What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to SEO for 2022. The 200 Google Ranking Factors. PLUS! 22 Ways to Boost Your Website’s Google Ranking today

• SEO helps your website appear on search engines like Google, it also builds brand awareness and, as a result, helps you reach new customers without paying for advertising.
• Google has never published all 200 ranking factors, but we’ve included a list compiled from proven or most talked about ranking factors in the SEO community.
• With Google’s 2015 addition of AI, and recently Natural Language Processing some experts say there may now be 880 ranking factors.
• There are two types of SEO. Onsite and offsite SEO. And there are two ways to do SEO. Blackhat and whitehat SEO. 
• SEO costs start from $99/m, are most typically $1000/m, but can be up to $50,000 per month.
• When first starting, it can take 3-6 months to see significant SEO growth. After that it can take anywhere from a day to 6 weeks for SEO changes to be recognised and updated on Google. 
• The best SEO strategy in 2020 is to invest in content marketing. Less keyword stuffing, more quality content production.
• Like any craft, having the right tools in your toolbox makes doing the work so much easier. Check out these 30 best free SEO tools.
• We’ve included 22 SEO practises you can use right now to improve your website’s Google ranking today.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)?

You own a website and you want to be seen on Google, and the only way to appear as number one in the search results it to do SEO.

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation is organising your website so that it is search engine and user friendly, and in return, search engines rank your website higher in search results. SEO helps boost your visibility in search engine results, and in turn, helps your customers find you right at the time they have the highest intent to purchase. 

More specifically, SEO is a series of tasks you as the website owner does on and off your site to make it easier for search engines to understand what your site is about, how popular and credible you are, how relevant it is to the search, how up to date it is, where you are, what you do, and whether users (your customers or viewers) like using your site. These tasks are broken into two parts; tasks you do on your website, and another set of tasks you do off your site.

Some SEOs claim it is the biggest con job of all time. Not in a criminal way. In a ‘you (Google / Bing) just want me to do your job for your’ sort of way. But millions of website owners are doing SEO because the ROI is there. 

WHY DO I NEED TO DO SEO? WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF SEO?

• Be visible to new customers. Google receives 60,000+ searches every second. By doing SEO you may be visible for some of these searches.
• SEO builds brand awareness and helps you reach new customers without paying for advertising.
• SEO helps to build brand credibility through networking
• SEO helps provide useful information to your audience at the right time. Like answers to questions, or contact information.
• SEO improves the user experience for everyone.
• SEO helps to maximise your other marketing activities. For instance, if you plant a seed but the customer can’t remember your name, SEO makes it easier for them to locate you.

Search engines aren’t humans. They don’t look at your website and see pretty pictures and a beautiful design like we do. They are computers. They read code. And their job is to find every website on the web – all 2 billion of them – scan them, save them, and try to understand what they’re all about so they can show them to people who are searching for them at the right time. 

If you’re a plumber and you want to be at the top of Google when someone searches for a plumber in your area – you need to do SEO. Why? Because search engines have 2 billion websites in their database and about 1.3 billion results for the word ‘plumber’. How are they meant to know you’re the best plumber in your area? You tell them, by doing SEO 🙂

HOW TO DO SEO WITHOUT WASTING TIME OR MONEY

To do SEO effectively, you need to understand why search engines like Google need you to do SEO and how the search engine business model works. Trust us, hang in there. It’s worth it. When you grasp this you will stop wasting money on SEO tactics that don’t work and start to get real results.

Firstly, search engines aren’t free magical tools provided out of the kindness of their hearts. They are a business like any other. They have to pay bills, wages, rent and all the rest of it. They’re media businesses, not too dissimilar to a TV station, magazine and newspaper. Only better and more relevant. They have an audience of people (viewers) that come to their site millions of times a day to consume content (information) and they show them ads in order to money. 

Like any other media channel, the search engines are trying to do three things. 1. They are trying to get new people using their website. 2. They want to hold them there for as long as possible. 3. They want to sell more ads. And the more people they can hold on their website for longer, the more ads they can sell. 

Google tracks what you do online, builds a profile of information about you and fine tunes their search results tailored to you and your interests. So the ads you see are relevant to you. It’s a genius advertising model actually, because users are only seeing ads they most likely want to see. Who’d have thought?

For instance, if you type in ‘best plumber in New York’, they’ll show you an ad for a plumber with 20+ years experience who’s available 24/7 in New York… not some random ad for a condo in Florida like you might see on the TV. And to appear in the top result for that search, that plumber would be in New York, have great reviews, have a clean, easy to understand website that’s fast to load, plenty of helpful information, a low exit rate, and a lot of other sites pointing to it saying how awesome it is.

Now you know what the SEO game really is, you can become a champion SEO player.

HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE WORK?

Ever wonder why the internet is called the ‘web’? To simplify a long and boring answer…The internet itself is nothing more than a series of clickable links between web pages and other websites. And if you were to draw these links, it’d look like a web.

Search engines use web crawlers called spiders to move around the web and their job is to document and save everything they find. The spiders follow hyperlinks between web pages and to discover new pages, content, article updates or newly new sites. Once a site is saved in their database, they use their sophisticated ranking (sorting) algorithm to return and rank the best result for any user’s search query, from most relevant to least relevant.

HOW MANY RANKING FACTORS ARE IN GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM?

How many rules (or algorithm ranking factors) does the SEO game have? Truth is, no one outside of Google knows. Google has confirmed there are over 200 ranking factors a few years ago. Things like keywords, your location, backlinks, domain authority etc. (scroll down for the full list) – but since then they’ve added a ton more. In 2015 they added machine learning into the mix, and more recently their natural language processor to tie it all together. Combine everything and it’s now said to have up to 880 ranking factors – according to SEO gurus, Cora – that are all aiming to give their users the best possible response and ultimately the best experience possible. 

WHAT ARE THE 200 GOOGLE RANKING FACTORS?

Google has never published all 200 ranking factors, but this list is a compilation of proven or most talked about ranking factors in the SEO community.

• Authority Of Linking Domain Is High
• Authority Of Linking Page Is High
• Backlink Age Is Mature
• Backlink Anchor Text Is Relevant To Search
• Backlink Domain Age Is Mature
• Backlink Profile Is High Quality 
• Categories In URL String
• Citing References And Sources
• Comprehensive Content Subject Matter
• Content Has Known Author
• Content Includes Current Year For Improved Relevancy
• Content Is 750+ Words In Length
• Content Is Genuinely Useful
• Content Is Up To Date
• Content Isn’t Hidden Behind Tabs
• Content Provides Value And Unique Insights
• Content Updates Are Significant
• Disavow Tool Has Been Used
• Doesn’t Have “Sponsored Links” 
• Doesn’t Have A High Number Of Guest Posts
• Doesn’t Have Ads Above The Fold
• Doesn’t Have Auto Generated Content
• Doesn’t Have Dmca Complaints
• Doesn’t Have Duplicate Meta Information On-site
• Doesn’t Have Excessive 301 Redirects To Page
• Doesn’t Have Excessive Forum Links
• Doesn’t Have Excessive Reciprocal Links
• Doesn’t Have Interstitial Pop Ups
• Doesn’t Have Links From Articles And Press Releases
• Doesn’t Have Links From Low Quality Sites
• Doesn’t Have Links From Unrelated Websites
• Doesn’t Have Links To Bad Neighborhoods
• Doesn’t Have Low-quality Directory Links
• Doesn’t Have Meta Tag Spam
• Doesn’t Have Pharmaceutical Terms In Backlink Anchor Text
• Doesn’t Have Pop Ups Or “Distracting Ads”
• Doesn’t Have Redirects
• Doesn’t Have Too Many Outbound Links
• Doesn’t Have Unnatural Amount Of Links From The Same Class C IP
• Doesn’t Have Unnatural Influx Of Links
• Doesn’t Have Unnatural Links Warnings
• Doesn’t Have Widget Links
• Doesn’t Hide Or Cloak Affiliate Links
• Doesn’t Use Temporary Link Schemes
• Domain Age.  Respect Your Elders
• Domain Diversity Of Serps
• Domain History Is Penalty Free
• Domain Includes Country Top Level Domain Extension
• Domain Registration Length
• Entity Matches User’s Search Query
• Exact Keyword Match Domain
• Exact Keyword Matches In Content
• Fast Page Loading Speed Via Chrome
• Fast Page Loading Speed Via Html
• Font Size Is Large Enough To Read On Mobile
• Free From Html Errors/W3c Validation
• Free Of Plagiarism Or Syndicated Content
• Good Grammar And Spelling 
• Google 2017 Update Named Fred
• Google Dance Can Randomly Change Serp Rankings
• Google Employee Moderators
• Google Hummingbird Goes Beyond Keywords
• Great Mobile User Experience 
• Has A High Domain Authority
• Has A High Pagerank
• Has Big Brand Preference
• Has Brand Mentions On Top Stories
• Has Brand Name Anchor Text
• Has Breadcrumb Navigation
• Has Contextual Links Inside Content Not Empty Pages
• Has Diversity Of Link Types
• Has Facebook Page And Likes
• Has High Number Of Page Shares
• Has Link From Authority Sites
• Has Links From Authoritative Topic ‘hubs’ 
• Has Links From Authority Websites In Your Niche
• Has Links From Competitors
• Has Natural Link Profile (Not Spammy)
• Has Official Linkedin Company Page
• Has Real World Business Address/Location
• Has Schema
• Has Ssl Certificate
• Has Terms Of Service And Privacy Pages
• Has Twitter Profile With Followers
• Has Unlinked Brand Mentions
• Has User Generated Content Links
• Has User Reviews/ Good Site Reputation
• Has Well Organised Site Architecture
• Has Youtube Video Content
• Hasn’t Been Penalised By Panda Update
• Haven’t Bought Backlinks
• High Direct Traffic
• High Domain Trust/Trustrank
• High Google Chrome Bookmarks
• High Homepage Authority 
• High Number Of Comments On Page
• High Number Of Internal Links Pointing To Page
• High Number Of Linking Root Domains
• High Number Of Links From Separate C-class IPs
• High Organic Click Through Rate For A Single Keyword
• High Organic Ctr For All Keywords
• High Repeat Traffic
• High Session Duration (Dwell Time)
• High Total Number Of Linking Pages
• High Trustrank Of Linking Site
• Image File Size Is Optimised For Web
• Included In User Browsing History
• Included In User Search History
• Includes Backlinks From Edu And .Gov Websites
• Includes Bullets And Numbered Lists
• Includes Helpful Additional Content
• Includes Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords In Content (LSI)
• Includes Multimedia
• Includes Nofollow In Outbound Links 
• Includes Table Of Contents
• Internal Link Anchor Text Is Relevant
• IP Address Isn’t Flagged As Spam
• Is Easy To Load, Navigate And Use Site
• Is Included In Featured Snippets
• Is Keyword Dense
• Is Linked To By Wikipedia
• Is Mobile Responsive
• Is Not Sitting On A Parked Domains
• Is Safe Search Appropriate
• Isn’t An Affiliate Site
• Isn’t Full Of Affiliate Links
• Isn’t Unreadable Or Spun Content
• Keyword Appears In H1 Tag
• Keyword In Meta Description Tag
• Keyword In Title Tag
• Keyword Included In H2, H3 Tags
• Keyword Is Present In Subdomain
• Keyword Is Present In Top Level Domain
• Keyword Is The First Word In Domain
• Keywords Are Prominent In The First 100 Words
• Keywords In Image Alt Text
• Keywords In Image Caption
• Keywords In Image Description
• Keywords In Image File Name
• Link Is High On Page 
• Link Location In Paragraph Is Relevant To Search
• Link Title Attribution Is Relevant To Search
• Linking Content Is Of High Quality
• Linking Domain Is Relevant 
• Linking Page Content Is Relevant
• Linking Page Includes Content 750+ Words
• Linking Page Title Includes Keyword
• Links From Ads Are Nofollow
• Location Relevant Searches
• Low Bounce Rate
• LSI Keywords Included In Title And Description Tags
• No “Hidden” Content On Mobile
• No Broken Links
• No Excessive Pagerank Sculpting
• Number Of Brand + Keyword Searches
• Number Of Branded Searches
• Outbound Link Theme Is Relevant Not Spammy
• Outbound Links Are High Quality
• Page Age Is Mature
• Page Category Is Relevant To Search
• Page Doesn’t Have Negative Link Velocity
• Page Doesn’t Include Low Quality Duplicate Content
• Page Has A User Friendly Layout
• Page Has Positive Link Velocity
• Page Is Prioritised In Sitemap
• Page Updates Are Made Frequently
• Page Uses Google Amp
• Pagerank Of Outbound Links On Page
• Payday Loans Update – Isn’t Classed As Spammy Content
• Proper Use Of Rel=Canonical Tags
• Quality Of Internal Links Pointing To Page
• Quantity Of Other Keywords Page Ranks For
• Rankbrain (Google’s Ai Algorithm)
• Reading Level Appeals To Majority
• Reconsideration Requested
• Server Location Is Close To Searcher
• Short And Concise URL Length
• Single Site Results For Brands
• Site Doesn’t Have Too Many URL Redirects
• Site Hasn’t Been Hacked
• Site Hasn’t Been Penalised By Google Penguin Update
• Site Is Updated Regularly
• Site Isn’t In Google Sandbox
• Site Isn’t Over-optimized Or Gaming Search Algorithms
• Sitewide Links Count As One Link
• Social Media Accounts Are Legit
• Title Tag Starts With Keyword
• Transactional Searches Relevance
• Triggers Google’s Easter Egg Results
• Triggers Image Results
• Triggers Shopping Results
• Triggers Top Stories Box
• URL Path Is Close To The Home Page
• Uses Geo Targeting
• Uses Google Analytics And Google Search Console
• Website Has A Sitemap
• Website Has Good Uptime
• Website Includes Contact Us Page
• Website Owner Hasn’t Previously Been Penalised
• WordPress Tags Are Relevant

When you consider Google’s 2015 addition of AI, and recently Natural Language Processing into its ranking algorithm, some SEO experts claim there are over 880 proven ranking factors. Stay tuned – we’ll have an article on that soon!

HOW MANY TYPES OF SEO ARE THERE?

SEO tasks are split into two types of activities:

• On-site SEO – This is the work you do on your website. Things like writing good in depth blogs. Including keywords in title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags, and ensuring your page loads nice and fast. 

• Off-site SEO – These are things like building brand awareness, PR, your social media presence, building a strong backlink profile and participating and adding genuine value to your industry’s online community. 

And as you go about doing so, there are two ways you can do them. 

• Following Blackhat SEO techniques. 
• Or following Whitehat SEO techniques.

WHAT IS BLACK HAT vs WHITE HAT SEO?

Blackhat SEO – Just like the black market, this is the naughty way of doing SEO. Doing Blackhat SEO means doing SEO in a way that goes against the search engine’s guidelines and recommendations. Typically it means you’re trying to gaming the system. Cheat. Spamming. Keyword stuffing. Buying backlinks and so on.

Whitehat SEO – This is the godly way of doing SEO. You follow the guidelines. Do everything by the book. Build a genuine brand. Add value to your online community. Have quality content. A great website. And you’re an all-round good person. In short; you don’t cut corners.

HOW MUCH DOES SEO COST?

Costs start around $99/m, are typically around $1000/m, but can be up to $50k per month if you’re one of the big ecomm heavy hitters wanting to dominate the SERPs nationally for every keyword in an entire niche. There’s a lot of work that goes into SEO, and the price can vary a lot. But this is definitely a speciality where the saying – ‘you get what you pay for’ – rings true. Let us explain…

No doubt your inbox has been flooded with ‘Guaranteed 1st page rankings for $99/m’ type emails. We all get them. And yeah, you could go down that path. But those cheap and nasty blackhat SEO providers will cost you more in the long run. If you’re lucky, you might find a genuine white hat SEO based out of India who will do about 10 hours of work a month for that $99. If they’re not doing blackhat SEO, they’ll likely require a lot of your time understanding your business, helping on trivial SEO decisions, just simply chew up more of your time than it’s worth. Worst case, they’ll be doing blackhat SEO that scores your website a big fat Google penalty which could drop you to the bottom of Google and cost heavily in lost revenue. That’s the point they cut bait and run – leaving you with to deal with the problem.

A good whitehat freelancer will cost around $30/hr. They’ll probably be offshore, but they’re genuine, have some runs on the board, and can get you okay results. You might get them to do 20 hours of work a month at a cost of about $600/m to you and you’ll see some month on month progress in a local area. If English isn’t their first language, any copy they write will need proofing or editing, if it’s usable at all. But they’ll do a great job of cleaning up a website that has had no SEO, setting up your accounts and getting the basics done. The biggest downside to freelancers is that their experience is limited to what they know. They might only have a few of their own clients. Which means they know a lot of SEO theory – they try some tactics out depending on what’s applicable – and months later they find out which ones work. You might be paying them to teach themselves the latest SEO tricks, which means results are often slow.

Entry level SEO agencies cost a bit more, but at least you’ll have the benefit of their collective learnings. Agencies typically range from $750/m for localised SEO, to $5000/m for national or international businesses. Anything over $5000/m and you’d hire a full time SEO in-house. This price range will cover on and off page SEO, content strategy and copywriting. Maybe a few blogs. The enterprise plans will offer more offsite SEO like backlink building and business citations. And you’ll get a fancy report each month. The good ones will probably set you up a Google Data Studio account. You’ll start to see decent month on month SEO growth, particularly if you’re publishing a new content (blogs, videos, social posts) each and every week. They’ll probably find the limits of your website and recommend a new website if it’s holding you back.

If you’ve got an SEO budget of over $5k/m, you’d normally hire a local experienced SEO manager in house. Being local and in-house means you’ll get more results, faster because they’ll have a better understanding of your business, your brand and tone of voice, and be able to bang out more genuinely helpful SEO keyword rich content than an agency or offshore provide could ever do. A $60k wage PA will get you someone who’s come out of an agency and keen to get some of their own runs on the board. They’ll have seen all the tricks and just want to focus on getting results for one brand. They usually are creatively focused or dev focused, which means they may need a little technical help from a website developer  or creative writer depending on their background. But the ROI for a local in-house SEO with genuine experience could be ten-fold, particularly for local B2B and ecommerce sales.

So how do you spend $50k per month on SEO? Once you’ve got an in-house SEO, the rest of that budget generally gets spent on SEO or website software and backlink building. Things like tools for optimising content on your site. For repurposing long-form content into short form content. For highly authoritative feature articles, or paying influencers for product reviews and a hyperlinked shoutout or mention. 

SHOULD I OUTSOURCE MY SEO?

Whether you outsource your SEO or not depends on your SEO budget, as a portion of your marketing budget. Generally speaking, most SME businesses don’t have the lucky of big budgets. So if your SEO budget is under $4-5k per month, it’ll be more cost effective to outsource your SEO to a reputable, reliable and proven SEO agency or freelancer. Just make sure you spend the time finding the right person.

If your SEO budget is over $5k/m, you’ll get a better ROI hiring a full time local employee in-house who’s got an agency or equivalent background with a matching portfolio of proven results and case studies.

HOW FAST DOES SEO WORK?

When first starting, it can take 3-6 months to see significant SEO growth. After that it can take anywhere from a day to 6 weeks for SEO changes to be recognised and updated on Google. 

Of course, it’s relative to the amount you invest. Invest more into SEO activity and you’ll get faster growth. Less, and it’ll take longer. 

In month one, you generally spend your time doing Google Analytics and Google Search Console account setup and linking, SEO strategy, keyword research, website auditing and planning. This sets a course for what you’re going to be doing in month two, and in what priority. Generally you aim to fix major no no’s first, while also launching into new content production.

In month two, you begin cleaning up major technical issues on your website, which in itself can take months to complete. And it can be a little underwhelming because you may not be seeing any real results in this clean up phase. Things like fixing broken links, mobile issues, defining H1, H2 and H3 tags (etc), internal linking, meta descriptions, title tags, speeding up page loading times and so on. 

Month three starts to get a bit more exciting. You’ll generally be able to start creating content to help boost the quality of the content on the website. You should be focusing on 1000+ word blogs, related videos, FAQs, industry white papers and infographics. You should start to see some changes in the SERPs around now, too, which can be encouraging. The more you can invest in quality content, the faster the results will come.

Month four is when you might have a bit more time to start building out your backlink strategy. You’ll have a cleaner website with quality articles by now, so now you is the time to start adding value to the community by sharing your content online. Particularly across social media. You can disavow low quality links. Ensure you’ve got a healthy NAP list. And of course, you’ll be continuing on site technical improvements and producing more and more content as you did in month one and two. These should never stop.

By month five you should be seeing an increase in organic sessions. And if you look into your Google Search Console account, you’ll be able to see which keywords and articles are bringing in the most traffic. By the stage you’ll want to be focusing on improving rankings for pages and keywords that are starting to get traction in the SERPs. If you can bump them up closer to page 1, your 5 months of hard work will start to pay off.

In month six, you may want to think about adding more in-depth conversation rate tracking and UX optimisations to your to-do list to make the most of the traffic you’re starting to get. As you start to climb the ranks, Google will be looking at things like time spent on page and bounce rates. You’ll also need to keep your foot on the content production gas pedal to ensure your constantly adding value to your site. Now is the time to double down and re-invest any early growth into more content production (designers, writers, videographers, content optimisation tools etc). Doing so will allow you to broaden and go deeper on your content strategy, which will also reflect in the SERPs.

HOW TO TRACK THE ROI OF SEO

So you’ve now invested six months and a stack of $ into SEO – how do you track the return on your investment?

Calculating the ROI of SEO can be tricky and confusing because customers often hear about your brand on another marketing channel first, which means the ROI of SEO may be split across multiple marketing channels. 

Let’s say you’re a plumber doing SEO. SEO is only effective when people go to a search engine like Google and search for plumbers or plumbing related products. So if they don’t think they need a plumber, and nothing is wrong with their pipes, they probably won’t search Google for a plumber… that is, unless they are influenced. 

For example – it’s your lucky day; the local news station is running a feature on hot water systems coming into winter. Or water conservation during a drought. People start Googling ‘water saving tips’ or ‘energy efficient hot water systems’ and find you on Google. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, you have a new customer and you attribute that sale to SEO. It didn’t cost you anything extra because it was a coincidence the TV station ran that feature…

… but you like the spike in sales and want to replicate it. You engage an influencer to talk about the importance of plumbing maintenance and how one blown $0.20 water heater seal resulted in $1000s of water damage, and they give you a genuine shout out saying thanks for a job well done. 

This would be classed as a brand awareness type of marketing campaign. Any direct link clicks you get from the social post would be attributed to the ‘social’ channel in Google Analytics. Your brand reaches thousands of people. It earns you one SEO backlink to your site. A brand mention from a credible figure. And a positive review or testimony. 

You get people thinking… and they start Googling to find out more. People start to Google things like, ‘what is plumbing maintenance’, or ‘how often do I need to service my water heater’, or ‘best plumber in New York’… your blogs pop up in the search results and the time and budget you’ve put into SEO pays off again. In this case, you have to split the ROI over the total costs of the campaign. So you need to weight to sales across both the social influencer campaign and SEO efforts.

Starting to sound complex? It is. First. To attribute anything you need to make sure you’re using accurate tracking across all of your marketing. Because any brand awareness campaign – online or offline – can influence your SEO results.

For any digital campaigns, it’s recommended to use UTM tags to track where every session on your website originated from. You then set up marketing attribution flows that track the user’s journey. You weight each channel on how it influences the buying decision. Then tally up how many customers originated in each channel, where, when and what they purchased. And for any offline campaigns, it’s recommended to include a unique promo code or drive customers to a unique landing page so you can attribute the extra traffic or sales to that marketing campaign.

HOW TO CALCULATE THE ROI OF SEO

To find the ROI of SEO, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got Google Analytics setup with conversion tracking. Jump into the ‘conversions’ > ‘goals’ screen to view how many sales you made in total, then sort by ‘Channel’. Click on ‘Organic Search’ and you’ll have the number of sales attributed to your SEO channel.

To calculate ROI… first, minus the [Organic Search sales] – [Cost of your SEO activities] to give you your [net profit]. Then divide [net profit] / [Cost of your SEO activities] to get your ROI ratio. For example; if you made $10,000 in Organic Search sales last month and you spent $1000 on SEO services, you’d have $10,000 – $1000 = $9000 net profit. Then divide $9000 / $1000 = 9… or an ROI of 9:1, which means for every $1000 we spent on SEO, we got $9000 in return.

You may also want to work out the cost per conversion for SEO. To do so, take the total number of transactions that make up the $10,000 in Organic Search sales and divide it by the cost of your SEO services. So, let’s say you are selling plumbing fittings at an average cost of $100 each. You sold 100 fittings last month via Organic Search. Your cost per conversion for SEO would be $10 per sale. 

Calculating the ROI of SEO is a little easier and more accurate when you widen the time window of your calculations. For example. Looking at the ROI over 3-6 month periods will be more accurate than a 1 month window because of the way people make buying decisions. 

For instance, let’s say your customers see the TV feature about water conservation, or the influencer testimonial, but doesn’t need plumbing services so they don’t do anything right away. 4 months later their hot water system fails and they Google what is top of mind – that’s you – because you planted the seed about energy efficient water heaters 6 months ago and your credibility was established by an influencer on social media. You get the click and ultimately the sale.

WHAT IS THE BEST SEO STRATEGY IN 2020?

The best SEO strategy in 2020 is to invest in content marketing. Less keyword stuffing, more quality content production….

It’s about adding value to your audience by publishing awesome content they can’t get enough of, on a platform that loads fast, is easy to use and navigate and gets them coming back for more time and time again. In fact, don’t think of yourself as doing SEO. Think of yourself as a media company publishing the best content in your industry. Your content inspires your customers… or gives them something to aspire to. And the products or services you offer are the key to turning that dream into reality. You post long-form content on your website, and link back to it from your social media accounts, which helps to reach and engage new audiences organically.

Did you notice Google shut down Google+ a few years ago? Why do you think they did that? They certainly weren’t giving up on producing their own social platform… in fact, if you use an Android smartphone, you’ll have noticed that they have turned the Google search app itself into a social platform. Google now has a content feed under the main search bar (on Android anyway), that means, SEO in 2020 is more about content marketing than keyword stuffing.

These days, your on-site SEO strategy should be to-do list of the tasks you need to execute organised from most important (or having the biggest impact on SERP rankings) to least important (having the smallest impact on SERP rankings). Essentially you want your website to work well, load fast, be easy to use, be attractive to the eye, and deliver value. Then it’s just a matter of publishing killer content.

Your SEO strategy should be aimed at publishing content with a high search volume. Or focusing on news and trending topics. In your keyword research phase you’ll be able to identify what topics your customers want to know more about, what questions they have, what time of year they want to know about it, and how often. This will become your content strategy and ultimately the outline of your content marketing calendar. 

Repurposing content is the key to reaching more eyeballs in 2020. The idea is, for each topic in your content strategy, you invest in a high quality long form blog or video which can be cut down into bite site snippets of information used to cross promote it on your social channels. Each blog can be repurposed into infographics, animated videos, social posts and EDMs. So for every long-form article or video you produce, you may be able to produce another 10 pieces of content to build out your content calendar. 

Of course, the key to being found on a search engine is to match your content to the key words (terms, questions or phrases etc) your audience most commonly searches for. Put simply, if you can offer the best answer, and the best user experience, Google is more likely to push you up the rankings. And the higher up the SERP rankings you are, the more visible you are and the more likely you’ll be discovered organically (without having to pay for ads).

WHAT ARE KEYWORDS?

Keywords are the primary words your audience key into a search engine when they have a query. And long-tail keywords are a series of keywords in a phrase, sentence or question. 

For instance. ‘Plumber’ is a keyword. ‘Best plumber in New York’ is a longtail keyword or phrase. The key to a successful SEO strategy is producing high quality and helpful content around keywords that have a high search volume.

WHAT ARE LSI KEYWORDS?

Because many languages have words with double meanings (depending on the context in which the word is used), search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand the intended meaning of a word based on the structure of the sentence it’s within, as well as the words surrounding it. Search engines recognise highly relevant or associated words or slang terms people use around a topic to understand the intent of the search. And it’s these alternative words or phrases that are known as LSI keywords. In short, it helps to target these LSI keywords in the body of your content so the search engines can gain a better understanding of what your content is about.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR YOUR TARGET MARKET

You know your audience best, so you’ll have a pretty good idea of the words they use when making an enquiry. The trick is, though, to target the keywords they use most frequently – the idea being, if you are visible for commonly search keywords in your industry, you’re likely to get more traffic and enquiries. 

You do this by finding the ‘search volume’ for each keyword, or long tail phrase. Then focus your SEO strategy and content pillars around trying to track for these keywords. This step is called keyword research. Many tools provide these insights. You can get these insights from SlangSprout, as well as in your Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

When you dive into keyword research, you’ll find you have more keywords you want to rank for than you have time and budget to do SEO. So at this point a handy tip for deciding which keywords to focus on first is to look up what you currently rank for and focus your efforts on improving existing keyword rankings where you already appear on page 2-50, rather than keywords you don’t rank for at all. The idea being, you’ll get results faster going from page 2 to page 1 than you will to go from page 100 to page 1.

WHAT ARE META DESCRIPTIONS AND ALT TAGS?

We’ve lumped these two together because they’re both very similar, and they both need to be written as you go. Meta descriptions and alt tags are descriptive tags in the backend that describe the web page or image. 

A meta description describes what a web page is about in 150-160 characters. And an alt tag is a description of what is being depicted in an image or graphic. 

They were originally used to assist people with vision impairments but nowadays play a big part in feeding voice search algorithms.

Meta descriptions and alt tags indirectly influence search engine algorithms in a few ways. They exist in the first place? Tick. They aren’t duplicated across every page of the website? Tick. They contain the target keyword early in the description? Tick. They are enticing and attract clicks when displayed in search results? Tick.

WHAT ABOUT BACKLINKS? WHY DO I NEED BACKLINKS?

Backlinks are hyperlinks linking back to your website, or to a page on your website. Google and other search engines use backlinks to determine how popular you are. It used to be the more you had, the more popular they thought you were. It used to play a big part search algorithm, but these days they look at many factors combined to score your popularity, and more important nowadays, your credibility.

Three things are important when it comes to backlinks. 1. The total number of backlinks you have. The higher the better. 2. The quality of those backlinks. A high number of high quality and relevant links from authoritative websites will give your website street cred and boost you up the rankings.Conversely, low quality spammy or bought links can negatively impact your rankings. 3. Are those links ‘follow’, or ‘no follow’. 

See, every website has an authority score called a domain authority (DA) and each page on that site has a page authority (PA). If they link to you, they’re telling Google spiders you’re cool, and some of their authority is passed to you. But if that link includes a ‘no follow’ tag, it signals to the spiders not to follow the link, they won’t crawl the site, and you won’t receive any authority from that site. 

A ‘no follow’ tag isn’t all bad. A brand mention on other relevant sites is a good thing in Google’s eyes. Plus, if it’s a popular site seen by a lot of people, that brand mention is great brand awareness. This scenario is common if you get a mention in a high ranking news article. 

HOW MANY BACKLINKS DO I NEED TO RANK?

Lots! The more the better. But here’s the disclaimer – they can’t be bought and they must be high quality. 1 high quality link can be worth 1000 bought spammy links. 

Many top ranking sites have thousands of backlinks and still don’t rank number one for everything. Don’t even put a number on it. It’s recommended to include high quality link building techniques in your SEO strategy so new links are always being created. Instead of thinking in terms of total numbers, aim for growing your backlink growth by 10-20% per month.

7 WAYS TO DO BACKLINK BUILDING THAT WORKS IN 2020

• Share it on social. Sharing your content across social media is a great one. Not only does it help your brand reach new people, but your content may get picked up and featured in someone else’s blog – earning you a backlink.

• Appear on a podcast or vlog. We like this one because it’s easy and a win win for everyone. When you start to build a following, other publishers, like podcasters and vloggers wanting to build their own empire will be looking for people they can host to help feed fresh content to their audience. Often podcasters will transcribe show notes and give a shout out to the interviewee (that’s you) as a thanks for being on their show. This one is a win win because it can be quick and easy to do, you’re reaching new audiences, doing PR, and link building all at the same time.

• Guest blogging is an oldie but a goodie. You track down relevant publishers that typically produce content in your industry. You – as an expert in the niche – volunteer to write a blog they can publish on their website in exchange for a shout out and hyperlink as a thanks. The publisher wins because they get free content for their fans. You win because you get a quality backlink from a relevant source with a relevant audience.

• Design an interesting and unique infographic and allow other sites to publish it in exchange for a backlink. Or similarly, you post other resources like white papers, how-to guides or instructional videos that can be distributed and linked back to. 

• Use a broken link browser plugin to scan relevant niche websites in your industry for broken links. If you find one on an authoritative, let the admin know and at the same time mention your site or article that is better than the one they’re currently linking to.

• Spy on your competitors by doing a backlink scan on their website to see what makes up their backlink profile. It may give you a list of backlinking sites you can also work with.

• Promote your content to publishers who feature weekly or monthly round up style content. It’s a similar idea to guest blogging, only, you often don’t need to write a whole blog if your existing content is new and trending. You can do this by sending regular press releases to media agents, or by searching for sites that publish similar articles regularly and adding them to your hit list.

WHAT ARE THE BEST FREE SEO TOOLS?

Like any craft, having the right tools in your toolbox makes doing the work so much easier. Here are the best SEO tools to up your SEO game:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights – Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices

2. Moz Local Listing Score – See how your local business looks online

3. Slangspout.com – Thousands of keyword ideas and trending searchers based on a single keyword

4. Google Analytics – Complete web stats and search insights

5. Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools – Constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports

6. Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker – Comprehensive link analysis

7. Moz Link Explorer – Complete overview of your website, pages, and links

8. Google Keyword Planner – Know what people search for

9. Google.com in an Incognito Window – Discover auto-fill opportunities

10. Google Trends – See the relative search popularity of topics

11. Ahrefs SEO toolbar – Instant SEO metrics for web pages and Google searches

12. SEO Web Page Analyzer – Get a full on-page analysis of your website

13. SERP Simulator – Preview how your web pages will look in Google’s search results

14. Schema Creator – Customize how your web pages appear in the search results

15. SimilarWeb – View site stats for any domain

16. SERP Robot – See your ranking position for up to five keywords

17. XML Sitemaps – Build a sitemap

18. Browseo – See your website the way a search engine sees it

19. SEO Site Checkup – Audit your website for on-page and technical SEO issues

20. Yoast SEO – Suggestions for search engine optimizing your blog posts

21. LinkMiner – Instantly find broken links on any web page

22. Google Business Review Link Generator – Create a link for customers to review your business on Google

23. Copyscape – Check for duplicate content

24. Robots.txt Generator – Easily generate an all-important robots.txt for your site

25. Structured Data Testing Tool – Helps to provide context to the information on your page. 

26. Beam Us UP – A free SEO crawler. It’s a great alternative to Screaming Frog.

27. Keyworddit – Extracts keywords from Reddit. Just enter any subreddit (e.g., /r/bigSEO) and it’ll pull out a list of a few hundred keywords plus monthly search volumes.

28. Hunter.io – Finds all email addresses related to a website in seconds.

29. Responsive Design Checker – Checks the responsiveness of a website.

30. Smush -A free WordPress plugin for compressing, optimizing, and resizing images on your site.

31. Where Goes? – A simple tool for checking redirect paths for any URL.

32. Whitespark Local Citation Finder – Finds citation opportunities for your business.

22 WAYS TO BOOST YOUR WEBSITE’S GOOGLE RANKING

Now you know what the game is, how to play and have the tools you need to get started… here’s 22 SEO tactics you can use to improve your website’s Google ranking. Enjoy!

• Improve your page loading speed
• Publish high quality content
• Fix all broken links
• Design your site for mobile devices
• Compress and optimize your images
• Break up your content with header tags
• Use outbound links when relevant
• Add more than text
• Publish your contact information
• Share your content on social media
• Use targeted keywords that match what people are searching
• Use LSI keywords to compliment your targeted keywords
• Use clean and targeted URLs
• Write click worthy meta descriptions
• Cull unnecessary code
• Add FAQs to all converting pages
• Use infographics in all blogs
• Be interviewed on a podcast
• Set up a Google My Business Account
• Set up and link Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Start building high quality and relevant backlinks
• Build a tool or calculator on your site and encourage people to link to it

… well, what are you waiting for? Book market this page for later and kick start your SEO today!