The 3 pillars of SEO: How to get found on Google? - Lambourn Digital

The term ‘SEO’ is ubiquitous but we wish it was as simple as the three abbreviated letters. SEO or Search Engine Optimization not only involves complex concepts but it is heavily dependent on Google and its 200+ rankings criteria which we all know isn’t the most transparent list. Therefore to be found on Google in the Top 10 positions on Page 1 of SERP takes a lot of effort and even after being found, holding on to the spot takes constant work.

Afterall, in the words of Dharmesh Shah, CEO HubSpot, “The Best Place To Hide A Dead Body Is Page Two Of Google Search Results”.

These complications definitely make SEO less attractive and explains why many companies give up on their SEO efforts and are confused about the steps to take to climb the ladder of rankings. Some concerns have been raised if SEO is dying but with an approximate valuation of over $70 billion dollars, SEO is as alive as ever!

If you are struggling with SEO and are frustrated with Google and its endless, confusing parameters for ranking, take a deep breath as in this blog, we will break down the Three Pillars of SEO that are your foundation to being found on Google! Don’t worry, we also sometimes say “Oh, Google!”, “Why Google?” just like you! I think at this stage, we sometimes think Google is a human! 🤯

If you are unsure at any stage, feel free to give a shout to us and our Nerdy Guys & Gals will be happy to walk you through these tech-terms!

Pillar One: Technical SEO & On Page SEO

Once you have your website hosted live, you need to tell Google to crawl your website and understand it to be able to rank for relevant keywords. Unless your website is optimized for Google meaning the On Page SEO and Technical SEO is done, your website will be present in the World Wide Web but Google won’t know of its existence.

On-page SEO includes optimizing your web pages with the right keywords along with adding the meta title tags, meta description, image alt tags, heading tags that can tell Google what a particular page is about. But before doing these optimizations, you need to do a competitor & keyword research that includes identifying your competitors, finding the right keywords in a combination of long tail and short tail keywords, checking the difficulty level of the targeted keywords and investigating the questions people are asking around your targeted keywords. You will also need to setup the following:

1. Google Search Console: an indispensable tool to provide a wealth of data that can be used to gain valuable insights into your site's performance, grow organically and increase visibility.
   
   
2. Google Analytics: the free marketing analytics tool to gain insights on people visiting your site and the ways they are engaging with your site.
   
   Pro tip: Don’t forget to connect your Google Console With Google Analytics to import data from Google Console to Google Analytics!
   
   
3. Sitemap: provides a list of URLs to Google that specifies your site's main content ensuring that it gets crawled and indexed. Quoting Google : “A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a pag”.
   
   
4. Robot.txt: tells Google and other search engine crawlers the pages and files that web crawlers can or can't request from your site. It is mostly used to prevent Google from crawling certain sections of your website like the Privacy & Cookie Policy maybe!
   
   

Technical SEO goes much more in depth than On Page SEO, including evaluation of factors like the Website structure, smooth rendering, proper indexability, and internal linking. Technical SEO basically ensures that your website has everything (except content) for Google to start ranking it. The list for Technical SEO is long but below are the Top 5:

1. HTTPS: Signals that your website is secure and it has been a ranking factor since 2014.
   
   
2. Website Speed: With Google’s new Page Experience update, it is even more important to not just have fast loading sites but sites that can deliver great user experience.
   
   
3. Mobile Friendly website: According to Statista, half of the web traffic is from mobile devices. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic.
   
   
4. Internal & Outbound linking: Ensure that all the links in your website including the internal and outbound/external links are working properly as broken links reflect poor user experience.
   
   
5. SEO friendly URL structure: Guides Google and Web Crawlers to easily crawl your web pages and understand what they are about.
   

The list for Technical SEO is long and it is even more important for large websites like https://www.demesne.ie, https://peats.ie, https://www.fantasylights.com. With hundreds of pages and products. How can you be sure that all the pages are being crawled by Google? When a new section is added, is Google indexing it?

According to Google, “If a site has fewer than a few thousand URLs, most of the time it will be crawled efficiently.” This means businesses with large websites, such as e-commerce stores need to work even harder on technical SEO.

We work on the On page & Technical SEO for a wide variety of websites including numerous E-Commerce websites with a proven track record.
Get in touch with us if you would like to know more.

Pillar Two: Link Building, Referring Domains & Off Page SEO

Backlinko defines Link building as the “practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving search engine visibility”. The domains from where your backlinks come from are the Referring domains. It was Google’s PageRank Algorithm that made backlinks so important for a website to be ranked on Google. Google not only evaluates the content of your own site but checks how many other domains are linked to your page. With the Google Penguin update, the focus was shifted from quantity to quality of the backlinks. Therefore, the On Page & Technical SEO is only the beginning of the SEO process, generating high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites are mandatory if you want to see yourself on the First Page of Google.

But, what makes a backlink good or bad? Let’s understand the Top 5 factors essential for quality link building.

1. Authority: Links generated from pages and websites with high Page Authority passes on more authority, also known as Page Rank, to your website.
   
   
2. Relevancy: Alongwith Authority of the referring domain, the relevancy is of significant importance as well. So, if you are an electrical wholesaler and get a backlink from a high end fashion magazine with high authority, it's not gonna help!
   
   
3. Link’s position on a page: Links stacked in the footer of your website are as not worthy as compared to the ones in the main body content of your page. So, you have to ensure the right placement of the links you have.
   
   
4. Editorially Placed links: Try to get more Editorially Placed links which means that you did not create a random profile on a random site to get your link, Rather, someone gave it to you because they thought your site is awesome! Quoting Google: “…creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”
   
   
5. Nofollow .vs. Dofollow links: When a rel=”nofollow” tag is added to a link, it tells search engines: “Don’t count this link as an endorsement.”. So, when creating backlinks for SEO you must ensure to get normal, “dofollow” links whenever possible because a nofollow is of no use to Google.

Our Guys & Gals make sure that our clients get not only backlinks but quality backlinks to keep their Off Page SEO going smoothly. It takes time to analyze the different domains and design strategy to gain backlinks for websites. If you have any queries, you can reach out to us and we are happy to help!

Pillar Three: Content Development

Content & SEO are synonymous. Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998 with a mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google’s mission remains the same but the algorithms are constantly changing to make the information more relevant with the searcher’s intent. The useful and relevant information that Google strives to deliver are the varied pieces of content, available throughout the web. So, unless your website has fresh content to offer to Google, there is no relevant information for Google to deliver. Google recommends providing credible, useful, informative, high quality and engaging content. However, creating the content is only one piece of the puzzle which brings us back to the first pillar we discussed - optimization of the content. Fresh content is of no use until it is optimized for Google to understand the content. You could write 10 fresh pieces of content but if they are irrelevant and not optimized, it is of no use. Alongwith with having the content on the website, it is equally important to have the content across different channels to generate quality backlinks - which is the second pillar of our process.

Thus, the SEO process is not linear even if it seems so, it is also circular. Every strategy you build around getting the rankings high up organically will fall under these three categories and one cannot do without the other. Here’s a complete SEO checklist that we follow for all our clients. We use the Top tools like SemRush & SERanking for our client’s SEO.

Image Source: SemRush

Check out this Success Story on how we outranked an International brand like Rentokil with our killer Organic SEO strategy.

SEO efforts won’t bring top organic results magically but organic traffic continues to be considered the most valuable traffic source for several reasons:

• Google is highly particular about rankings which makes ranking in the top five results for a keyword an indication of your authority and high quality of content.
  
  
• Getting yourself on the 1st Page of Google is difficult and takes time, but once you get there, you can enjoy the benefits for a long time.
  
  
• Results on the first page of Google (The Top 10) receive 92% off all search traffic on Google. Traffic drops by 95% on the second page.
  
  
• 33% of clicks from organic search results go to the very first listing on Google.
  
  
• It is never SEO vs PPC. They work hand-in-hand. So, an improvement in the Google Organic results can enable you to have a low CPC on your Adwords
  

Get in touch with us for any queries regarding your SEO strategy and we are more than happy to answer them
(without any obligation)!