What is SEO? How can it be used to build a strategy for your business?

How do search engines rank your content? The key to getting your content to rank well in search is having a clear understanding of how Google finds, analyses, and ranks your content.

Getting your content to rank highly in search results depends predominantly on two things:

1. Improving discovery and relevance by creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for

2. Building authority by getting lots of high-quality backlinks to your website.

Discovery, relevance, and authority – those are the three stages that cover how search engines work in a nutshell. And each of these three stages correlates with an action the search engine takes:

1. Crawling

2. Indexing

3. Ranking

First is the DISCOVERY stage.

Search engine bots discover your web page by “crawling” it – which really just means it discovers your web page and takes note of all of the content within it.

Next is the RELEVANCE stage.

Once a search engine bot discovers your content, it decides how relevant it is to certain search queries by indexing it, based on signals like keywords within the content.

Lastly is the AUTHORITY stage.

This means building enough credibility through backlinks and other factors that search engines consider your site authoritative enough to rank high in the search results. Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

Explanation of how SEO works

I find the best way to explain how search engines rank content is using the library metaphor. After all, isn’t Google just a giant library?

Let’s pretend for a moment that you work in a library. You have a ton of books in a pile in front of you, and you need to figure out where in the library these books need to be stored.

This is a great way to think about how Google finds, analyses, and ranks content.

1.  Find all these books.

This is CRAWLING. If a book isn’t in the stack to begin with or you can’t see it, you won’t be able to put it on a shelf. That’s the discovery stage. In the sense of a website: Do you have a piece of content, and can the search engines access it?

2. Categorise these books.

This is INDEXING. The books in your library cover all sorts of topics: fiction, nonfiction, science, history, and technology. How do you sort them? This is where you assess the relevance of a book to a topic – by looking at the title, flipping through some pages, and seeing who the author is and whether they’re known for writing about certain topics. Search engine bots index content on a website in a similar way. They crawl the content and say, ‘What are the contents of this web page? What do they mean? Then, they bucket them into some sort of topic and start to create some semantic associations.

3. Figuring out which books to feature.

What should go on your best-sellers shelf? Which books should you make easier to find than others? This is RANKING. The way you determine which books are most easily discoverable for visitors to your library  is mostly based on whether the book comes from credible sources.

So, how do you determine authority? This is a subjective exercise. In the case of books, you look for credible authors like Dan Brown and H.G. Wells. Those are authoritative sources – we know that because they’re talked about a lot, referred to a lot, and they’re cited in other works. Getting cited is like having backlinks to your website – things that are mentioned in the press and are linked to from other sites regularly. That’s what builds authority.

These three stages and actions are dependent on one another. If your content isn’t relevant, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how authoritative it is. If your website isn’t authoritative, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is. And if your website can’t be discovered in the first place, it has no chance of ranking at all.

How to determine the SEO strategy for your business?

When it comes to SEO, many small-to-mid-sized organisations look to well-known organisations for clues on where to focus their efforts. They think to themselves, “If that big, successful company over there is improving their SEO by creating tons of content, then I’ll create tons of content and that will improve my SEO, too.”

Approaching SEO as a one-size-fits-all solution is one of the most common SEO mistakes we see.

The truth is, if your organisation doesn’t have authority built up yet, then you can’t focus solely on creating content in a vacuum. You need to be spending time on building authority.

Relevance refers to how well a document matches a search query. Authority refers to ranking strength. Even if you publish a lot of relevant content that search engines find, if those search engines don’t consider you an authoritative source, then they’re not going to rank your content highly in the search results. More authority means better ranking strength, which means better positions in the search results.

Your SEO strategy starts with creating compelling, unique, high-quality content that people might naturally want to reference and link to. But you also have to tell people about your content for anyone to find it and link to it.

A healthy SEO approach balances building relevancy with building authority.

That means balancing creating high-quality, relevant content with building high-quality backlinks. How much time you focus on one versus the other will depend on how much authority your website has right now.

So, take a moment to think about your own organisation.

Is your organisation well known and talked about and linked to a lot online?

If so, then you probably have pretty good search authority already. That means, when it comes to SEO, you won’t have to spend as much time building authority. Instead, you can focus on serving up more relevant content that can be discovered by Google. Creating more content will also, in turn, help you acquire more backlinks.

Is your organisation creating a lot of content but not getting many links?

In other words, are you more like a brand-new author who’s just thrown their book into the pile? Then don’t make the common mistake of focusing entirely on the relevancy aspect of SEO by just creating lots and lots of content. It doesn’t matter how many books you publish; unless you’re actually making an effort to build credibility by getting your books seen and known and talked about, otherwise they’re just going to gather dust.

If your website doesn’t have authority built up yet, then all the content you’re creating isn’t going to get ranked as quickly as you may want it to.

You don’t get authority and credibility through volume; you get it largely through high-quality, and more importantly, relevant backlinks. High-quality content is essential to getting quality backlinks. For example, one piece of content that's better than anything else on the internet for that topic could get you hundreds of backlinks, whereas a hundred pieces of poor-quality content might not even earn you a single link.

Make sure you’re balancing your content creation and link-building efforts in a way that reflects your organisation’s SEO needs.

Measuring Your Website’s SEO Authority

Publishing great content on your website is important, but your site needs to have strong authority to give your content a good shot at ranking in the search results. That begs the question: How do you accurately measure authority in the first place?

There are a number of different factors that add up to the search authority of your website, but the most important are around backlinks.

Measuring authority boils down to assessing the volume and quality of the backlinks you have to your website.

To truly measure your website’s authority, you’ll need to analyse your “backlink profile.” What is your “backlink profile”? Your backlink profile is a list of all the sites currently linking back to your site, which also takes into account how they’re linking to your site, and which pages they’re linking to.

Your backlink profile shows the number of inbound links to your website, the number of unique domains that link to your website, and the quality of those links – which depends on things like how authoritative the web pages that link to your site are.

Analysing your backlink profile isn’t something you can do manually, but there are tools to help that don’t cost much and are well worth the price. There are also free versions of these tools that will give you a pretty good high-level view of your backlink profile.

One tool that you can use is Moz, which can help you uncover backlinks to your site, find link-building opportunities, and discover links that might be damaging your authority.

The free version of Moz has a tool called Link Explorer which will give you a score out of 100 on your website’s authority and tell you the number of unique websites linking to your webpages and the total number of web pages linking to your website.

One thing to call out here is that these metrics are estimates. Although they’re fairly accurate, the results you get from one tool versus another will differ slightly but that’s nothing to worry about. These tools are used to give you a general sense of how authoritative your website is.

Thinking through and actually measuring your website’s authority and credibility will help you get a good idea of the state of your current SEO situation, and what you need to do to have a better chance of ranking.

Want to learn how to build an SEO strategy for your business? Check out ADMA’s SEO Fundamentals Course.