You can use Google Alerts to help you track when and where your brand is being mentioned online. Identify content gaps or opportunities to create more comprehensive, valuable, or engaging content that appeals to your shared target audience. This analysis will inform your on-page optimization strategies and ensure your website meets industry standards. By studying your competitors, you can gain valuable insights into industry best practices, identify gaps in your strategy, and uncover opportunities to capture a larger market share. Start by brainstorming broad, relevant topics and terms related to your business, products, or services.
Unlike other marketing channels, such as social media, where people happen to scroll upon your brand and content. This means you’re interrupting a user’s experience to capture their attention, which makes it more difficult to get them interested. Showing up in their search results aligns with an existing demand—your customers are actively seeking information, products, or solutions. This makes SEO a powerful inbound marketing strategy, where users come to you rather than the other way around.
Mobile Friendliness
SEO is critical for small businesses in 2025, where online visibility can make or break success. Search engines like Google are the gateway to most online experiences, with 68% of all website traffic coming from searches. And with over 92% of the search market owned by Google, ranking high isn’t just important—it’s essential. While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king.
How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking, & More
Website owners should prioritize delivering a seamless and consistent experience across devices to cater to the diverse ways users access their content. It’s essential to understand that mobile-first doesn’t mean mobile-only. Google still indexes desktop sites, and there’s no separate “mobile-first index” distinct from the main index. Instead, the shift means that Google views the mobile version as the primary version of the site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem overwhelming due to the amount of information and techniques involved.
Because searchers already have intent, they are more likely to convert, making SEO an essential tool for attracting high-quality leads. Make sure any content you create is high quality and optimized for local search. If users click on your content and immediately decide it’s not for them, you’ll end up with a high bounce rate, which sends a signal to Google that your content isn’t solving users’ queries.
- This means your page speed should be less than 3 seconds and as close to 1 second as possible.
- WebP, an increasingly popular format, offers superior compression rates while maintaining high quality, further enhancing page load speeds.
- For example, using the right LSI keywords will tell Google that when searchers type in “mini,” your page is relevant to the car rather than the skirt, and vice versa.
- Search intent, often called user intent, is a user’s primary goal or motive when typing a query into a search engine.
- Google still indexes desktop sites, and there’s no separate “mobile-first index” distinct from the main index.
If you aren’t sure about search intent or if you believe readers may have multiple questions, check the top-ranking results for the query. Google defines quality content as material that’s both helpful and reliable. The search engine also cautions content marketers and SEO experts to publish content for readers, not for the algorithm. That matters because the better you can tailor your content to what search engines want, the better you’ll be able to connect with relevant audience members online. Rank Tracker lets you track up to 10,000 keyword rankings for “regular” organic search by country, state, city, and even ZIP/postal code.
You can tell search engine crawlers things like “do not index this page in search results” or “don’t pass any link equity to any on-page links”. These instructions are executed via Robots Meta Tags in the of your HTML pages (most commonly used) or via the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. Some individuals believe that if they place a search box on their site, search engines will be able to find everything that their visitors search for. Most people think about making sure Google can find their important pages, but it’s easy to forget that there are likely pages you don’t want Googlebot to find. These might include things like old URLs that have BHS Links thin content, duplicate URLs (such as sort-and-filter parameters for e-commerce), special promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.
Tools like Serpple make it easy to keep tabs on your keyword metrics without overwhelming costs. Complementing this is Google Analytics, where you can analyze user behavior, traffic sources, and conversions. Both tools can be linked to provide a comprehensive view of your SEO performance. You can export data and create reports, ensuring you have a clear picture of your rankings and site effectiveness.
Therefore, websites that rank on the first page capture the majority of search traffic. One final aspect that you shouldn’t forget about is your business listings. Make sure these are accurate on your Google Business Profile and other websites that are relevant to your business. The reason that so many (big) companies heavily invest in SEO is the high impact that it can have when done right. To give you an idea, Google, the most-used search engine got around 8.3 billion searches per day in 2024. So if you have a website, you want to make sure to show up in Google and other search platforms.
I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. Once these types of content start ranking, they tend to naturally earn more and more links over time, pushing them—and your site—even higher in search results. If you want to rank, you almost certainly need links, but you’ve got to know the rules. This means that you shouldn’t expect a rankings boost simply because you added schema to your page.
