SEO can be complex, and often overly complex. It’s easy to get lost in the SEO rabbit hole and end up spending a lot of time with minimal results.
This article will help you cut through the distractions and focus on the four main pillars of SEO that will help you improve your visibility in 2024 and beyond.
Four pillars of SEO
The four main areas of SEO that site owners should consider are:
- Technical SEO: How well your content is crawled and indexed.
- content: Provide the most relevant and best answers to your prospects’ questions.
- On-site SEO: Content and HTML optimization.
- Offsite SEO: Build authority to increase trust and rankings.
By following these four SEO pillars, you can increase your visibility, traffic, and engagement from organic search.
1. Technical SEO
Technical SEO can seem a little daunting. However, it is necessary so that search engines can read your content and explore your site.
Much of this is handled by the content management system you’re using. Google’s Search Console also helps you understand the technical structure of your site.
The main areas to consider here are:
- crawl: Can search engines explore my site?
- Indexing: Is it clear which pages search engines should index?
- cell phone: Does your site offer a stable mobile experience?
- speed: Do web pages load fast on mobile, desktop, etc?
- technology: Is your website search engine friendly?
- hierarchy: Is the content organized in a way that helps with categorization?
If you’re a small business using WordPress (or a similar CMS) for your website, technical SEO should be a quick check off your list. For large bespoke websites with millions of pages, technical SEO becomes more important (and tedious).
From 2024 onwards, much of “technical SEO” will actually be part of websites and CMSs. The key is to work with a developer who understands SEO principles and who will build a well-structured, SEO-friendly website. Doing this should give you most of the path to effective SEO.
Note: If you are a small or micro business, don’t get too hung up on this or feel like everything has to be perfect. Good luck, because there are still a lot of sites that are doing basically the wrong thing and still rank high.
2. On-site SEO
Once your technical SEO is in good shape, you need to optimize your site’s content.
Structure optimization
Your first job here is to make sure your site is structured in a way that Google can understand how all your pages are related. Think of your website as a filing cabinet. Websites are cabinets, sections are drawers, and pages are folders within those drawers.
If you draw this structure on the back of a napkin, you should be able to see how everything is related.
- House
- service
- location
- team
- Department
- Team member A
- Team member B
- Department
- Case Study
- Case study A
- Case study B
- About us
- contact
You understand the big picture – and hopefully Google does too. By structuring your site this way, you provide context to your pages before Google inspects them and sets the scene for the pages themselves to be optimized.
Page-level optimization
With a smart structure in place, you can optimize each individual page.
The main areas to focus on here are:
- Keyword research: Understand the language of your target audience.
- Descriptive URL: Make sure each URL is simple and understandable.
- page title: Use keywords naturally within page titles.
- meta description: Write your meta description like ad copy to increase click-through rates.
- Content optimization: Use keywords and variations wisely in your page copy.
- User experience (UX): Make sure your site is easy to use and navigate.
- A powerful call to action: Make it easy for users to understand what to do next.
- Structured data markup: Help Google understand your content.
If you take the time to configure your site correctly, layering on-page optimization is very easy. If it helps, enter your list of pages into a spreadsheet and detail the keywords that each page is optimized for.
There are many tools available to help you with the basics of optimization by evaluating how well your pages are optimized for specific terms.
Don’t think of this as a one-time job. Once your site is indexed, you can gather more information from Google Search Console about what keywords each page is ranking for and adjust optimization on a page-by-page level.
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3. Content
Content is king. That’s a saying, right?
That’s true in a sense. A website is just a wrapper for your content.
Your content tells prospects what you do, where you do it, who you do it for, and why someone should use your business.
And if you’re smart, your content should go beyond these obvious brochure-type elements to help prospects achieve their goals.
For service businesses, content can be broadly divided into four categories.
- Business information. Who you are and why people should care.
- Service contents. What to do and where to do it.
- Reliable content. Why prospects should engage with your business.
- marketing content. Content that positions you as an expert and helps you get your business in front of potential customers early in the buying cycle.
SEO is important in different ways for each type of content. SEO is often forgotten when it comes to content that increases credibility such as case studies and reviews, but in the EEA world this is a missed opportunity.
For example, I recently renovated a Victorian house in England. The house is 140 years old and falling apart and is known as the “Money Pit.”
It was difficult to find talented people to help with this project, but the ones we ended up hiring had great references and case studies.
- Search from localized search results.
- Use of relevant experience and expertise with clear examples.
EEAT may seem like a cumbersome SEO abbreviation to get around, but in reality, EEAT just stands for what we as consumers want.
Adjusting your mindset to demonstrate EEAT in your content will help you rank higher, get more visitors, and convert those clicks into customers.
Additionally, be sure to optimize your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries, and testimonials, not just the obvious service pages.
For large businesses, a solid content marketing and SEO strategy is also the most scalable way to promote your business to a wide audience.
This generally provides the highest ROI since there is no cost per click. This allows you to scale up your marketing without directly increasing your costs.
Building on this first organic touch with remarketing and other advertising can give you a winning combination of strategies.
Make sure your SEO strategy aligns with your overall SEO strategy. There are still too many paint-by-numbers approaches to SEO where local businesses pay agencies or use generative AI tools to pump out blog posts that will never rank.
Focus on creating and optimizing content that helps customers find and choose your company.
Dig deeper: What is useful content, according to Google?
4. Build Offsite Authority
Ultimately, all SEO rivers flow into this one place: building authority.
Historically, building authority was all about link building, which by 2024 was an abused and maligned SEO practice.
Authority remains essential to building strong organic rankings and is part of the EEAT approach. However, getting this right can be the most difficult part of his SEO.
The best way I’ve ever seen to explain the concept of proper link building was written by the late Eric Ward: “Connect what needs to be connected.”
This philosophy is beautiful in its simplicity and validates the “more, more, more” mentality when building historical links.I only request links from the following related sauce.
Often, this means that to expand your link building efforts beyond the obvious strategies, you need to create something link-worthy. Where it makes sense to have a link, there will be a link. Simple.
Wikipedia has millions of links, but you’ve definitely never done any link building. This is because there is a ton of useful content being linked to. These are real, natural links that enrich your landing page, provide further context, and serve as the real connective tissue of this hyperlinked world we live in.
These kinds of natural links should be the backbone of your link building efforts. This may mean you need to reconsider your site’s content to create something of value first, but if you can pull it off, you’re half way done. .
A secure and scalable link building strategy should be built on this idea.
summary
SEO is easier to manage when broken down into four core pillars.
- Technical SEO Allow search engines to properly crawl and index your site.
- Optimizing elements on the page It provides useful clues to search engines regarding relevance and hierarchy.
- Invest time and resources into useful content Answering customer questions and establishing your expertise lays the foundation for your rankings.
- Take a strategic and authentic approach to building external authority Establish your site as a trusted resource on relevant topics.
Set clear SEO goals and track performance KPIs to continually improve these four pillars.
Learn more: SEO Plan: One Page SEO Plan
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.