What are the 15 critical components of solid SEO ?

When we think of working on the SEO aspect of a website, we typically face on-page challenges. Though these challenges are complex in nature, they are totally avoidable with a few preparations. What are the 15 critical components of solid SEO ? These are the 15 components that you definitely need to know to win clients, conversions, and sales. 

1. Know your audience and the industry :

When we come up with any SEO strategy, it can’t work until and unless we are not aware of the audience and the industry. Defining the audience and segmenting the industry is a very important consideration in SEO. When you know who your potential audience whom you wanna target with your web content, it puts on the right weight to your increased traffic strategy. The second most important consideration after the audience is the industry. Segmenting the industry helps one to understand where are you going to get your audience from ? With such informed steps the approach of traffic building will work comparatively more effectively.

In order to know your audience and industry, it’s important that you can answer these questions:

• Which industry are you in ?
• Who are your nearest competitors ?
• What are their area of competition ?
• How are your competitors executing their business in the best possible ways ?
• What competition are the fiercest ?

2. Keyword research :

Keywords are those words and phrases which are put as queries on the search segment on Google. When people search for your business looking with those keywords, your business shows up on results. So, having proper keyword research is very important to find your website on Google.  Defining the keywords is a crucial factor as subtle shifts in keywords can either make or break an SEO strategy. So, to conclude, keywords need to have a firm grasp in terms of the market and the buyer-intent.

3. Understanding the user intent:

Keywords works the best when the keywords matches the user intent. User intent is a parameter when a user searches anything in Google, the search engine considers the keywords and process the context and the intention behind those words. In SEO, this match making of keywords and the intent of of utter significance. Let’s understand this with an example :

Suppose, you are looking of a “red evening gown for party dress”, google will show you like this :

This means that your intent is to buy them. Or just incase, you are someone who takes interest of the dress designs for inspiration, Google will recommend you likewise. So, you see how vital it is for the SEO to fix up righteously. So, it’s a pretty good idea to integrate such keywords within your site and the overall SEO process. 

4. Web Analytics and reporting

Do you know what’s the reality of digital marketing ? Its the “Insights”. Why do we work on something ? To get results right. That’s exactly what SEO makes you do. The best factor to determine if your SEO strategy is working or not is it’s measurability. The insights helps you understand the traffic, user behaviour and many other minute data which are just unmissable. 

Some industries may not need a weekly or a daily keyword adjustments. But, what’s more challenging is when you have a fast-paced industry, it is very important to device a quarterly or bi-monthly reporting format to know exactly what your audience is actually looking for. 

5. Mobile SEO

On April ,2015, Google rolled out with a very important update which emphasized on the mobile friendliness of the website.  This update had the following impacts :

• Affects only search rankings on the mobile devices
• Affects search results on the languages globally.
• It applies on the individual pages and not the web pages.

This update was such a big one that over time Google’s mobile-first index became everyone’s word of mouth, Google’s move to mobile-first signifies the start of a brand new era – an era of dumbed-down search results for the masses.  So, it’s very important to fix the issues from the aspect of the Mobile screen view.

6. Site Crawling :

Website crawling is a process where search engines send spiders or bots to check your page. It is this phase that tells what is lacking in your site that is preventing your site from ranking. If your website has no proper architecture facilitating internal backlinking or no XML sitemaps, the bots will not crawl on your site. Also, major 404 issues can also create severe crawling issues. Some of the issues like allowing and disallowing the bots are a part of the major technical implementations. One obvious solution for many SEO pros is ensuring the subsequent line is aloof from robots.txt

Disallow: /

This directive tells the server to disallow all search engines from crawling the site. 

Disallow: allow

The second part allows all robots to complete the crawling process. 

This is why it is so important to make sure that your site is 100 percent functional, and crawlable from the start.

7. Indexing :

Though crawling and indexing are different sides of the same coin. The steps are different. They are mutual but not mutually exclusive. Adding things like noindex, nofollow, impacts the indexing during a negative way.

Points to feature on indexing :

• Adding a sitemap of the website on the Google Search Console.
• Canonicalizing the pages
• Identifying the trail slash issues

Once such issues are added, or else it can lead to the double indexing which actually interferes with Google’s ranking algorithms.

It is important to perform an in-depth analysis before we start fixing the on-page vulnerabilities. Because while doing so, you can uncover issues that may not have otherwise been considered. And these issues can make a big difference in your website’s performance.

8. Fixing the Technical SEO:

Technical SEO almost always brings to mind these related terms. When technical SEO is something which misses out, the entire website can suffer. My checkpoints :

• No canonicalisation plugins installed
• Big unoptimised sliders
• Schema implementation

As a site gets larger and infinitely more complex, one mistake in one part of the implementation really can affect another part of it.

9. Important highlight : Call to action

All the points, your site, content , images and others are all well integrated when you guide your visitors with the goal of what actions they need to take. You can have well-laid plans of action, but CTAs make it complete. 

Once you take actions, however, and you have that project – then get the rest of these SEO factors right.

Then you will be raking in that cold, hard cash. Maybe. I can’t make any guarantees on that.

Some of the examples of the  call to actions are :

10. Content Quality

In the digital marketing world, having a strong content strategy is something very very important. It is one of the most valuable tools anyone can be interested in. A survey in Hubspot has concluded that companies that have an active blog on an indexes an average 434% than the rest. Surveys have even confirmed that around 70% of the total traffic is received from the old blogs. So,  developing a killer content makes a person take clickable actions, and buttons. 

Last but not least,  blogging can take a lot of time and not all business owners have the resources to capitalize on it. If you’re in that business genre, consider outsourcing it if that’s a possibility.

11. Links building strategy

Links building is one out of the many strategies in SEO which focuses on getting the links back to your website. Though Google algorithms are very complex and always evolving, backlinks still carry a lot of significance. Webmasters can improve the rank in their sites by increasing tarffic from the other high – quality sites that link to their pages.

Basically google loves popular links, when you have numerous links prompting popular links, google trusts it. The following ways help us generate the backlinks :

• Anchor text : One of the important search engines to take into account is considering the text that is used to link your site with reference to the context used.
• Quality of the linking page : Search engines allow links from high quality links, trusted pages. These points are an important factor to demonstrate the quality of the page.
• Aimed Page : When people talk about the page quality, we usually find the other pages linked to the home page. This makes it difficult for the pages to rank as they miss the rank-equity.

12. Loading speed

The rule book to a good site is when it loads within 5 seconds. This means all the resources, contents, and CSS styles, all need to load within the frame of 5 seconds. Slow loading pages mostly suffer due to the low user engagements. Since Google reads the user behavior of the users then such behavior data influences the user rankings badly. Slow loading pages impact the indexation adversely. When search engines can’t crawl the site for a few days/weeks, rankings associated with the keywords of the inaccessible pages.  After all slow pages kill conversions.

13. Domain Age, URL and authority

Right now “domain age, URL and authority” is a hot topic on Google. Previously this factor was the most underrated factor in SEO. But, now as more factors are developing this factor is now more evolving. The general notion of regarding the old domains is that Google prioritises the older domains. Even this is believed that since the domain is old, there is lesser probability to declare such links low quality or spammy links.

When Google is talking about “domain age,” they’re simply looking at your registration historical length and nothing more.

14. Accessibility

It’s a myth that SEO and digital odds goes against each other. Many of the core SEO principles tells about good practices in making your websites accessible to people of all liabilities.

Here are other enhancements that improve both accessibility and searchability:

• Ensuring all of your images have proper alternative text
• When possible, using text instead of images
• Creating descriptive and relevant page titles to the content
• Avoiding empty headings and an improper heading structure
• When linking to other text, provide a descriptive link as well
• Provide your visitors multiple ways to find content, for example, make an available site map, search and clear navigation
• Providing captions and transcripts for videos
• Identifying the language of your content
• Spelling out acronyms and abbreviations

15. The core of the SEO process : Planned execution

The planned execution is the heart of the SEO process. When you work as per a plan, you’ll definitely achieve what you want. It helps you stay on track when creating content. Instead of just creating what people might think they are looking for vs what they actually look for. 

In the following ways the execution  can be planned :

1. Create a monthly plan.
2. Take time to research the keywords related to your industry.
3. Identify blog posts that can be updated or refreshed.
4. Identify the other SEO opportunities.
5. List out the content ideas in the Insights report.
6. Assign as per the content plan.
7. Track progress at the end of each month.