Search Engine Optimization – Factors and components of your website that can help you rank on top in search results for targeted keywords on search engines such as Google and Bing.
SEO is a meticulous process of:
- Placing various technical components on your website which are factors in Google’s Search Results Algorithm or other search engine’s algos.
- Setting up off page SEO components to build authority and bring relevant users and traffic to your website
What are the benefits of great SEO optimization?
- Awareness and Reach without ad spend or cost
- Organic (Unpaid) traffic and users
- Capture “Brand” keywords traffic at no cost
- Optimize for multiple keywords and products
- Build authority & identity nearby physical location of your business
The important question is: Where to begin with SEO optimization of your website?
SEO optimization begins by understanding the goals of your business. The most important factor to be kept in mind is what are your customers or users looking for? If your webpage is selling hair oil then your customers are looking for hair oil, hair fall remedies, hair loss, hair shampoo, dandruff or may be baldness. These are the key focus phrases for your business and thus your SEO. In short, your SEO starts with content & keywords related to your business and therefore, your website or page.
Now from here on we move towards the technical side of SEO and will discuss the reasons and thought process of your website visitors and thus probable customers.
- Speed of the website – People don’t like to wait, thus the loading time of your website has to be lightening fast
- User Experience (UI/UX) – The experience of users when they surf through your website. The ease of finding what they are looking for and the flow or how your website guides them through the buying process or completing a goal on your website helps in building user engagement and building your business. Thus, this is another tech factor for your website.
- No disruption – People don’t like disruptions. They want the buying process to be smooth. So do not put any intrusive pop ups unless extremely necessary.
- Authenticity, Transparency & Knowledge Imparted (part of content) – People like to know more about what they are searching for and what they are buying. Provide them with all relevant info to help them make faster and better decisions
Based on the above, we have the following components of a website’s technical or on-page SEO:
| 1 | Meta Data, OG Tags & Hreflang | Meta Title, Meta Description, Location, Language and all other meta tags |
| 2 | Schema/Structured Data | organization, Category, product level schema |
| 3 | Page Speed – Mobile focused | Hosting, ping response, size, images, FCP, TTI, DOM Load, CSS, Java Rendering, HTTP2 etc |
| 4 | On-page content, Keywords & Cannibalization | The keywords relevant to your business and are searched by the users of your website |
| 5 | Core Web Vitals | Real time stats of page speed |
| 6 | url Structure | how urls are built |
| 7 | Sitemap | uploading site map in html and xml formats to search engines |
| 8 | UI/UX & Responsiveness | Contrast, readability, button sizes, transitions and more. Material design & RAIL model |
| 9 | 30x, 40x & 50x errors | page availability, canonicals, content caching, multiple hosting |
| 10 | Pop Ups & Forwarding | not to have disruptive popups, no automated forwarding of the page |
| 11 | Crawl Quota & Indexing | all pages should be indexed and keep checking for availability of crawl quota |
| 12 | GA Stats – CTR, Dwell Time, Bounce Rate, Pages Visited etc | CTR shows content relevance to search query, Dwell time & bounce rate show content quality |
| 13 | Canonicals | Content duplication should be marked for search engines |
| 14 | Authority of Authors | EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness |
| 15 | API Requests | limited API request result in faster page load times |
| 16 | Link Structure | Internal link structure of a website. All pages should be reachable in max 4 clicks |
| 17 | Cloaking | do not hide content in html or same color as background |
| 18 | SSL, Encryption, Search Console Verification, Facebook Domain Verification and https Security | Verifying ownership & security of domain across all search engines and social networks |
| 19 | Reports | GTMetrix, Page Speed Insights, Lighthouse Report |
| 20 | Accessibility | Robots.txt and indexing tags |
After setting up and measuring the on-page SEO components of your website, we now move towards off-page components. Off-page SEO is any SEO optimization done outside of your website or webpage. These factors focus on authenticity and identity of your business. They help your business to be present where your users might be searching for you, related keywords or finding knowledge related to your website’s targeted keywords.
These factors are part of Google’s algorithm that focuses on finding more information about your business to find the authenticity of your business. It also includes components which include listening to the real users and customers by including factors such as Rating and Reviews about the business on Google or other aggregator websites and directories.
Now we list down the components of off-page SEO. Make sure that you have all these components covered for your business while you path your way to the top of Google’s search results.
| 1 | Listings | GMB, Google Maps Tag, Apple Maps, Bing Listing |
| 2 | Citations | Social Pages, Links and Citations to website |
| 3 | Directories & Aggregators | Listing in industry or business directories/aggregator websites helps with authority |
| 4 | Backlinks | Quality backlinks from other websites to your website |
| 5 | Blogs | Blogs for content, being up to date and refined targeting |
| 6 | Referrals | Backlinks via referral sites or directories etc |
| 7 | Forums | Quora, Reddit etc – targeting content on these forums to bring traffic to website |
| 8 | Social Bookmarking | People saving your webpages as bookmarks shows content authority |
| 9 | Reviews & Ratings | Trustworthiness of your business |
| 10 | PR & Influencer Marketing | Helps bring more traffic to site thus impacting SEO progressively |
Finally, there is a small part of off-page SEO which deals with the hyperlocal component of a business. If your business is a local establishment such as a hotel, restaurant, saloon, or you are a professional such as lawyer, plumber etc, then you should surely cover all hyperlocal components of your business.
We have all these factors listed for you below:
| 1 | GMB & Listing | posting, listing, services, areas and more |
| 2 | Local Metatags | Services, Areas, Postcodes, coordinates etc in meta tags & Schema |
| 3 | Citations & Social Pages | same as SEO |
| 4 | FAQs, Reviews & Knowledge Graph | Same as SEO |
| 5 | Directories & Aggregators | Yelp, TripAdvisor etc |
| 6 | Maps & APIs | Same as SEO |
| 7 | Geofencing & CB Messages | Not in use anymore |
Waiting for your business to rank on top of Google Search Results? Get help from experts
Mindless (www.mindless.in) is a digital martech agency that helps businesses with their technology & marketing requirements. With our comprehensive checklists and detailed processes, we are able to quickly and flawlessly integrate technologies for optimizing resource requirements and automating recursive processes, thus improving efficiency and turn around times.
Seamlessly implement these bulletproof digital SEO strategies at low cost with Mindless.
Our team members have worked with over 100 hotels & 350 restaurant clients to build their online business, scaling some of them by 500% in one year. We provide beautiful and efficient SEO optimized websites for more organic exposure and revenue. We take care of their social media presence of our hotel clients and also create their awareness using advertisement channels.
Feel free to reach us on ceo@mindless.in for all the digital requirements of your business.