SEO – An Easy Guide to Impact Performance

An estimated 97% of mobile searches are done on Google, making it smart to base your strategies on Google’s algorithm, signals, ranking system, and indexing priorities.

With each query, Google looks for the following:

• How a web page relates to certain concepts
• The context of the keywords being used
• Relevancy of the page to the query itself

Additionally, it factors in site speed, mobile responsiveness, and the performance of core web vitals.

Speech tagging and answering questions are among the natural language processes being used by search engines.  Further, the domain rating (DR) will influence your backlink profile, while domain authority (DA) will impact your search engine positioning.

Other ranking factors include:

• Industry authority
• User interface framework
• Crawlability / indexability
• Quality of content
• Backlinks
• Page rendering
• Mobile experience
• Site architecture
• Content clustering and semantic relationships

Your keyword approach must be designed to achieve the right reach, frequency, channels, and marketing mix.

Content tactics to apply:

• Word context and implicit signals
• Semantic distance between words
• Term relationships and frequency
• Synonyms and close variants
• On-page content prominence and visual hierarchy
• Co-occurring and phrase-based keywords
• Mobile search strategies
• Voice search strategies
• Title tag tactics (i.e. pose a question, insert the year, evoke curiosity)
• Limit title tag to 40 characters
• Exact keywords or query in URL
• Insert power words – superior, remarkable, breathtaking
• Infuse resonating and emotive elements
• Assess trends such as conversions and bounce rates

Here are action items to share with your team:

1. Build keyword leaders, clusters, and high-relevancy long-tail words
2. Advance your ranking through the publishing of value-based resources
3. Utilize keyword insertion tactics and test them on SERP, landing pages, email, social media, product pages etc.
4. Optimize on-page content with fresh blogs, infographics, product descriptors etc.
5. Audit and update technical SEO including titles, header tags, meta, schema, structured data markup, and alt tags

Along with content, keywords & meta, site performance has a significant role in your website’s search engine quality score and ranking. 

Core Web Vitals:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – from the point of the User requesting the URL, this is the amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport.

First Input Delay (FID) – the time from when a User initiates interaction with the web page to the time when the browser responds to that interaction.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – in the loading phase, this is the amount of time that the page layout shifts.

By focusing on website performance and speed with equal diligence to the interface and user experience, you will vastly improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Need to know how to do the job better?  Here are a few proven and popular tools to optimize your website with ease, efficiency, and accuracy.

Google

• Search Console
• PageSpeed Insights
• Structured Data Testing Tool
• Keyword Planner

Others

• Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• BuzzSumo
• Answer The Public

For fans of a checklist, here is a quick guide to improve performance, ranking, and quality score.

• Audit URLs for proper structure
• Add 301 redirects for any URL for which the slug has been changed
• Integrate Google Tag Manager
• Implement tracking code and heat mapping
• Create segments in Google Analytics for measuring shopping cart performance
• Audit each page and optimize meta – page titles, descriptions, and head tag
• Add ALT tags to all images (keywords and image descriptions)
• Remove any broken links
• Add canonical tags
• Implement a content marketing strategy
• Optimize content based on Google guidelines (including title, keywords, interlinking, etc.)
• Use creative banners, compelling images, and rich media to augment content
• Work on Core Vitals, responsiveness, and speed optimization
• Enable mobile indexing first
• Create high quality backlinks from high DA (domain authority) websites.
• Regularly analyze poor backlinks and remove them (rejected from Search Console)
• Focus on the do-follow backlinks – it gives more link juice to the linking website
• Increase the referring domain count
• Audit structured data markup for all pages and perform fixes
• Improve the speed of the website by fixing these issues:
• Remove unnecessary JavaScript files
• Defer off screen images
• Eliminate render-blocking resources
• Minify JavaScript
• Remove unused CSS files

A final note – every optimization action is valuable. Take a process-driven approach, appreciate the complexity of search terms, be patient in making incremental improvements to your organic search ranking, and continually test outcomes.