SEO is a crucial part of marketing, growing, and running a successful business. Because of how constantly SEO changes, it can be difficult to stay ahead of these changes. Even though SEO is a very broad subject, understanding a few important parts of it can give you help you get started, and you can level up as you go. Here are some of the parts of SEO you need to master.
Keyword Research
As you begin to understand SEO, you will come across the term “user intent”. This is the reason why a person searched for a keyword or phrase. The intent could be to get more information, make a purchase decision, get an answer to a question and so on. Understanding user intent will inform how you do your keyword research because it is not only important to understand what people are searching for but how and why they are doing so.
Apart from user intent, it is also important to keep in mind what phrases you want to rank for. These might or might not be aligned with user intent keywords but are still important for your industry. While you can do extensive research to find these keywords and their variations, it is always better to let an SEO agency Birmingham handle this for you. The SEO agency will help you not only discover ranking keywords but also help you rank higher for them by integrating them into your overall SEO strategy.
Audience Research
Keyword research is now being paired with audience research because if you cannot understand your audience, you cannot know what type of content and marketing they will be receptive to. Audience research entails understanding what motivates your audience, what they are looking for, their demographics and other factors. Once you understand your audience, you can work backwards to know what type of SEO and marketing will work to improve your results.
Analytics and Analysis
Accurate reporting is essential for SEO in a world where businesses have access to massive amounts of data. Analysing this data and reporting on it is the best way to see how campaigns are doing and find areas of improvement. While some industries might not require that you adjust your SEO strategy for a few months, many do require it, especially if things move and change fast in those industries. Data analytics and reporting can help you understand the drivers of your SEO results so you can fine-tune your campaigns and strategies.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of speed standards and metrics used by Google to gauge the user experience on your website. These metrics include vitals such as first input delay which measures interactivity, largest contentful paint for loading performance and cumulative layout shift for visual stability. There are other Core Web Vitals you should know about, but these are the more important ones. These vitals force website owners to think of user experience as a vital part of user experience and thus SEO.
SEO is challenging but can be very rewarding if done right. The essentials discussed above are a great place to start, and you can broaden your knowledge and understanding of SEO as you go.