Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial component of your digital marketing strategy. SEO is a set of tactics designed to drive traffic to your website organically from search engines such as Google, Bing and YouTube. The goal is to improve your website’s position in search results because the higher your website shows up in search, the more visible it will be for users.

At CIPR Communications, we always talk about SEO as a 3-legged stool because there are three main pillars that need to be worked on to produce optimal results: on-page activities, off-page activities, and technical SEO. These three components of your search engine optimization program need to be monitored and maintained monthly. Keep reading to learn more about the different SEO types and how our team of experts can implement a strategy for your business.

On-page SEO Activities

The first step in optimizing for search is to optimize the pages and content on your website. On-page SEO activities set your website up properly so that it can be crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines. Factors affecting on-page SEO include:

• Core Web Vitals
• Page and Site Speed
• Content Quality: readability, accuracy, and relevance.
• Mobile Friendliness 
• Page/HTML Titles: H1 – Main keywords and subject. H2 – Break up of content using similar keywords from H1. H3 – Subcategories, further break up of content.
• Meta Descriptions: A summary of the content on a specific page.
• Alt Text: An invisible description of an image for users who are blind or visually impaired by a screen reader (audio).
• Internal Linking: Any link from one page of your website to another.
• Navigation: A collection of the most valuable and search content on your website that is easily accessible to the user.

Off-page SEO Activities

Once on-page optimizations have been completed, you’re ready to move to off-page SEO activities. Off-page SEO activities include all things that need to happen off your website to improve how your website shows up on search engine results pages (SERP). Off-page activities signal to Google that your website has valuable content by endorsements from another websites, which are called links.

There are several ways to perform off-page SEO activities including guest posting, social media posting, content marketing, social bookmarking, and directory submissions. All of the above mentioned tactics support what is called link building.

Link building or backlinks plays a major role in your website’s domain ranking, which is a metric that search engines use to determine both how many backlinks your website has and how good the quality of those backlinks are.

Backlinks are links from other websites leading back to yours and they are often described as “votes of confidence” for the content on your website – essentially, the better the content on your website, the more likely that other websites will link to your content. Search engines therefore look at backlinks as an indication that your site has quality content worth linking to and since search engines want to point their users to quality content that answers their questions, the number and quality of backlinks that point to your site helps them determine which sites they should serve up to searchers . These backlinks boost your website authority, creating awareness and driving traffic. Backlinks can also be called referral traffic on Google Analytics.

Technical SEO

Another critical step in your strategy is technical SEO. Now that on-page content has been optimized, it is ready for crawling, indexing, and ranking. Technical SEO is focused on making sure that your website’s code is clean and that your server is optimized so that it can be easily crawled and properly indexed.

Crawling refers to search engines sending out crawlers to comb through websites looking for new and updated content. Indexing refers to the storage and organization of that content. Once this content has been stored, it can be served up by search engines in response to queries. If your content is deemed highly valuable and your technical SEO is properly set up, your pages will rank higher in search results.

Although these are three steps in implementing your SEO strategy, SEO is an ongoing process. With search engine algorithms continuously changing, SEO strategies need to be reviewed and updated regularly. If you’re interested in an SEO digital audit, book a meeting with our SEO expert today.