading times, but also affect your conversion rates.

Planning your site’s architecture can help you establish a flexible structure as you continue to build as you go. For most websites, having a pyramid composition is the way to go. It involves having your homepage at the top, with the next most important pages—those that are on your main menu— right below it. Underneath those, you can add subcategories and other pages that fall within them.

SEO and user experience will always be inextricably linked, which can be broken down into two parts: navigation and design. However, these two will only be mutually beneficial to your website launch if you get them in the proper order.

The key is to design your site’s navigation by keeping in mind what your customer wants from you first. The best way to approach this is to create content silos that address the needs of your customers and direct them to content or products that fill these needs. Once this is set up, you can start designing the pages by how they can easily navigate through your site.

When you’ve achieved fluid navigation, your next step would be to test your site for usability. But while usability testing can have a large scope, you should address a few vital aspects that include:

  • Readability
  • Functionality in various browsers
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Intuitive UI

If you’ve managed to tick all these off, you’re on the right track. All you need do is refine these elements until launch day and just keep on making the necessary improvements as you go on.

While your initial keyword research can help you look at the bigger picture in terms of the language you plan to use in building your website, it’s also good practice to target a specific keyword or two for each page on your site. Also, to avoid competing against yourself, decide on unique keywords per page.

There are a number of tools that can help provide keyword suggestions and data about the amount of traffic and competition you can expect from them. Most require you to pay a subscription fee, but you can always use Google’s free Keyword Planner to get you started.

Once you have selected your keywords, you’ll want to optimize all of your content around them. Use them where it’s easy for both visitors and search engines to know what the page is all about. One of the best practices is to use one focus keyword per page. While it’s also okay to inject a few secondary keywords in your page, you would generally want to designate one official keyword per page or post.

Customize each page of your website’s URLs. It should be easy to remember, communicate the content on that page, and, if possible, contain your target keyword for that specific page.

Your site’s architecture should also be set up to help create a more optimized structure for your URLs, which provides your visitors with information regarding their positioning on the site. For instance, if one of your top-level categories is “bags” and a subcategory is “backpacks, your product page might be something like “www.yourwebsite.com/bags/backpacks/product”.

A title tag is a part of a website that Google looks at to learn what the page is all about, making it another good place to use your target keyword.

Try to keep it short, since Google only displays 50-60 characters on SERPs, and even less of it will show up in the tab at the top of your browser. Avoid stuffing keywords here; using your primary keywords once should be enough.

Each image you upload on a webpage gives you an added opportunity for optimizing your page through your main keywords. You can customize the filename of every image as well as the alt text on the page to include the keyword you’re targeting.

When creating articles for publishing on your website, headings are a great tool to better organize your copy, making them easy to read and scannable for visitors. An added bonus is that your headings become another signal to Google regarding what your page is all about.

A good strategy is to include your target keywords in the headings, but only when it makes sense to do so. Forcing words may sound strange to your readers, so make sure their insertion is natural and justifiable.

When dealing with text optimization, you have to be careful and avoid keyword stuffing or risk being penalized by Google. However, as long as you use target keywords and their relevant synonyms in contexts where they make sense, it’s good practice to integrate them into your page’s text content.

Meta descriptions don’t have a direct influence on rankings, but they do play an important role in boosting your click-through rates from the search results. When people spot your web page in SERPs, they’ll see your meta description right below the page title, and any words that match their search will help draw their attention to it. Whatever you write here can make a case as to why your page is worth the click.

Just like writing text content, go for a relevant meta description for every page on your website. Try incorporating your keywords naturally and hopefully end up with bolded text on the SERP, and at the same time use the space to offer a short description of what’s valuable on the page to make people click through. Also, try to keep it short—around 50-160 characters to achieve optimal length for readability.

Internal linking is a way to signal Google what your page is all about through your anchor text or those words that are hyperlinked in your content. Google knows when this happens and takes these anchor texts as information about what’s on the page.

Internal links also show search engines how your web pages within your site are connected and how they drive keyword authority from one page to another. Ideally, you’d want your visitors to stick around and spend time on your site. Providing helpful internal links can help make this happen.

Before any of your web pages can show up on SERPs, Google has to crawl your website first. Typically, these crawlers will eventually make their way to your website over time regardless if you don’t do anything. However, you can speed things up by directly submitting your sitemap through Google’s Search Console. Once done, your website will have a stronger chance of improving its rank quality.

You’ll probably be able to tell how well your website is doing in SERPs based on the increased activity your business is having. But if you want a more accurate picture of what’s going on, Google Analytics is the tool you need. You can measure all the essential metrics of your website, so you’re up to speed on its performance and make any adjustments if necessary.

Cover All Your Bases

Getting your website prepped for SEO may appear to be a daunting task, but this checklist can prove to be invaluable in your efforts to make sure your website is ready to perform and rank high in SERPs. Just like planning the blueprints of a building, it’s vital to cover all bases, so you don’t end up having a difficult time figuring out where you’re having trouble when things go wrong.

Once everything’s in place and have all the SEO essentials, you’re ready for launch. Marketing your website from here on will be relatively easier, but remember, don’t stop making improvements. Keep creating the right content, refine your SEO strategies, and continue building your brand. Pretty soon, results will come and you’ll be able to reap all the wonderful benefits of your efforts.

Contact us today to learn how we can help grow your new website with the power of SEO!

A Complete Guide to SEO Reporting for Businesses

Whenever business owners or managers make decisions, they always place primary importance on one thing: return on investment (ROI). For these people, any purchase, partnership, or hiring decisions to be made should help propel a business to higher profitability. They’d also want to be able to quantify or measure the ROI that can be reaped from these business decisions.

This is what makes search engine optimization (SEO) reporting important, as it communicates the value of an SEO strategy to any company. Through the SEO report, you can keep your team in the loop with the status of the SEO campaigns you’re implementing to support their efforts. It also showcases the most significant milestones you’ve achieved at any point in the project timeline.

This is a standard expectation in SEO reporting since they’re designed to identify any loopholes and opportunities to help a website perform well in organic search. As such, data in your SEO report should cover metrics, site traffic, rankings, and more. You’ll also want to make sure that your SEO reports are really useful, not just a hodgepodge of quantitative and qualitative data in an effort to communicate what you’ve been doing throughout the project period.

Here’s what to aim for in your SEO report:

  • Comprehensiveness. Your report should include all the findings uncovered during the audit you’ve done on your website, including on-page and off-page aspects of SEO.
  • Clarity. For your SEO reports to be effective, they should be easy to understand on the manager’s end, and present information and insights in layman’s terms.
  • Visual. Putting too many numbers in your SEO reports can make them be overwhelming for the average reader, so try including graphs and charts to make your reports more visual and easier to digest.
  • Accuracy. Obviously, there’s no use creating reports that are riddled with inaccuracies, errors, and inconsistencies as these won’t help you determine whether they’re on track with their SEO goals, or which campaigns to discard and which ones to keep.   

What Your SEO Report Should Include

As SEO marketers, you’ll probably agree that the SEO department is far from being one-dimensional. With multiple areas to cover, you might find yourself having a hard time putting together an SEO report that shows the overall picture of the efficiency and functionality of your website.

To avoid this dilemma, focus your SEO reporting on these key aspects.

1. Website traffic broken down by page

One of the first things that managers want to know is how much traffic is coming to their website. As such, it would be good to show the amount of sessions or visits made by internet users using week-on-week, month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, or year-on-year comparisons, depending on their requirements. Naturally, you’ll want the numbers to keep increasing regardless of the period intervals you’re tracking.

It’s also recommended that you report on web traffic based on page views. This part of SEO reporting can tell you a number of things—from the size of the audience you’re reaching and how active of a user they are to which pages they’re interested in.

2. Keyword performance by page

The right selection of keywords can help boost a company’s website ranking, so be sure to include which target keywords are delivering results versus those that are not.

Aside from showing the specific ranking of your client’s website using certain keywords, your report can also include data about the rankings of competing businesses or websites. This way, you can try to rank for keywords that are making your competitors land on search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can further customize the keyword performance section of your SEO report based on page optimization data. The idea is to pick a particular page on the website that you’re monitoring along with a target keyword, so you’ll know if that page is optimized for that keyword.

3. Conversions

While it’s a good sign when a website is able to generate traffic or engage users, the most conclusive proof that can tell you if the website is performing well is conversions. If the website has low conversion rates, it’s possible that you’re targeting the wrong kind of audience or the content on the site is neither relevant nor useful to its visitors.

Your conversion data should go beyond conversion rates, which is a measure of the percentage of visitors who take your desired action—whether it’s in the form of an inquiry, purchase, content download, app installs, or form signups, to mention a few. Instead, it should show where your numbers are coming from.

Are your conversions coming from mobile devices or from desktops and laptops? Once you see some patterns on which sources or channels are giving you more conversions, you can then start uncovering and resolving common issues that users from other platforms may be having.

4. Engagement

Google and other search engines rank websites based on various factors, including engagement—which pertains to how visitors are interacting with a particular website.

To help you measure and analyze audience engagement, you’ll need to include several metrics in your SEO report.

First on the list is the website’s bounce rate, which refers to the percentage of visitors who are leaving the site or navigating to another page without first interacting with its content. That said, your goal is to keep the site’s bounce rate low by finding out what type of content or information can attract users to the site.

Your SEO report should also indicate the average session duration and average pages per session, which will give your clients an idea if visitors are spending enough time or viewing different pages on your website, respectively.

The goal is for these numbers to balance each other out. If either of these metrics is too high, it could mean that visitors are having difficulty reaching their target destination on the site.

5. Landing pages

It’s not enough to report on website traffic without identifying which landing pages are driving people to your site. This is important since it’s the top performing pages that have the potential to add to a company’s commercial value.

Once you’ve identified the most visited landing pages, you can then track which keywords or query phrases people often use in their search and are helping those pages rank on Google, Bing, and more. Ultimately, this allows you to use the right set of keywords in your content resources.

6. Search visibility

With roughly 6 billion webpages on the web today, businesses need SEO now more than ever to attain search visibility. This pertains to how prominently a piece of content is displayed in organic search results.

A search visibility score of zero means you have no pages ranking on the top 50 spots in the SERPs, while a perfect score of 100% means you’re getting the top positions for all the keywords you’re targeting. Search visibility also provides an overview of how well a website is performing in organic search.

As such, it takes into account the number of search terms that your client’s website ranks for, the places or location where the website is ranking, how much search volume is attributed to certain keywords, and the estimated traffic that those keywords are expected to drive.

By monitoring a site’s search visibility score, you can then determine whether there’s an increase or drop in the website’s visibility over time.

7. Ranking

Ranking is an essential part of SEO reporting since search engines use this process to determine where a particular piece of content should go on the SERPs.

Closely tied to search visibility, search rank tells you where a website appears in the list of search results for a given keyword or search phrase. The more relevant a webpage is to a search or query, the higher it ranks on the SERPs.

Aside from showing your clients’ position on organic search, you’ll also want to use SEO reports to help them understand why there might be a change in their rankings, whether it’s from good to bad or vice-versa. Perhaps the website dropped from the top 1 to the top 3 spot because there weren’t any new backlinks created for a long period, for instance.

8. Link Metrics

When you incorporate link metrics in your SEO reports, you get to show your team the positive impact of building links to help improve their search rankings and visibility.

  • Domain Authority (DA)—This measures the trustworthiness, strength, or popularity of the site from where you got your backlink. A DA that ranges between 20 and 40 is considered average; if it’s between 40 and 60 it is considered good; and a DA that’s over 60 is considered excellent.
  • Referring domains—This pertains to how many different website domains have links pointing to your domain. For obvious reasons, the more domains you have referring to you, the more authority gets passed on to your website for that particular keyword. This does not take into account the quality of each link.

9. Comparisons and Trends

Metrics per se cannot show the level or quality of growth that a website has acquired, but having a baseline with which to compare current metrics can. This way, you can help your clients identify SEO trends and relate how these managed to deliver the most impact in improving the overall performance of their website.

For example, you can highlight the fact that after optimizing your client’s website for mobile, there was an improvement in the site’s ranking on Google, whose updated algorithms treat mobile page speed as a factor in ranking websites.

10. Recommendations

You can put in as much data as you want in your SEO reports, but with little to no useful advice for your clients, you’re not really helping them achieve their goals. The best way to do SEO reporting is to provide key data or metrics, interpret what they mean, and propose the next course of action especially regarding areas where improvements can and should be made.

SEO Reporting Tools

As you gather, track, and interpret crucial data points, you should be able to get help from the right software or tools. We think the ones in this list are the best in creating insightful SEO reports in a way that’s fast and easy for you.

SEMrush

What it is: Recognized as the best SEO tool in the USA and across Europe in 2017, SEMrush is hailed as a complete SEO toolkit for digital marketers.

What it offers: SEMrush is designed to help you assess a website based on metrics related to traffic and keywords. Its Search Console Integration feature is helpful in auditing the backlink profile of the website and even removing potentially dangerous backlinks on its own or through Google Disavow.

This premium tool requires the purchase of individual licenses for every user.

SEO Analyzer

What it is: This is Neil Patel’s proprietary tool for analyzing websites.

What it offers: Apart from analyzing websites, this tool helps with SEO optimization by performing an audit on various aspects of SEO—from on-page elements to site speed and backlink checker. SEO Analyzer lets you create your SEO reports for free.

Google Data Studio (GDS)

What it is: This tool from Google is designed to help you turn various data sets into interactive visual reports.

What it offers: GDS lets you access and integrate your data from third-party platforms, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud SQL into your SEO reports at no cost. It also integrates with other Google properties, such as Search Console, which is Google’s free service that allows you to monitor a website’s online presence on different search engines.

Moz Pro

What it is: The Moz Pro tool is ideal for reporting on keyword performance, site audit, and SEO optimization.

What it offers: Moz Pro has a Keyword Explorer function that shows what keywords drive traffic to a site as well as track if a website is ranking locally or internationally. It also has a Site Crawl tool that pinpoints SEO issues, as well as on-page optimization features that help a piece of content land on the top of SERPs.

Standard Moz Pro accounts cost $99 per month, while premium ones will set you back $999 per month.

Ahrefs

What it is: Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO analysis tool that is used extensively in digital marketing.

What it offers: The Ahrefs SEO tool has the ability to create reports for SEO audit, rankings, traffic, domain rating, and a whole lot more. But what sets Ahrefs apart is its large index of live backlinks known as the Backlink Checker. Among the things that this tool does is to check on the number of times a website received backlinks and filter this metric according to the anchor text used, referring domains, and backlinks URL.

Ahrefs offers a 7-day trial for $7, with plan pricing starting at $99 up to $999.

Getting the Most Out of SEO Reporting

SEO reporting is an essential step in helping you find out what to optimize in a website and how to go about it. This is where the value of having a clear and comprehensive SEO report lies, as it paves way for a holistic assessment and necessary refinement of your SEO strategy.

SEO Company specializes in SEO reporting for website analysis and optimization. Our detailed and straightforward style of reporting guarantees that you get a concrete view of your website performance as well as subsequent growth brought about by our SEO strategies.

Contact SEO Company today for all your SEO reporting needs!

How Long Does It Take to Do SEO?

Any business creating a digital footprint knows just how crucial search engine optimization is to their online marketing efforts. It’s a proven strategy to boost your brand’s visibility on search results, as well as encourage you to establish your site’s authority and credibility to consumers.

Tons of articles have been published rounding up the best SEO practices and most creative tactics that will ensure you can reap the benefits of SEO. However, the debate remains as to how long you’ll see results after putting in your efforts. Is there a definite answer to this.

The truth is, it depends. It may be frustrating to hear this, as digital marketers live in a fast-paced bubble where instant ROIs and improvements are expected, but there is no correct answer.

There’s also the fact that “results” can mean differently to different SEO practitioners. One could be expecting higher rankings in SERPs, while another could want more organic search traffic. While they may be different, these factors are closely linked, and they will perhaps start to show improvement at different timelines.

There’s no one real answer as to how long SEO takes, but it’s well worth your time to familiarize yourself with the process so you can manage your expectations and gauge the trajectory of your results.

How Search Engines Rank Pages

Search engines like Google and Bing work hard to rank different web pages as accurately as possible properly. This helps users find the most relevant websites that will answer their search queries and reward webmasters who put in the work to make their sites helpful to their readers.

Here’s how they do it.

Step 1: Classify

First things first: search engines classify the search terms entered by a user. This helps them in identifying the information it needs to execute the rest of the steps in page ranking. Before that, they used to rely mainly on keyword volume despite some websites not having proper tags or labels. Some examples of classifications a search engine would give are YMYL, local, unseen, adult, and question.

There is currently no catalog of classifications available for SEO practitioners to see or infer what kind of category a specific search term would fall into, but it is known that this step starts up the whole ranking process.

Step 2: Context

The next step is discovering user intent and your historical, environmental, and geographical factors that influence that query. After considering the category of the search terms entered, they now have to find the relevant information related to that query. Some examples of these data are:

  • The user’s location
  • The current time
  • Identifying whether or not the query is a question
  • The device used to enter the query
  • The format used to perform the query (typed, voice, etc.)
  • Whether the query relates to previous items searched or not
  • Whether the question has been asked before or not

Step 3: Weights

Before an engine can determine what pages should rank, they need to figure out which signals are most important to the query. This is where RankBrain enters the picture. RankBrain is part of Google’s core algorithm which helps the search engine determine the most relevant results to a search query.

With the query classification and context at play, the search engine’s algorithm can now understand which relevancy signals have the most weight in influencing the results. For instance, if you were to type a time-sensitive topic such as breaking news in politics, freshness would be a critical factor vs. a general search about home gardening tips.

Step 4: Layout

A few years ago, Google SERPs were pretty straightforward, showing the first ten links to the query entered. It slowly evolved to become a bit more interactive, highlighting the essential information on the page. These additional data points evolved into what we now know as schema markup. 

For instance, there could be a short bio page for a celebrity or prominent historical event at the top righthand corner of the page. Google could also display related videos to the topic, breaking news, or other search queries that are relevant to what was initially entered. If you type a search term for an item you intend to buy, then you will see carousels with prices linking to online shops that sell the product. Not all queries will garner the same SERP layout.

Step 5: Ranking

Finally, the search engine can begin ranking. After gathering all the important information such as classification, user intent, relevancy signals, and layout, it can arrange the pages in the order that would most likely satisfy the user. This is actually the “easy” part for search engines—it’s gathering the rest of the information above that takes time and work for it to process.

Videos, developing stories, and other information related to a query may change any time, and so that requires constant updates that can affect the presentation of the SERP of the search query entered.

What Does SEO Speed Depend On?

Since the length of time it usually takes for SEO to produce tangible results is in a range (2 to 12 months), most digital marketers would still likely gun for the shortest time possible in this timeframe. There are plenty of factors that can speed up or slow down your SEO efforts.

Competition

It should go without saying that the rate of difficulty increases in an industry where there are a lot of competitors. There’s always a possibility that your competitors have been doing SEO longer than you have, and the results will show—so it could take a while to dethrone them from the number one spot on SERPs. This is also a huge factor why competitor analysis is essential before starting your SEO strategy. It’s good to be clued in with what your industry rivals are doing and to spot the holes in their campaigns which you can do better.

Inbound Links

It’s no surprise that links have a huge role in SEO, as these are trust signals for search engines to decipher if your website is a credible reference that other sites refer to. However, it’s not all about quantity here, but quality.

A high volume of low-ranking webpages that link to your site won’t guarantee a high ranking—the opposite is true. These links could hurt your web reputation and slow down your SEO progress too. By focusing on sites that have higher domain authority, you can maintain the quality of your backlinks and attain your SEO goals faster.

Lastly, there’s also the topic of how fast you get those inbound links. Search engines would find it quite dubious if you suddenly acquire a considerable amount of high-quality links all at once. This could indicate black hat SEO techniques and could cause your site to get penalized—something potentially challenging to recover from.

Content Quality

Search engines love high-quality content. This has some indicating factors, such as word count, internal links, external links, format, and more. However, there’s no need to spew out 10,000-word articles on the regular. Google has become smarter in identifying the types of content that answer a person’s search query.

There’s also the factor of how regularly you publish your content. Some people have thought that the key to content publishing is to do it as often as possible—but this theory has been debunked. As long as you have great content that’s worth discussing, highly relevant, and helpful to your target audience’s problem, then there’s no reason for volume to trump quality and relevance.

Website Architecture

The effectivity of your SEO efforts also lies on what your website looks like:

  • Is your text readable?
  • Do the pages load quickly?
  • Are the URLs short and related to the page’s topic?

These factors matter when it comes to the speed of SEO. Your website architecture tells Google how much effort you put into your website and how much you care about your users by giving them a great browsing experience.

Having an architecturally-sound website also helps Google crawl your webpages for information more easily. They don’t have to crawl through too much text, code, or too many URLs to identify which data is pertinent to your site. Keep in mind that Google also now prioritizes mobile-friendly webpages versus those that are not optimized.

Website Age

Unfortunately, even if you believe that your website is the answer to the information that’s lacking in your industry, you might find it difficult to rank for the first six months since your website has gone live. This is because Google considers sites that are less than six months of age as a “new website.”

Search engines tend to favor old websites since they’re more established and less likely to spew out non-factual information that could hurt their reputation. However, that shouldn’t stop you from putting in the work for your new website. As long as search engines see consistency in your efforts, you will be rewarded faster—especially after passing the six-month mark.

Google Takes a While to Index Pages

Building upon the discussion about website age, it’s also important to consider that it takes a while for Google to index new websites and pages. The current estimate is around four days to four weeks. However, the exact amount of time will again vary. Google always uses its private algorithms for their actions, so it’s quite tricky to give a definite answer to this process.

Here’s how Google indexes pages:

  1. Crawling begins with a list of websites from past crawls and sitemaps provided by webmasters. This job is done by the Googlebot, an algorithm-equipped web-crawling digital robot tasked to discover new and updated web pages to be added to the Google index.
  2. As the bot visits each new site, it detects links on that page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl as well. It pays attention to new websites, updates to existing web pages, and dead links.
  3. Once it starts crawling the site, it reads the information on the page according to the instructions outlined in the site’s robots.txt file. After Googlebot finishes reading the text and following the links they discovered on the page, it begins the process of indexing the webpage.
  4. The data and content which the bot read are sent back to Google’s servers and added to its vast database. They take note of key signals such as keywords and website freshness, all of which are tracked in the Search Index.
  5. The information collected in the database is then fed to programs that keep track of which sites should be crawled, how often bots should visit them, and the number of pages to fetch.

The Google Search Index is the web’s library with hundreds of billions of webpages in its fortress. It’s the index at the back of reference books. As content and links are published every minute of the day, it could take a while for Google to crawl each individual site and add them to their index.

There’s no current strategy to follow to make Google index your page faster. However, it’s worthy to point out that the speed at which Google can index your site will depend on the same criteria that you should look into when auditing your website for SEO: content, website architecture and responsiveness, inbound links, etc.

SEO is Worth It

Although it seems like SEO is a challenging process with no immediate rewards, don’t give up—it’s worth it! While it’s not the fastest channel in terms of results, it’s one of the most important tactics you should implement if you want to hit your long-term goals. A good rule of thumb would probably to check back on your progress around the sixth to twelfth-month mark and see if there are any other tactics you can incorporate or if you should re-evaluate current practices.

If you noticed, the common thread among all the topics discussed is to build an authoritative and helpful website. You can accomplish this by producing great content, establishing credibility through inbound links, and creating a superb user experience for your visitors. The heart of SEO directly lies there, as unbelievably simple as that sounds.

Another thing you shouldn’t forget is that SEO is a process. You will need to update your tactics, maintain your website, and continually scout your playing field to stay on top of the game. It’s important not to get complacent as a lot of companies regularly take their shot at SEO and also expect results.

Make sure you’re always working to secure or maintain that top spot!

Ask SEO Company what we can do to grow your brand with proven best practices!

10 Ways to Use Schema Markup for More Organic Traffic

Building a sound website isn’t just about setting up responsive website design and producing relevant content—a lot of the work happens behind the scenes too! That means knowing how to optimize the backend of your site. You should frequently check in and polish your codes for maintenance, updates, and to see if they still make sense.

One of the most crucial things you should ensure is that you create your web pages with context, so the search engines can figure out exactly what it contains. Luckily, it’s easy to do this with schema markup.

What is Schema Markup?

The schema markup is a type of code or tag that you can add to your HTML so search engines can understand and skim your page better. It is also frequently referred to as structured data.

Schema is actually short for Schema.org, a library of semantic vocabulary of tags. This project is a collaborative effort among Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo. Their goal was to provide a better way for webmasters to provide information and context about their site to search engines. Performing this step can help boost SEO rankings too and is therefore critical in your website structure.

How Does Schema Markup Work?

Plenty of websites with markup still use HTML codes. Adding schema markup means including Schema.org tags to your HTML microdata. Search engines will then be able to read that data to know what your page is about, display it on its results pages, and feed visual information to potential website visitors, such as ratings on products or small photos that explain what’s found inside the webpage.

For instance, we see that Sanuk’s website displays ratings, number of upvotes, price, and the stock availability of their product. It already gives you so much information to aid your decision to buy the product.

One of the most important things to note is that schema markup was created with the user in mind. The top search engines didn’t just band together to make your lives more difficult—they created the code to help everyone out. That includes search engines that want to understand the content of your page, users who want to know what the link contains before they click it, and webmasters who wish to provide this data and improve their website for both search engines and its users.

Why Should You Use Schema Markup?

Schema markup sounds exciting and all, but what tangible results can it give your website? Here are just some of the best ones:

  • Higher click-through rates – More people will be enticed to visit your webpage. A study revealed that using schema increases your CTR by up to 30%.
  • Improved website rankings – The richer the information you provide, the more search engines will appreciate your effort to tell them how much valuable content you have on your webpage. This means higher rankings for all types of content.
  • Become eligible for Position Zero – Schema helps you get the coveted featured snippet on search engines. The material displayed on that spot has schema markup implemented on their webpage.
  • Beat your competition – Steal the thunder away from your industry rivals as you attract more web visitors and inch your way to the top of SERPs.

Types of Schema Markup that Can Boost Organic Traffic

There are many kinds of schema markup codes that have different functions. Below are some you can implement depending on the nature of your website and business. There will be some here that you will definitely want to prioritize over others.

1.       Organization Schema Markup

Usually appearing on the right-hand corner of SERPs, this tag enables you to present your company information in an orderly fashion. It includes your logo, nature of the business, website, short history, contact information, social media profiles, and location, to name a few. It’s an excellent way for users to learn about your company at a glance without having to click through so many pages. It also boosts your image and adds credibility to your brand.

2.        Website Schema Markup

The website schema markup shows a second search bar, called the Sitelinks Search Box, under your URL. It allows users to type in queries and consequently get results from your website. This is helpful if they see that your company or brand is related to the industry they are researching, and they feel that they can get more specific results by taking the search to your website. For this to be activated, however, you must have an existing site search feature.

3.       Recipe Schema Markup

The recipe schema markup is made especially for food blogs, where they can show rich snippets of their creation. It’s usually a great way for users to evaluate whether or not they want to follow a specific recipe since it already shows the cooking duration, ratings from other people who’ve done it, a thumbnail showing the finished product, and more or less the entire summary of the recipe. Again, this works because you don’t waste anymore of the user’s precious time. They can decide then and there if they want to click on your website and learn what you have prepared. This schema markup is also great for visual and instructional content.

4.       Site Navigation Schema Markup

You’ve probably come across a URL of a SERP display “Jump to [Menu}” or “Jump to [Page].” This is the site navigation markup. It allows users to click on the specific menu or section on the page where they can find a more detailed explanation of their query, shortening the time it takes for users to get the answers that they need. If you have this on your webpage, your visitors will appreciate the fact that they don’t have to go through countless pages or try to figure out where the content they’re looking for is.

5.       Video Schema Markup

Search engines have a harder time indexing videos on search results pages, as there is no text to crawl—this where tags, like structured data, come in handy. Implementing video schema markup not only helps your content get indexed faster on search engines like Google, but it also shows a thumbnail image of what your video is going to be about. The description of the video will also be shown, as well as the video length and date of publishing.

Note: This also motivates you to be as descriptive as possible with your videos. This information is what will help Google and your users understand what your content is about before they even click on your page.

6.       Social Media Schema Markup

You can also specify which social media profiles you want to appear under your URL. This can help your audience know where else to reach you, other than your official website. You can place your Facebook Page, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Spotify, and so much more, depending on which channels are most relevant to your business. Of course, you don’t have to fill in each one unless otherwise necessary.

7.       Local Business Schema Markup

Location information is one of the most widely searched things about a business. If you don’t have this readily available on your site, you may be frustrating or turning away a lot of potential customers. Implementing this structured data saves your target audience from additional clicks by displaying your company or store address, operating data and hours, contact information, and more right on Google Search or Google Maps. This helps distinguish different branches of the same company, and boosts local SEO.

8.       Article Schema Markup

If you regularly publish blog posts on your page (which you should be doing), then the article schema markup will help put your content center-stage. This is usually a collection of your most recent posts, with your headline, featured image, and date of publication included. If there’s a video on the page, it could replace the space where the featured image would usually be shown.

This gives the viewer much more information about a particular topic at a glance, as well as a chance to see its relevance and freshness. You can further categorize the structured data you tag for your blog posts, news articles, and journals or scholarly articles.

9.       Rating or Review Schema Markup

Like the original example shown above with Sanuk, the rating and review structured data clues in your target audience about necessary information about a product. If you have an e-commerce store on your official website, it would be helpful to show details like ratings and the number of reviews your item has gotten from other people. It’s much more attention-grabbing this way.

10.   Product and Offer Schema Markup

The product and offer schema markup work well with the rating and reviews tag. That’s right—you need two different tags for each feature. If you notice carefully on your searches, some results won’t display a rating. In that case, they only have the product and offer schema markup activated. This gives information such as stock availability, price, or price range. This saves a person the hassle from discovering that your product is out of stock, or your item may be out of their price range.

Essential Tools to Implement Schema Markup

To execute the above examples of structured data on your webpages, you will need help from these smart tools. Luckily, most of these are free. Here’s why you need each one and what they can do for you.

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper

This tool allows you to generate schema markup codes that you can easily incorporate on your website. Once you’re at the home page, the first thing you should do is select the type of data you want to markup. Let’s say you want to add video schema markup. Next, you paste the URL of the page you want to add structured data to. Highlight all the relevant information you want to be marked up. In this case, you’d want to include the title, upload date, and relevant information to appear on SERPs.

Schema.org Schema Data Type

The Schema.org website gives you the necessary information about the different types of structured data you should use for your HTML code. You can look it up there and note it for when you enter the needed values on the Structured Data Markup Helper.

Structured Data Testing Tool

To better help you visualize the changes that will happen to your webpage, you can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to see what the schema markup adds. You can also use this for troubleshooting or testing for warnings and errors. If all seems to be working well, you can then add the generated schema markup to your web page. This saves you time from having to go back in and edit things again if there is missing information you may have overlooked.

Google’s Structured Data Guidelines

Last but not least, it’s critical for you to review the guidelines set by Google. It’s free material you can base your schema markup optimization and strategies on to help your webpage get understood and indexed faster by the search engine. These guidelines are also an excellent benchmark for what you can follow and apply towards other search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, etc.) since they all co-created the structured data tags.

If you need a few more tools for your schema markup experimentation, you can also check out the following:

  • Google Data Highlighter
  • Yandex Structured Data Markup
  • Yandex Structured Data Validator API
  • Bing Webmaster Tools Markup Validator
  • Google Rich Results Tester

Implement Structured Data Tags Today

Schema markup might seem like a small detail in your HTML code, but its impact is huge. More and more websites are becoming feature-rich, cutting away from simple blue links on SERPs. The different parameters set by search engines ensure that webpages incorporate things such as schema markup to improve the user experience.

Suffice it to say that learning about schema markup and the nuances of its use can definitely be a handful, especially if you’re not well-versed in code. Thankfully, there are reputable agencies that know what they’re doing in the digital marketing and SEO scene.

Contact experts at SEO Company who can help you implement this feature, so your website can start reaping the benefits of structured data today!

How to Effectively Build Website Authority for SEO

Your website’s been up and running, producing relevant and valuable content that’s been resonating with your audience. This is a good sign that your site is doing great in terms of putting the right message out there. However, you notice that your site still isn’t performing as expected. There seems to be something amiss in your content marketing strategy and you’re not getting the results that you were working for.

You think you have all the bases covered in terms of optimizing content for your website, but one crucial thing that often gets overlooked and even taken for granted is your site’s domain or website authority. This is another crucial factor in boosting your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is domain or website authority?

Developed by marketing software company Moz, domain or website authority (DA) is a search engine score that predicts how a website will rank on SERPs. The score ranges from one to 100, with a higher number indicating a greater ability to rank. DA is calculated by evaluating various factors, which include linking root domains and the total number of links. These are all combined to determine a single DA score.

It should be noted that domain authority is not a metric used by Google as a determining factor in search rankings, so it has no direct effect on SERPs. However, the score can be used when comparing websites or tracking its “ranking strength” over time.

Domain authority is scored using a 100-point logarithmic scale, making it considerably easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 compared to climbing up from 70 to 80.

To give you a basic rundown, brand new websites will always start with a domain authority of one. Generally, sites with a large number of high-quality external links are at the top of the DA scale, while small businesses and websites with less inbound links may have a much lower DA score.

Since DA is meant to be a predictor of a website’s ranking ability, getting a high DA score shouldn’t be your only goal. You’ll need to take a look at those sites you’re directly in competition with on SERPs and aim to get a higher score.

Domain authority works best when used as a comparative metric instead of an absolute, concrete score when doing your research in SERPs and when finding out which sites have more powerful or relevant link profiles than others. Essentially, it’s a comparative tool, so there isn’t necessarily what one would describe as a “good” or “bad” DA score.

The metrics involved in knowing your website’s domain authority are integrated into dozens of SEO and online marketing platforms across the web. Using Moz, you can measure your DA through Link Explorer and MozBar, which is the marketing software’s free SEO toolbar. You can also do it through the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer. Authority metrics are also incorporated into all of Moz’s pro campaign products, including its API.

Outside the Moz ecosystem, SEO Review Tools works perfectly fine, too. You can also use Ahrefs to find out your website’s score. However, it should be noted that this tool has a way of calculating domain authority differently, so the same site may have different ratings depending on the measuring tool you use.

Another thing to remember is that domain authority shouldn’t be confused with page authority since they’re entirely different things. While DA measures the predictive ranking strength of an entire domain or subdomain, page authority is used to measure the strength of a single page of a website.

Factors Affecting Website Authority

Several essential factors help determine your domain or website authority score. There may be up to 40 different elements that can influence a DA score, but here are the most important:

Linking Root Domains

This pertains to the number of unique backlinks earned by your website. If it has acquired 20 external links from two different sites, then this equates to only having two linking root domains. It’s better to earn a few links from an assortment of websites than getting many links from one. This will primarily help boost your rankings in SERPs.

MozRank

This metric is used to score the strength of your website’s links, taking into account not just the links pointing back to your site, but also their quality. In this case, quality trumps quantity, which means one good external link is far better than having ten with low quality. MozRank utilizes a scale from zero to 10, with three as the average website score.

MozTrust

Similar to MozRank, this metric is used to help understand the quality of your external links. The difference is, it’s a little more specific in a sense that it measures how closely your website is connected to trusted sites such as .edu or .gov websites. This works even if a trusted site links to another site that links to you (tier 2 links), which is also considered a sign of trust and helps boost your MozTrust rating.

Quality Content

There’s no question that content is one of the main factors in ranking a website, so it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that that quality of your website’s content is a determining factor for its domain authority. While your DA may help improve your ranking in SERPs, quality content also correlates closely with it.

Social Signals

Google makes use of social signals as one of the main factors in recognizing good quality content. In the case of sending out social signals, it’s safe to assume that a piece of content that’s liked, shared, and commented on many times must be of good quality. Moz uses these signals in scoring domain or website authority.

Search Engine Friendliness

This pertains to the use of SEO in conjunction with the site structure and your site’s user-friendliness. Site structure can influence usability in the sense that poor site structure can make your site difficult to navigate. It also makes it burdensome for search engines to crawl and index your website, which would eventually hurt your rankings. Overall, this is essential for maximizing domain authority score as well.

How to Build Your Website Authority

Having a low DA score right now doesn’t mean that you should throw in the towel and give up your efforts in improving your website. Conversely, if you already have a high DA score, it doesn’t mean that you can cease all efforts. You must always keep in mind that building website authority is a continuous process.

To start climbing that DA score ladder, there are different strategies that you can use. When executed effectively, your site will be on its way to getting that high DA score, turning it into an authoritative website that other sites would purposely link to.

1. Choose an SEO friendly domain name

If you’re just starting out, you should pick a domain name that’s relevant to your website. It should be relatively easy to remember, so your visitors won’t have a hard time returning to your site trying to recall what it is.

Your domain name can have a significant impact on your SEO efforts. An optimized domain name is one that tells people what your website is all about, and the products or services it offers, among other things. It allows them to recognize your brand, business, or what your site is all about, possibly making it stand out in a sea of search results and more likely to be clicked.

You can focus on branding with a good integration of keywords when coming up with a domain name. If you’re running a website that’s all about the ins and outs of carburetors in car engines, your domain name, for instance, can be “carburetorjunkie”—it’s easy to remember, and it contains the keyword of what your site is all about.

2. Optimize your website speed

Since July 2018, when Google had a pagespeed update, the search engine started rewarding sites that load fast—like less than one second fast. This is one other way to boost your website authority because page loading time also affects user experience. If your page loads slowly, your visitor clicks back to search results, reducing your average time on site and bounce rate. 

Remember, better user experience generally results in higher website authority.

If your website is lacking in this department, you can consider switching to a better hosting service. Optimize your images, reduce the number of plugins, and minimize your JavaScript and CSS files—these are a few of the best methods to increase your website speed.

3. Consistently publish quality content

It goes without saying that you can never go wrong with publishing quality content, and you should do this on a regular and consistent basis to increase both your DA score and search rankings. Without quality content, that’s one less reason other sites will link to yours, quelling any hope of boosting your rankings.

4. Promote your content

Promotion is one great way of putting your content out there. You can use both paid and organic channels, which include pay-per-click advertising, influencer outreach, social media, email marketing, and syndication, among others. This method can help reach your target audience, and when users start to realize your site contains valuable content that could address their needs, your DA score will likely get a boost.

5. Include internal links in your content

Internal linking is often overlooked when creating content. But little do they know that it helps direct visitors to what they are trying to find, which in turn improves their user experience. This means that if they’ve delved deep into your older blog posts, they can still find their way around through one of your internal links.

It’s common practice to link internally by suggesting related blog posts to readers just in case they would like to know more about a particular topic. It also keeps them engaged while helping to prevent them from leaving, not to mention making it easier for search engines to understand your website architecture.

6. But never skip on including external links either

External links may seem counterintuitive since they direct your readers to a different website. But linking to trustworthy material from authority sites also helps you appear to be an authority yourself while helping search engines determine what your content is about for SEO purposes.

7. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly and responsive

A huge number of users access the web through their mobile devices, particularly smartphones. So, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile yet, then you’re lagging far behind. This will not only hurt your mobile search engine rankings, but you’ll likely lose a lot of visitors who’ll just leave your site once they realize it’s not working properly on their mobile device.

Check whether your site is mobile friendly through this Mobile-Friendly Test by Google. The tool will analyze your web page and let you know how responsive it is to various devices.

8. Remove bad links

Every so often, you should go through your link profile and search for any backlinks that are bad or toxic. Try to remove links from sources that could end up having a negative effect on your DA instead of helping it gain points. Such links include ones from spammy websites, unrelated content, or questionable material that you don’t want to associate your brand with.

Links posted throughout your website leading to bad sites or those that are simply broken should also be removed to make sure they don’t deliver a negative impact to your site.

It can be inconvenient to check on each and every link throughout your site, so to make it easier, you can use tools such as SEOPressor’s Link Manager to help put them in one place. You no longer have to go through them one by one, and instead you can check the status of your link, whether broken or not, on the tool itself.

9. Get high-quality links from third-party sites

High-quality links will always be a plus, and regardless of where they come from, the key to acquiring them is through the creation of amazing content that draws in people. This will get you not only direct links but also those from third-party sites that know that the content of your website is worth linking to.

10. Improve your site structure

A website’s structure refers to how your site is set up, such as how your individual pages are linked to each other and how organized it is, delivering a great user experience. This, in turn, boosts your DA score.

To improve your site structure, you should aim to have a clean, user-friendly site structure. Use text links extensively throughout your site and offer an easy-to-browse, user accessible sitemap. Finally, keep the average number of links on a page within a limit for a cleaner look and functionality.

There’s No Other Way But Up

Website authority is crucial in the overall performance of your business. However, having a low DA score shouldn’t be a cause for concern since you can always make it go up. The process may be complicated and time-consuming, but if you have the right tools and expertise, getting a higher score will be easier to achieve.

If you lack the resources, you can always count on SEO Company’s team of experts to help your website gain a higher website authority. We can help you reach the DA score that will make your website stand out from obscurity and eventually establish an outstanding reputation within your industry.

Need help building your website’s authority and improving rankings? Contact us today!