SEO Marketing can seem stressful because SEO is never static. The rules of search engine optimization are constantly changing, but some things always stay the same. Those are the most important things to focus on. If you want to get your website to where you want it to be, there’s no way of doing it without SEO. Website owners ignore the role of SEO and ranking factors at your peril.

But what is SEO marketing? And why should you spend time on it? We’re going to cover all that below, then we will be discussing the SEO ranking factors that you need to know if you’re going to make your website as successful as it can be.

It might seem complicated at first, but we’ll break it down and make it easy for you to understand, even if you’re a beginner in the world of SEO. So, read on, and let’s start with something simple:

1- What is SEO Marketing?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO Marketing is all about a constant process of optimization to enhance your website’s search engine ranking, first to rank high and then continue ranking high. It’s the practice of improving the quality of the traffic to your website via search engine results pages and the quantity of traffic.

What’s meant by quality is that you want the visitors to be clicking on links to your sites for the right reasons. You want your website’s visitors to arrive organically and stay on your website.

If they visit and immediately realize you’re not offering what they thought you were, those visits were worthless to you. Even more, they negatively impact your website by increasing its bounce rate.

There are ad-driven visits that come from people using search engine adverts. But organic traffic is any traffic you don’t have to pay for. This is usually what people are talking about when they talk about SEO.

2- What is Ranking?

SEO is about ensuring that your pages rank as high as possible on a search engine’s results pages. A top ranking will mean that when people search for a particular term, a link to your web page will be the first result on the search engine results page.

Roughly half of all clicks on search engine results pages go to the top 3 results. That shows just how important achieving a high rank is if you want to increase visits successfully and, ultimately, sales on your website. To hit it home, 95% of people never click through to the second page of results.

3- How Does Google Work and What is it Looking For? 

Google works by crawling the web and indexing pages. They add optimized pages to their index and catalog them. This is their ranking process and enables them to present what they believe to be the best search results to their users when they search for particular terms.

There are various factors that Google says it checks for when ranking pages. These factors include the purpose of the page, its authority, trustworthiness, and expertise, as well as the amount of content and reputation of the website and its creator. That’s a basic overview of the things that matter but you’ll learn much more below.

4- Monitoring Search Engine Rankings

Improving your SEO ranking is key, but you first need to understand where you’re at right now. You can use Google in incognito mode to search for specific terms and see where your content appears. That’s the easiest way to see an accurate ranking for your pages without Google offering personalized results.

Other software gives you more tools for showing how you rank for various keywords. These keyword position tracking tools are invaluable if you’re serious about improving your ranking over time. Start with the tools offered by SEMRush if you want to use some.

5- Important SEO Ranking Factors

Now we’ve covered the basics of what SEO is, we’re going to look at the most essential SEO ranking factors, and we’ve broken them down into three categories. These are the three types of ranking factors that matter most, and they can’t be ignored if your website is going to reach the heights you want it to reach. Off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO all matter.

6- Off Page SEO

A big part of off-page SEO is link building. It’s about how your website is promoted and how people find it. This can include how it’s promoted via a social media marketing strategy. And it’s also about ensuring you have the correct links in place from authoritative sources.

Off-page SEO is important because it tells the search engines how the wider world views your content. If many high-quality links to your website are in place, it tells the search engine that other people respect this content and find value in it. And that means it’ll be more likely to rank higher.

Here are the most important off-page SEO ranking factors that you should know about it:

• Domains linking to your website
• Sources of linking pages
• Page rank of linking pages
• Relevance of those links
• Homepage links
• Authority of linking domains
• Diversity of links
• Contextual links
• Social media marketing

7- On-Page SEO

As the name suggests, on-page SEO refers to all the things that happen on your website and what you can do to ensure your content is optimized. As well as applying to the content on your website, it’s also referring to how the website’s underlying code is optimized.

On-page SEO is within your control. You don’t have to worry about other sites linking to yours; you simply have to get the things on your website right, such as the content, internal links, and things like that. That’s why there’s no excuse for getting on-page SEO wrong.

If you’re unsure of where to start and which things come under the umbrella of on-page SEO, here are the most important on-page SEO ranking factors:

• Content that supplies a demand
• Linkable content
• Title tags
• A URL that shows the hierarchy of the page’s information
• Image alt text
• Link back to the category or subcategory page
• Image link at the top that links back to the homepage

8- Technical SEO

Your site won’t even rank in many instances if you have big problems blocking the work done by search engines. Therefore, technical SEO is fundamental to your website’s ability to rank. Website owners must understand this and pay attention to these issues.

Here are the most important aspects and factors relating to technical SEO:

• Whether your website is mobile-optimized
• Load times
• Links returning Error 404
• The presence of duplicate content
• Metadata optimization
• .txt files

A Comprehensive Guide: What is SEO marketing?

As you can see, there are lots of different ranking factors that’ll have an impact on your SEO success going forward. Off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO are all important in their own unique ways. Any search engine optimization approach should take each of those three types of ranking factors into account.

When you formulate an approach that ticks all the right boxes and considers these ranking factors, you can help your pages rank higher. You have to tailor your approach to how Google and other search engines operate because that’s the only way to rank #1.

So, if you’re ever wondering what SEO marketing is again, simply refer to the guide above.