Here’s why.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the practice of optimizing all aspects of a brand’s online presence—from web page content to page speed to consistency across local directories—to rank better in search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO includes on-page SEO (on-site SEO) and off-page SEO (off-site SEO). On-page SEO refers to the parts of SEO that take place on a website itself, such as placing internal links in high-quality content. Off-page SEO includes the parts of SEO that take place outside the website, such as link acquisition and keeping business NAP (name, address, phone number) information consistent across local directories.

Components of SEO include, but are not limited to:

• Content marketing, the practice of creating high-quality website content.
• Local SEO/local search, which concerns SEO at a local level (the physical area near a business) and includes the optimization of Google My Business/Google Business Profile listings.
• Link-building, the process of acquiring backlinks.
• Social media marketing, or reaching existing and new customers on social media platforms and fostering positive engagements with the brand.
• Relevant keyword research to find the search terms a target audience is searching for.
• Technical SEO, such as page speed, mobile-friendliness of a site, and site security.

How Does SEO Work?

When all aspects of SEO work together, it helps a website rank better in organic (i.e., not paid for) results on Google Search, Bing, and other search engines.

Properly implemented SEO tactics make a website appear more trustworthy to both search engines and human users, which boosts website traffic. Specifically, well-executed SEO strategies mean Google and other search platforms will push a website higher in organic results for a specific search query. This higher ranking means the website will automatically have a larger audience, as the overwhelming majority of people do not go past the first page of search results.

Once on the first page of SERPs, the helpful, high-quality content that populates the site does the heavy lifting. It encourages human users to click on a site over its competitors, engage with that site’s content, and successfully convert to leads and sales.

Why Your Business Needs SEO

A comprehensive SEO strategy needs to be part of your digital marketing efforts. Here are just some of the benefits of SEO your business can reap when you implement your strategies correctly.

1. Boosts Search Engine Rankings and Search Traffic

You can drive traffic to your site with SEO! SEO helps your website rank for the organic search queries your target audience cares about. Better rankings often translate to higher click-through rates (CTRs).

2. Offers Better Return on Investment

Many digital marketers refer to organic traffic as free web traffic. While you could argue that it’s not truly free once you invest time and money into SEO, organic is still by far the more cost-effective source of website traffic compared to PPC, or pay-per-click, traffic.

3. Helps You Take Control of Your Brand

Say your competitor writes a blog about your brand. That blog uses your brand name for its target keyword. If your competitor plays their cards right, that blog post could outrank your own site for search queries for your brand’s own name! In this scenario, you lose control of your brand’s narrative. The best way to take back control is to ensure the SEO strategies strengthening your own site are sound.

Let’s put it another way.

SEO lets you take control of your online presence by having YOUR site rank well in search results. That means people are more likely to see your brand in the exact way you want it to be seen (on your site), not the way your competitors try to paint you (like in negative blog posts).

4. Finds You New Potential Customers

When you boost your online visibility, you can find new potential customers in venues you weren’t previously capitalizing on, including organic search. Even better, if your online presence is strong enough, people will engage with your brand outside your website and on their own sites, social channels, and beyond.

5. Improves the User Experience

Better SEO lends itself not just to ranking well in SERPs, but also to offering a better user experience. After all, aspects of SEO like faster load times and improved site security are what real people want when they engage with your site. Give the people what they want, and you can build trustworthiness with your audience.

6. Helps You Build Trust

SEO is all about building trust with search engines so that their algorithms place your site higher in search results. SEO doesn’t just build credibility with algorithms, though; it builds trust with human searchers too.

A well-built site that’s attractive, helpful, safe, and factually correct is one that real people can trust time and again. Over time, that trust can lead to improved brand awareness and better conversions.

7. Boosts Local Engagement

Local search is all about reaching the people physically near your business. When a local business plays their local SEO cards right, it can mean more people know about the business and engage with it on a regular basis.

Important aspects of local SEO include:

• Optimizing a Google Business Profile listing
• Keeping NAP information consistent across local directories
• Engaging positively with people on social media
• Responding quickly to reviews on Google and other review sites

Create a Winning SEO Strategy

Why is SEO important for business? Free traffic, brand awareness, engagements, and more are all ways SEO can boost your business online. This success does not happen overnight, though.

SEO success takes a team of talent. As an award-winning digital marketing agency, our team has the expertise and insight necessary to help your business create an SEO strategy that helps you exceed your digital marketing goals. From building strategic sitemaps to writing engaging newsletters to finding only the most relevant keywords, our team is ready to open up opportunities for your business to succeed online.

Drop us a line and we can get started crafting a winning strategy together.

But, like, it’s complicated.

Here’s why.

Backlinks? What are those?

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.

What’s a backlink? A backlink is a link that goes to your website from another point on the Internet, like forums, social media posts, and a competitor’s website.

Why are backlinks important? (Or, at least, why did conventional wisdom say that they were important before the Google leaks?) Having backlinks to your site is an important aspect of search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy. Specifically, backlinks act like a vote of confidence for your site, telling search engines that your site is trustworthy, relevant, and has good content worth reading. This vote of confidence affects search engine rankings, as the more high-quality backlinks your site has, the more likely search platforms are to reward your site with higher rankings in organic SERPs.

Types of Links

Now that we know what backlinks are, let’s talk more about other types of links (trust us; this knowledge will come in handy in a moment).

External Links vs Internal Links

External links are links that go from your website to another domain. These links are important for SEO because they signal to search engines that you are citing your sources and have done your research, making you appear more credible. Think of it this way: would you trust a student’s paper that cited everything properly, or a paper that ended with “Trust me, bro”?

Internal links are links that go from one page on your website to another page on your website. These links are important as they create a complex web of relevancy that tells search platforms in greater detail what pages on your site are about and how they relate to each other.

Dofollow Links vs Nofollow Links

“Dofollow” and “nofollow” are link attributes, meaning they are bits of code that tell search platforms how they should read the links they are attributed to.

Dofollow links are links that search engines know to crawl and index; these types of backlinks help boost page rankings for whatever page they direct to. By default, all links are dofollow unless specified otherwise.

Nofollow links, traditionally, were links that search engines did not crawl and index, meaning they did not affect page rankings. Google has revealed that in recent years, however, it does use nofollow link attributes as link signals, or signals to help search engines better understand links and their strength for ranking purposes.

Outbound Links vs Inbound Links

Outbound links, external links, or outgoing links, are links that go from your website to another website.

Inbound links, or incoming links, are links that come to your website from another website.

Good Backlinks vs Bad Backlinks

Not all backlinks are created equal. Google and other search engines will reward your site for having “good” backlinks… and punish your site for having too many “bad” backlinks.

A good backlink is a link to your website from a high-authority website. Having high-quality backlinks can signal to search engines that your site is worth reading and, therefore, worth rewarding with higher Google rankings.

A bad backlink is a low-quality link to your website from a low-domain authority site or site that otherwise appears spammy. Having a few bad backlinks won’t hurt your website, but if your website has tons of bad backlinks—and only bad backlinks—Google and other search platforms will penalize your site.

Importance of Backlinks

Now that you know what backlinks (and other types of links) are, it’s time to talk about why backlinks are important… just not in the same way as many digital marketers initially thought.

Many SEO strategists assumed that having lots and lots of backlinks was important for building site authority. While backlinks are important for determining domain authority in search engine algorithms, a recent Google leak revealed that a site doesn’t really need that many high-quality backlinks to rank well in organic search results. In other words, backlinks are still an important part of SEO strategy, but the quality of links should always come before quantity.

Having good quality backlinks can help:

• Build brand awareness
• Drive referral traffic, or organic traffic directed to your site from another
• Boost site authority
• Search engines understand the relevancy of web pages

7 Tips for a Robust Backlink Strategy

Building backlinks takes time and effort. Here are some of the best tried-and-true tactics to build backlinks to your website.

1. Avoid Black Hat Practices

Let’s start with what you shouldn’t do: black hat SEO practices. Black hat SEO means using techniques to boost your site’s rankings with SEO tactics that search engines do not like. When it comes to backlink building, the major black hat practice to avoid is buying links in bulk from low-domain sites.

2. Focus on Quality Over Quantity

As we mentioned before, search engines are more concerned with the quality of backlinks rather than the sheer number of backlinks. Ideally, you only want links from authoritative websites. If you’re running a healthcare-focused site, for example, you want links from the likes of WebMD and MayoClinic, not www.iMadeThisWebsiteInMyMomsBasement.net.

It’s okay if you get links from some sites with middling domain authority, though. Heck, when you’ve reached a certain size, it can be impossible to avoid even a few links from low-authority sites! What search engines look at is the overall health of your backlink profile, or your site’s profile that search engines use to rate the overall quality and trustworthiness of your backlinks.

A healthy backlink profile will include links from mostly high-authority sites, some medium-authority sites, and little to no spammy sites.

TIP: If you’re getting lots of low-quality backlinks, you can disavow them to mitigate the negative impact they have on your site. Google Search Console’s Disavow tool can let you select which URLs and domains you want to disavow.

3. Outreach/Guest Blogging

One of the more direct link building strategies you can engage in is link building outreach. This strategy involves reaching out to other website owners to guest post on their websites; the guest posts will contain a link to your website.

Guest blogging is the most common form of white hat outreach strategies. Here are some best practices for aspiring outreach bloggers to keep in mind:

• Be respectful and exciting when reaching out to site owners
• Only reach out to site owners in a similar industry or vertical as your own
• Craft high-quality content that people want to read
• Return the favor and offer to host a guest post from the organization you reach out to

4. Broken Link Building

Maybe you’ve already garnered some backlinks to your site. Congrats! Don’t just leave it at that, though. Sometimes links break for any number of reasons. Whatever the reason, a broken link will not help your site.

If you notice that another website links to your site with a broken link, reach out to that website owner and ask if they can find the source of the problem and fix it.

5. Regular Backlink Analysis

You’ll find broken links and other potential issues with your backlink profile by running regular checks.

Some SEO tools you can use for backlink analysis include:

• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• Google Search Console

6. Don’t Neglect Social Media

Backlinks can come from anywhere, including social media platforms. That means that regularly posting high-quality content on your social channels, building a robust social media presence, and engaging with social followers can increase the odds that people share your social posts and even directly post links to your website from their own social accounts.

7. Create a Kickass Website

Pardon our French.

The best backlinks are the ones you don’t have to work for. When your website is known for quality, people will link from their websites and socials directly to you. So make a quality website worth linking to. Populate your site with helpful, high-quality content like white papers, case studies, infographics, expert opinions, and more.

Craft a Winning Backlink Building Strategy

Are backlinks important? The answer is still, without a doubt, yes. These links may help others learn about your brand, drive some organic traffic to your site, indirectly boost site authority, and help search engines learn more about what your content is about (and how it relates to search queries). However, as Google has stated, link building is not the single-most important ranking factor for a website. There are plenty of other ranking signals that search platforms use to help rank pages, and all of them need to work in tandem to be effective.

Let the experts at Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing take some of that pressure off your plate. We have years of experience helping clients build healthy backlink profiles and execute winning SEO strategies… and we would love the opportunity to do the same for your organization.

Despite how important SEO is, we often hear how daunting it can be, even for a senior marketing manager. SEO seems like such an abstract concept because there are so many layers and factors that can affect performance… and those layers and factors are constantly changing. It’s not as simple as managing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns where you can literally pay for higher placement if you’re not seeing the results as expected. (Okay, not that simple. But you know what we are getting at.)

So, just how do you become familiar with SEO (and maintain your sanity while doing it)? Keep reading to learn more about technical SEO and the best technical SEO audit tips you can implement right away.

What is Technical SEO?

One of the ways we like to introduce business owners to SEO? Presenting it as being composed of three equally important pillars that will empower growth. These three pillars are:

1. Authority
2. SEO-friendly content
3. Technical SEO (our favorite)

Many people are familiar with on-site SEO, or on-page SEO. On-page SEO includes content optimization, such as using target keywords in your copy, updating meta tags to include buzzwords, and using an SEO-friendly URL structure. While absolutely critical for success in its own right, you need to complement this type of SEO with technical SEO.

Technical SEO includes any task that is completed within the framework of your actual website. It therefore includes concerns like website crawlability, page load speeds, whether you have duplicate pages, and much more.

Performing a technical audit on your site can reveal areas for improvement, and may be one of the best ways to improve your website for both human users and search platform-ranking algorithms.

Fortunately, it is easy enough to perform a technical SEO audit and boost your site’s ranking on search platforms like Google.

Step-by-Step Guide for In-Depth Technical SEO Audits

The truth is, there is no single best way to optimize a website, only the best way for your website’s unique needs while keeping in mind the tools and resources you have at your disposal. Taking these variables into account, you can craft an auditing strategy that elevates your website in Google’s eyes (and rankings).

Whether your website operates as an affiliate marketing opportunity or an ecommerce sales driver, technical SEO tactics can make or break your visibility online. Our SEO strategists rely on the following quick but effective tactics to outrank the competition and help grow our clients’ businesses.

1. Run a Website Crawl

Crawling isn’t just for spiders. It’s also for robots on the web. These robots serve an important function: reviewing your website and storing (aka indexing or caching) it in a search platform’s database. This way, when a user enters a query into a search platform, the platform’s algorithm can quickly draw an organized list of the most relevant content from its database.

The downside to caching and indexing, however, is that sometimes search platforms will store outdated versions of your website, meaning that users won’t find the latest and greatest content on your site.

That is why it is imperative to frequently have crawlers (also referred to as robots or bots) review every nook and cranny of your website, even if your website doesn’t have many pages. You can rest assured that Google and other platforms see only the latest version of your site, or you can quickly detect and fix any errors that prevent your site from indexing and appearing to search users. In other words, frequent crawling can help you avoid a drop in traffic or visibility due to technical issues and crawl errors.

Use crawlers like Googlebot or Bingbot to find errors that include dead pages (error 404), broken links (links no longer work), no indexing, hacking, server accessibility issues, downtime, and more. Link breaks, image errors, and page removals happen all the time; that’s why we crawl and review the website every week, so we can keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

Tools that we at Digital Strike like for this tactic include:

• Screaming Frog
• SEMRush
• DeepCrawl

2. Make the Most Out of Your Crawl Budget

Crawler bots are busy. There are nearly 2 billion websites online right now. These robots are expected to crawl every URL on the internet, which means they don’t want to waste their time with unnecessary crawls of useless pages. That is why most search platforms enact a crawl budget, or a limit on how many pages on your site their crawlers will review every day.

To make the most of your crawl budget, try the following five easy actions:

1. Make your important pages indexable (use rel=index tags).
2. De-index PPC landing pages.
3. Keep your number of pages to a minimum by reorganizing similar content into what we refer to as “power pages,” i.e., long-form, authoritative, comprehensive, and informational content.
4. Use noindex tags on pages that are not as important, so Google bots don’t use up your crawl budget on content that will never get to the first page of Google (e.g., About Us pages).
5. If you have pages that shouldn’t even be found via organic search (e.g., admin pages) or that you otherwise do not want crawled, use disallow tags.

3. Index the Correct Version of Your Website

On occasion, website updates mean that servers begin serving the wrong version of a website to users and search platforms, such as serving the site with HTTP status instead of HTTPs. It is therefore important to manually verify the most accurate version of your website is indexing on your chosen search platform, or you could run into issues.

If both the HTTP and HTTPS versions are indexed, for instance, both URLs could be considered duplicate content. Search engines despise duplicate content and penalize them, meaning you want to avoid these issues as much as possible. Duplicate content issues aren’t as common these days, as Google bots get smarter and understand the purpose of different content. That said, these errors could still occur if you do not run a manual site audit and review similar content on occasion.

The following URL inspection and testing tools can help you check the index status of your site:

• URL Inspection Tool (Google)
• URL Inspection Tool (Bing)

4. Optimize Your Sitemap(s)

The devil is in the details, especially when it comes to websites. Your sitemap is essentially the blueprint of your entire online operation, telling search platform algorithms how they should interact with your site (and how they should present it to users). Even a small error on your sitemap can significantly impact site performance, meaning that sitemap optimization and cleanup is incredibly important for ranking high in SERPs.

There are two types of sitemaps, XML and HTML. Your XML sitemap is for crawlers while your HTML is for human users. You can have one or both types for a single site.

To optimize your XML sitemap, consider the following:

• Exclude nonimportant (rel=noindex) pages from the sitemap, which also helps you get the most of your crawl budget. (A win-win!) Then, include your XML sitemap in your robots.txt file (the file that tells crawlers what pages they should or should not crawl).
• Use plugins that automatically generate XML sitemaps for you when using website-building platforms like WordPress.
• Ensure URLs on your sitemap include canonical tags to avoid confusing the bots with complicated redirect chains (and make sure these canonical URLs are not pointing to a page that is redirected).

To optimize your HTML sitemap, try the following:

• Update your HTML sitemap when needed, since it cannot automatically update the way XML sitemaps can.
• Keep the number of links on your HTML sitemap to less than 100.
• Add keywords in your meta descriptions, meta titles, and anchor texts (we’ll discuss this in further detail below).

5. Update Page Title, Meta Descriptions, and H1 Tags

When the opportunity arises, improve clickability via optimizing headers, title tags, and meta descriptions while improving keyword importance via H1 tag recommendations. In other words, find a target keyword and closely related terms and use them throughout not just the body copy of a page, but also within proper H tags and meta descriptions. Making these changes might seem tedious, but trust us—the effort is well worth the results you are likely to see.

Keep in mind, meta descriptions are not a factor that Google looks at for rankings; they are more to entice human readers to read your content or buy your product. By testing out different verbiage within your metadata, however, you can find the right mix that increases organic search traffic by using persuasive copy to entice users to enter your website (and reduce bounce rates).

6. Track Keyword Rankings, Impressions, and Queries

Analyze trends in rankings, impressions, and queries via Google Search Console to identify optimization opportunities and indexation issues. If you are tracking your keywords and noting any substantial changes, then you can tell if/when an indexation issue arises.

Did a keyword that you typically rank highly for drop off within the search engine results pages (SERPs)? Chances are you have an indexation issue or you could potentially be a victim of Google’s algorithm updates.

You cannot judge a proper SEO strategy without tracking organic search performance. There are several keyword rankings and audit tools available for these types of tracking. At Digital Strike -Targeted Marketing, we like the following:

• SEMRush.com
• Cocolyze.com
• Ahrefs.com

(FYI: These are great tools for keyword research as well.)

7. Evaluate Your Organic Search Traffic Trends

Throughout the month, you should evaluate traffic trends in Google Analytics to analyze overall search engine performance from a traffic volume standpoint. If there are specific web pages that are seeing an increase in traffic (specifically from organic search), it should go without saying that you’re doing something right. (Good job!)

But what if you’re seeing the opposite? (It’s okay! Take a deep breath.)

Check for any technical SEO issues on important pages first if you’re not seeing the volume as expected. If you’re not the webmaster, your company should consult a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO.

8. Sculpt Authority with Links

Most digital marketers know the importance of external links/backlinks. But they aren’t the only types of links that matter when it comes to SEO.

Ensure web crawlers know what page is the authority on a given topic and improve authority through internal linking opportunities. Many SEO agencies fail with link-building campaigns by not considering the importance of internal links and proper anchor text usage.

If you want a particular page to rank highly in the search engine rankings you need to mold the authority by strategically placing internal links that point from other highly authoritative pages on your website to similar topical content you have. Boosting your homepage’s authority is a great first start for increasing organic traffic, for example. Do so by having different pages on your website point to your homepage… and have relevant links (with keyword-rich anchor text) to those pages as well. This practice helps you create a healthy ecosystem of interlinking on your website that shows search platforms your site is robust and should therefore rank higher in SERPs.

9. Use Social Media

Don’t roll your eyes at us.

Social media can help your business thrive.

Yes, really.

For starters, using social media to push your content helps increase organic traffic, brand awareness, and creates backlinks to your website (both through the link you share in your original post and any shares you get from followers). Additionally, platforms like Google even crawl certain social media sites like Facebook, meaning that a well-optimized and popular Facebook post could show up in Google SERPs.

So don’t let your social media marketing strategy fall to the wayside or think of it as a completely separate enterprise from SEO.

10. Prioritize the Mobile Version of Your Site Over the Desktop Version

More and more people are forgoing desktops to perform searches. Now, the majority of people use mobile devices to conduct searches. That is why Google actually uses mobile-first indexing practices (aka Google prioritizes mobile versions of your site for search and indexing purposes).

One quick way to see if your site is friendly for mobile users? Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

11. Run Site Speed/Page Load Time Tests

It should come as no surprise that Google and other search platforms consider website speed to be an important SERP ranking factor.

A slow page load time typically insinuates a poor user experience, and search platforms are all about serving the best user experience (more on that below). How slow is too slow? More than three seconds, according to Google research.

That means you need to keep your site and page load speeds at or below three seconds to reduce the likelihood of high bounce rates. You should evaluate load times both independently and against the competition. This approach means you can better determine if improving site speed should be on your priority list.

There are several tools that both test site speed and provide a list of improvements. We prefer to use Google-produced tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights.

12. Optimize User Experience

Aside from website page speed, there are several other factors that search engines note as ranking factors, such as mobile-friendliness, usability, accessibility, and efficiency.

Simply put, search platforms reward you when you keep things simple. Good news: most platforms give you the tools to help you do just that. Google, for instance, provides several tools to increase your scoring on the Core Web Vitals report, which will tell you if your website provides a good or poor user experience.

The better the user experience, the higher your website will rank on the SERPs.

Let’s talk about Core Web Vitals a little more.

In May 2020, Google announced Core Web Vitals as a new way to judge the user-friendliness of a website. This update officially rolled out in 2021, establishing metrics that affect visibility in the SERPs.

The Core Web Vitals report ranks your website’s status as Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor for the following metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – The time it takes for the largest content to show up in full view on screen, starting from when the user clicks the link or types in the URL. This content is typically a hero image or video on the homepage. Google recommends your pages’ largest content show up in less than 2.5 seconds to be in good standing.
• First Input Delay (FID) – The time it takes for your website to respond to a user’s action on your site. For example, FID is the time it takes for your site to navigate to an internal page when a user clicks on an internal link. Google recommends less than 100 milliseconds between actions on-site.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – The amount of change between the current layout to a new page layout between navigation. Think of this metric as counting the time between jumping from your service page to a blog. If a page is changing its template design while a user is trying to interact with it, it is considered to be a poor user experience. If it is a large upheaval, Google will score your changes between 0-1, 1 being the most shifting and 0 being the least. Google recommends a score of less than 0.1.

After March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a core web vital metric type. INP, according to Google, is more comprehensive, and takes into account how much time it takes for a site to process and display all user interactions, not just the first.

• Learn more about Google’s Core Web Vitals update.
• Learn more about Google’s Helpful Content update.

How to Prioritize Technical SEO Audit Action Items

Every technical audit will look different. Expertly craft yours based on the following three factors.

1. Budget

Technical SEO requires several tools and a lot of patience to comb through every page and every line of code on your website. And, to be honest, it’s complicated.

Online SEO tools and software or hiring real people to handle larger projects is sometimes the best way to fully optimize your website. But these resources aren’t always cheap. This fact means you will have to pay for not only the tools and time but also for the knowledge and years of experience any hired SEO strategist has put in to quickly assess your website or troubleshoot issues.

2. Age of Website

Older websites typically have more authority in the eyes of Google than newer websites do. And more authority means a better chance to rank higher in SERPs. Technical SEO changes also usually show results much more quickly on a well-established site than a newer one. So, if your website can easily be optimized, then optimize what you already have.

Unfortunately, not every website is salvageable. In these cases, starting over from the ground up and making a new site with a stronger foundation is the solution your brand needs.

So frequently do we hear new clients complain about our initial suggestion, “time for a new website.” We promise we’re not just saying that to sell you a new website—that’s slimy and that’s not Digital Strike.

The fact of the matter is that websites these days are different from those of the past. Technology has changed, making the launch of a brand-new website quicker and easier than ever. You’d be surprised how starting over can improve your current website’s performance!

3. Time

How much time you have is perhaps the single-most important resource you have to consider during an audit. More time means you can comb through the site for nitpicky details. Less time means you have to focus on only the big-ticket items like page speed and redirects.

Whether you’re a senior marketing manager or an entry-level SEO content writer, everyone needs to consider the technical soundness of their website. These small tasks can help your website get thousands to millions of impressions.