Proliferation

The greats in any field — whether they’re Olympians or mathematicians — might be gifted with some talents that others might not have, but at their core, they’re people just like you and I who spend their days and nights practicing, theorizing and outworking their competition.

The same has to be done for those who want to succeed in the SEO industry. You have to outpace your competitors, and you have to always find innovative answers to the impossible question. As the #1 digital advertising agency in Utah, we know a thing or two about dominating the SEO field.

Never Stop Studying and Strategizing

SEO is constantly changing. It’s still a newborn in the advertising field, so those that hold the keys to all of SEO’s abilities, like Google, are still trying to figure out what’s the best way to utilize the tool for brands and companies in Utah and beyond. The best way to keep up to date with changing search engine trends is by following the blogs that are navigating where the industry is going. Blogs like Google Webmaster Central, Search Engine Land, Moz Blog and SEMrush Blog are all crucial to helping you how to approach your next SEO strategy.

Understand What Is and Isn’t Working in SEO

Quick rule of thumb about SEO: Never trust your feelings, only the numbers. As I mentioned before, search engine optimization is a new field, so it’s important to trust the numbers over your past experiences.

Visiting SEMrush’s winners and losers report will help you get a better understanding of how certain website are able to build a large audience just because of their search engine presence.

Talk Is Cheap. Work Is Priceless.

It’s crucial to implement a strategy on how you’ll approach your brand’s search engine potential, but you can’t spend countless days theorizing the best approach. Sometimes the best way to succeed in SEO is by strategizing, implementing, failing and repeating. After a strategy or two, you’ll start to see some sort of success, but if you don’t, it might be best to go back to the previous steps, and see where you might’ve gone wrong. Keep your SEO actions consistent by developing a plan and timeline that you commit to.

Don’t Settle in Your Success: Break The Glass Ceiling

This tip is vital. If you follow the previous steps, you’re on the right path to SEO success, but if you stay satisfied with that success, you’ll become stagnant. Success is fleeting, especially in the shifting landscape of marketing. Take your success and invest it in resources and strategies that will make you even more successful.

If you go your entire life not seeing “Field of Dreams” then you’ve wasted your life.

Harsh, but accurate.

“Field of Dreams” was a pop culture phenomenon that still holds some resonance today thanks to its meme-tastic quote: “If you build it, they will come.” That quote is a good streamlined metaphor for how some SEO agencies treat their online presence. If you build good content, then people will come to your website.

That’s unfortunately become an oversimplification of what’s needed to help build your SEO potential, especially if you’re looking for your brand to reach beyond the nearest borders in your surrounding Utah neighborhood. Good content is vital, but so are a few other factors.

First, Let’s Define, “Good”

We can get all philosophical and existential on you, but we’ll keep to the basics of “good” content. It needs to be unique, useful, entertaining, and relevant. That’s just the bare bones of what good content is, and you need a lot more than just those factors in order to make any dent in a search engine’s rankings. But before we jump into the more technical stuff, it is important to emphasize that good content is essential to SEO potential, it’s just not the only factor.

Getting Your Content Shared

In a perfect world, only the best content online would get shared, and you’d be known as the SEO Guru because your content is just so good that people are dying to share your next inspired thought. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. We live in the world of Buzzfeed lists and Grumpy Cat movies, and it’s hard to get any other kind of content shared.

It’s hard, but it’s crucial. If Google’s algorithm sees your content is being shared, then it will place you higher in a search engine’s rankings. There’s a lot of different strategies on how to get your content shared on social media and on other sites, and it’s a good idea to see which one best suits your brand. A relatively common strategy though is to simply ask people to share your content. That strategy can work, but it’s important that your shares and links are always organic.

The Tech Behind Content

Template sites like WordPress give you a good foundation for spreading your content, but you need to make sure that your site has an extensive and updated sitemap, created metadata and title tags, intricate site security and exceptional site speed. Google and other search engines take these factors into consideration when they figure out where your content should rank. Your good content won’t do anything for your SEO potential if your website is riddled with toxic links, slow load times and convoluted site navigation.

Look Out Into The Future

It’s going to take you a while to become a notable presence on SEO. While you’re waiting for that to happen though, you need to ask yourself important questions about your content. You need to figure out who your audience is, what keywords you want to rank in, and how your content can be integrated in other parts of your brand’s campaign.

Think of good content as dirt. Dirt’s essential. Kevin Costner needed dirt to build his baseball field in “Field of Dreams.” He needed the proper tools though to turn that dirt into something more than just dirt. That’s what your content needs also: tools to turn it into something more.

One might think that SEO has been around since the inception of the Internet, but in reality, SEO has only existed since search engines and marketing came together to create their proverbial lovechild. Search engine optimization, or SEO, helps connect marketers with consumers who might be interested in their particular product.

Generally, SEO does this well: Google and Bing don’t typically point you toward a basketball website when you’re searching for cats up for adoption in Utah, for instance. This is where your SEO company comes in — an SEO company can help you optimize your SEO and get your company out on the market. But before we go into that, take a look at the evolution of SEO — understanding the history of SEO may help you better understand what SEO is, and what it can do.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization refers to the process of procuring increased organic (non-paid) traffic to your webpage from major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!

The more effort is put into optimizing a webpage for search engines, the more likely that webpage is to rank among the first page of search results for a particular set of search terms. For digital marketing companies, this is the end goal — a high-ranking, authoritative webpage that brings in traffic from all corners of the internet, whether consumers are searching from their homes in Utah or European coffee shops.

So How Does SEO Work, Exactly?

Let’s start with search engines. Search engines have two major functions: crawling the internet for information and indexing said information, and providing search users with the most relevant webpages according to their chosen search terms.

Search engine crawlers (or “spiders”) accomplish this by first gathering a backlog of information on the world’s websites. Search engine crawlers will take into account a site’s written content, overall site organization, URL structure, site elements, ALT attributes, rich media and more. All of this information helps search engines better understand what a webpage is about.

Search engine crawlers also gather information by way of links; if a number of webpages related to a particular topic all link to one external webpage that’s related, the webpage that is the destination of those links is determined to be the most authoritative of them all — and therefore the most likely to show up on the search results for that topic.

Say for example someone performs a search for “restaurants in Utah,” the search engine crawlers would go through millions of webpages and mazes of links related to “restaurants” and “Utah” until they come up with the most relevant and authoritative results for that search query. Getting your webpage into one of those top results is the purpose of SEO.

SEO Is for Humans and Search Engines Alike

Despite its name, SEO isn’t only important for search engines. Often, optimizing a webpage for search engines and optimizing a webpage for human visitors are one and the same.

A well-optimized webpage will do one of three things: provide a transaction, such as purchasing a particular product, provide information, such as the best restaurants in Utah, or simply exist as a destination to which people are trying to navigate. Not only that, a webpage that employs good SEO will accomplish one of these three things well, making the experience as smooth as possible for the consumer.

In the end, the webpage that accomplishes the searcher’s goal in the best and most efficient way will be the webpage that sits on the iron throne of the search rankings.