If you’re dipping your toes into the world of marketing to launch and better promote your brand and your business, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO” bandied about. SEO is one of the key fundamentals of online marketing, so if you want to grow your business, implementing the current SEO strategies is one of the best ways to do so. Here, we’ve broken down some of the basics of SEO to get you started on your journey.

What Is SEO?

SEO is short for “search engine optimization”. This refers to the process of optimizing your website to rank better on search engines, such as Google. When people search for a keyword, such as ‘low back pain from shoveling snow’, by utilizing SEO practices, you can get your page or article about that to show up in the first few pages of Google search results. At its core, SEO is how you increase the visibility of your website.

SEO isn’t purely about optimizing your website, though. It also involves other aspects of digital marketing, from the user experience, to web development, to the design of the content, to your branding, to content marketing, and much, much more. Thus, in order to have a high-ranking site in the search engines, you need to have excellent digital marketing practices as a whole, in addition to SEO expertise.

How Google Ranks Content

Google ranks your content in multiple ways, and to be successful at SEO, you’ll need to understand how this works. In order to rank well, you’ll need high-quality, original, and relevant information on your site’s pages that relate to what the searcher looked up. Google determines how relevant your content is through having “crawlers” evaluate it based on the keywords (like ‘low back pain’) within the page and whether or not the majority of the page’s content is just copy and pasted from another site or if it’s something quality and new.

Quality is also determined by how many sites link to your own, and the quality of those sites. If a reputable website links to yours, this will tell Google that your content is high quality and relevant. If a little personal blog that no other site has linked to links to yours, this won’t help your rankings. You’ll want links within your content too, to prove it can be trusted. These include .govs, .edus, and .orgs.

How long people stay on your site will also inform Google how relevant it is to the search result, as will how quickly your site loads and whether or not it is mobile friendly. The way Google ranks content is ever-changing, though, so in order to maintain a high-ranking in search results, you’ll need to stay on top of new and emerging tactics.

How To Build Your SEO Strategy

There are several key steps that you can take to build an effective SEO strategy. They are as follows:

Create your list of keywords
Study Google’s first page – what are the highest ranking results doing?
Create something new, better, and/or different from what’s already out there
Add a hook, which is why people link to specific types of content
Optimize your on-page SEO (keywords, internal, and external links)
Optimize for searchers (make sure it matches search intent)
Up your content design with pictures, graphics, charts, banners, and more, so it’s more interesting to look at and easier to read and understand
Audit your site
Be continuously improving and updating your content to meet current SEO standards

Keeping Up With Changing SEO Standards

Something that frustrates even the professionals is how SEO is an ever-changing practice that you need to stay on top of in order to continue seeing good results. What got your site to the first page of Google searches years ago will make it practically invisible now. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms which means that you need to be learning constantly and stay on top of all the latest changes. SEO is complex enough already, the last thing you need is to complicate it even more through utilizing strategies that no longer work. Staying informed will help you know what tactics to add to your strategy and what to toss.

Keeping up with changing SEO standards can feel like a never-ending race because it is. In order to stay ahead of the rest of the pack, you’ll need to both understand and keep track of: up and coming trends, new features in search tools and products, your audience, and the latest technological advances. Luckily, there are professionals who can help you out.

Do You Need Help With SEO?

Performance Driven Marketing has SEO experts in house who can help you increase the visibility of your website and generate more organic traffic. We want to help you get more customers and garner a stronger online presence. In addition to our professional SEO services, we can help you with web development, graphic design, and more. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your business.

When it comes to your business, it’s virtually impossible to achieve success without a good internet presence. Having a sleek logo and a beautiful website will draw people to you, but you also need high quality content in order to make them stay. A beautiful website can only do so much if your content writing is subpar. Having well-written content is essential for growing your business online.

While it may seem as though content writing is something anyone can do, there’s a reason why so many businesses outsource their content writing to professionals. Here’s what you need to know about how professional content writing helps businesses.

#1. Save Time

If you’re not already familiar with how to write content for a website and content that both Google and potential clients will approve of, you’ll greatly benefit from hiring a professional content writer. Rather than spending valuable time trying to learn, having professionals do the content writing for you will help save you time. Even if you do know how to write content for websites, chances are, if you’re starting a business, there’s a lot on your plate. Outsourcing will allow you to focus on other aspects of your business and ensuring customer satisfaction.

#2. Improve Readership

Too often, you’ll find websites with very minimal content. While this can work in some cases, in most, people want to actually learn about what it is you offer and what services you can provide. If they don’t find that, they’ll click away. Professional writers know how to write about what you do in a way that matches your business’s personality and answers your customers’ questions.

When you use content writers for your business, you’ll be able to have website content that isn’t just merely readable, but actually informative and written in a way for people to want to share it and come back to your website to learn more. Content writing helps businesses by boosting their website content’s readership with content that people want to read and learn more from.

#3. Increase Google Ranking

Even if you are a fantastic writer, that doesn’t necessarily mean your website content will rank well on Google search results. This is because content writing isn’t just about writing itself, it’s also about optimizing for SEO and integrating keywords in a natural way. Content writers know how to create engaging content that also ranks well, improving your business’s Google ranking. You don’t want a beautifully written article that research went into to go unseen. Content writers utilize their knowledge of Google and SEO to boost your viewership, so that the content on your website will get read.

For example, did you know that Google penalizes copied content or content that isn’t up to its standards? It’s true. Fresh, original content that has images, an appropriate amount of internal and external links and keyword usage, and meets word count requirements does better because it shows Google that your content writing is relevant, and thus, Google ranks your website higher in search engine results. Content writing helps businesses a lot through working with current and ever-changing SEO standards and strategies to make sure you get seen.

#4. Create A Brand Voice

You know when you click onto a site and can immediately get a sense of what working with that business would probably be like? Content writing plays a big role in this. Some people like their website content to be both fun and professional, so you might have some sass sprinkled into the cold hard facts. Others want a more chatty tone, while others prefer to stick with a professional voice.

Content writers can work to match the voice of your existing content or with you in order to come up with one that is right for you, your business, and your targeted audience. It’s important in content writing to consider both the business and the target audience, because that affects the tone of your writing. Content writing helps businesses by creating a brand voice for your company that suits it and its goals.

#5. Bring Life To Your Site

Standards of what makes a website good are constantly changing. What looked good a decade ago looks terrible now. It’s important to stay on top of the ever-changing trends. Content writing is no exception. Your content should be informative, engaging, and optimized, but not bulky or sparse. Websites that have a good amount of content and blogs that are written to standard will garner more traffic, because people will want to stay on your site to click around and learn more.

Are You Ready To Help Your Business?

Performance Driven Marketing understands the impact content can have on a business. We have several professional content writers in house who can make your website come alive with your voice and lure potential customers in. Let us be your solution for your writing needs. Contact us today to learn more about how content writing helps businesses, or about any of our other marketing services.

Google is constantly rolling out updates to their SEO algorithms. One consistent way that you might have heard in order to maintain SEO success in the long run is through utilizing the E-A-T principle. E-A-T is fairly divisive in the SEO community. There are those who say it’s an SEO fundamental, and then there are those who say it really doesn’t matter for your rankings at all. Let’s take a look into what E-A-T does and what Google has to say about whether or not it really matters for the SEO rankings of your website.

What Is E-A-T?

Sometimes known as page quality, E-A-T is what Google says that every page needs in order to be high quality, and is what human evaluators use in order to determine how relevant a page is to the search results for its keywords. Basically, E-A-T is what Google uses in order to determine just how legitimate the information on your site is, by ensuring that all of the content on it is made with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

It mostly applies to websites that fall into the “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) category, aka “future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety,” as Google defines it. So essentially, sites that are medical, legal, financial, that give advice about important topics, and likely sites that sell products. If people need to be able to trust you and know that the information on your site matches what your site is about, you need to ensure you take E-A-T into consideration in order to be a high-quality site. After all, you wouldn’t trust information about medications on a clothing site, would you?

How Is E-A-T Evaluated?

While expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness may sound like interchangeable terms, the differences are important.

E = Expertise

Expertise means that you have a high level of knowledge and skill in a certain field, that you are an expert in it. When people search for content with expertise, they’re looking for content that was made by an expert in that field. For some websites, this is more important than others. For example, when it comes to the medical, legal, or financial fields, you’ll want that information to come from a certified professional. Some websites are able to have their content written by someone who is not an expert in the field, so long as it is approved and verified to be true and accurate by someone who is.

In some cases, expertise isn’t defined by the amount of formal education that someone has had in a field, but rather their life experiences. One such instance of this would be someone writing about what it’s like to live with a disease, or someone writing about something that they have a lot of experience with, which isn’t in the medical, legal, or financial fields.

A = Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness refers to your reputation and how likely people are to use you as a source of information. You may claim that you are an expert in your field, but Google needs to be able to back this up. It does this by looking to see your rating, how often people go to you for information, how trustworthy said information it is, and making sure that it’s not just you claiming you have authority on a certain topic, but that other people agree with that statement and utilize you as a source of information. For example, if exterior authoritative sites link out to yours, this tells Google that you’re a reputable source of information, and they’ll rank your site higher.

T = Trustworthiness

This refers to just how trustworthy your entire website is from who is writing the content to the content itself to the site as a whole. You want your site to be legit, accurate, and transparent. You need your information to be fact-based, not opinion-based, and to cite other established trustworthy sites within your content. Linking out to a .gov or .org or brand site is a great way to do this. If you mention dental work, linking to the ADA (American Dental Association) tells people that they can trust what you said.

Is E-A-T Actually Important?

It is important, especially when it comes to information that impacts people’s lives. You want your content to be accurate and true to avoid misleading people and resulting in real-life consequences. While E-A-T isn’t something that can be directly measured, like say, how many times keywords pop up in your website content, it is utilized to promote high quality, original content.

If you’ve worked in SEO, chances are that you’ve heard the phrase: “Content is king.” This means that creating high quality content is essential in order for your website to rank better, as if your site just repeats what others say, if it has information that doesn’t match what the site is about, if it isn’t trustworthy and people don’t go to you for information, your website won’t rank well. E-A-T is a guideline that gives insight into what high quality content means.

So, while E-A-T isn’t something that can be directly measured, it can impact your SEO ranking. E-A-T provides SEO professionals with a way to inform their content making process in order to ensure that the content they make is high quality that people will be able to turn to and trust, and ergo can potentially boost your SEO rankings.

Do You Need Help With High Quality Content For SEO?

Performance Driven Marketing makes a point of crafting beautiful websites with top quality content. We use CopyScape in order to ensure that the content we make is original, and know how to optimize your content for SEO. We value transparency, honesty, and legitimacy. If you need help with the content or SEO ranking of your website, we offer professional SEO and content writing services. Contact us today to learn more!

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