You’re now ready to plunge headfirst into the world of SEO. It’s difficult to learn SEO if you are new. It’s easy to spend years learning everything, with many moving parts. There will be frustrating errors along the way.
We’ve compiled this list to make your life easier.
1. Instant Results Are Not Possible
It cannot be avoided. We want results immediately in this day and age. You will have to face the harsh reality that SEO does not happen overnight or in a matter of weeks. It will take several months for the changes to become visible.
Even after a few months, the difference is minimal. To reap the best SEO results you must keep at it for years. The combination of persistence in implementing your SEO strategy, and the overall growth of your website will yield the best results.
It’s not only consistency that matters, but also making sure your SEO strategy is comprehensive. SEO covers many factors and strategies that can affect your overall ranking.
Be wary of companies that promise quick results if you outsource your SEO needs. These claims by SEO agencies are likely to be black hat tactics that will damage your website and rank ability.
2. The Other Half of the Coin is Technical SEO
Many SEO information on the internet focuses on on-page and offline factors but completely ignores technical SEO. This is not the most exciting aspect of SEO and can be quite technical.
Technical SEO is simply about improving the speed at which search engine spiders can crawl your site. A website with broken links or a poorly structured site will slow down search engine spiders and result in lower rankings.
Search engines and readers are concerned about how fast your content loads. Consider the last time you clicked on any website that took more than 10 seconds to load. Did you stay on the site while it slowly loaded or did the page go blank and you moved on to the next one?
Google discovered that 53% of website visitors abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. Slow sites not only hurt your SEO ranking but also lose valuable traffic.
All this being said, you can outsource the work to an agency or freelancer if your skills are not in-depth. You risk ignoring its importance.
3. Mobile Optimization Importance
More people are using their smartphones to access the internet than ever before. People are conducting more searches on their phones as a result. Google actually reported that almost 60% of global searches are made from mobile devices.
Google is announcing that mobile optimization will be an important SEO factor. It is essential that your website is mobile- and desktop-ready if you wish to rank well.
Think back to the last time you visited a website that was not optimized for mobile devices. It is likely that you were met with unreadable text and non-clickable icons, which immediately made a poor first impression. Search engines do not like mobile-only sites.
4. Backlinks aren’t going away
It is easy to focus on the most exciting SEO factors while neglecting the more mundane ones like backlink building. Although backlinks were always an important factor, search engines such as Google have dramatically changed how they rank websites. Backlinks now rank high in the top SEO factors.
Backlinks are signals to search engines that the content is informative and high-quality. They are now more focused on providing authoritative, targeted content that is high-quality and relevant to users.
If your content meets these standards, then you will naturally get more backlinks. Backlinks, in essence, are a vote to approve that your content is useful and valuable to readers.
Although it may seem daunting at first to search for backlinks on your own, you will soon see the benefits.
5. Content is King
As we have already mentioned, the content remains the SEO king. You used to be capable of producing mediocre content with keywords a few years back. Today, this is not the case. Google wants its users to have high-quality, useful content.
It’s going to improve your SEO greatly if you produce a steady stream of quality content. It’s not only the content’s quality but also its length. Research reveals that the most highly ranked content is just under 2,000 words.
It may seem daunting to write articles this long if you aren’t used to it. But you will soon get the hang of it. You can cover the topic in greater detail and provide the value Google seeks.
This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Lux Digital Marketing, a St Petersburg SEO company. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients achieve the #1 position on Google in several different industries.
