Let’s start with the obvious one. If organic traffic is going up, you’re doing something right. You can track this in GSC for free. If you don’t have access to GSC, sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. Then plug your domain into Site Explorer for an estimate.
Keyword rankings
If rankings are on the rise for your target keywords, that’s another sign that you’re doing something right. You can track average keyword rankings for free in GSC. If you want more accurate tracking, you’ll need a rank tracking tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.
Did you know?
Organic traffic and keyword rankings are “vanity metrics.” There’s no harm in keeping an eye on them, but they often bear no relationship with marketing or business goals. It’s much better to track metrics that have actual business impact. We cover two of these below.
Visibility
This metric in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker shows what percentage of all clicks for the tracked keywords land on your website.
For example, let’s say you track one keyword, and all the top positions in Google are occupied by pages on your website. Because your website gets all possible traffic from that keyword, your Visibility is 100%.
Now let’s say your website only occupies one spot in Google, with the rest occupied by competitors. Because some clicks go to other websites, your Visibility is lower than 100%.
If your Visibility is increasing, this is yet another good sign your SEO is on the right track.
Having a website set up for SEO success will help Google crawl and index your pages. But submitting your site to Google can speed up this process further. That’s because this helps Google find your website even if it has no backlinks.
Finding or creating a sitemap
Sitemaps list the important pages on your website that you want search engines to index. If you already have a sitemap, it’ll likely be at one of these URLs:
site.com/sitemap.xml
site.com/sitemap_index.xml
If you can’t find it there, check site.com/robots.txt where it’s usually listed.
If you still can’t find it, you likely don’t have one and need to create one.
Submitting your sitemap
You do this via Google Search Console (GSC). It takes about two seconds.
Most domains are fine for SEO, so don’t panic if you already have one. But if you’re still shopping around, keep these two elements of a good domain in mind.
Domain name
Something short and memorable is best here. Don’t try to shoehorn keywords. Your business name without hyphens or special characters is usually a good bet.
Top-level domain (TLD)
This is the part after the name, like .com. Your choice of TLD makes no difference for SEO. But we think .com is best for most people, as it’s the most recognizable and trusted. For charities, .org or your local equivalent also works. If you only do business in one country outside the U.S., your country code top-level domain (ccTLD), like .co.uk, is fine too.
It’s best to stay clear of TLDs like .info and .biz that people tend to associate with spam. But it’s not the end of the world if you have one. You can still build a legit website that ranks.
Use a website platform
Website platforms let you create and manage a website with ease. There are two types:
Hosted platforms. Everything’s done for you. They host the site, give you ready-made designs, and let you add and edit content without touching code.
Self-hosted platforms. These also let you add and edit content without code. The difference is that you have to host and install them yourself.
Most SEOs recommend a self-hosted, open-source platform like WordPress because:
It’s customizable. You can edit the open-source code how you like. There’s also a vast community of developers who know the platform inside out.
It’s extensible. There are millions of plugins for extending its functionality, including many SEO plugins.
That said, if you value ease of use and support, a hosted solution might be a better fit. All the big ones provide enough SEO capabilities for most people.
Use a good web host
If you’re using a hosted solution, you’ll need a web host. These store your site on a hard drive that anyone with an internet connection can access. Consider the three S’s when choosing one:
Security. Make sure you get a free SSL/TLS certificate. Or, at the very least, support for Let’s Encrypt—a nonprofit supplying free certificates.
Server location. It takes time for data to travel between the server and visitor. So it’s best to choose a host with servers in the same country as most of your traffic.
Support. 24/7 support is ideal. Test how good their support is by asking the above before you sign up.
DID YOU KNOW?
You can optimize server location with a content distribution network (CDN). This creates copies of your site on servers around the world so it’s always served from close to the user. So don’t fret about this too much. If you find that speed is an issue, you can invest in a CDN later on.
Create a positive user experience
Google wants to rank pages that give visitors a positive experience. Let’s look at a few ways to do this.
Use HTTPS
Nothing is worse for visitors than their personal data being susceptible to hackers. Always encrypt your site with SSL/TLS.
Choose an appealing design
Nobody wants to visit a website that looks like it’s from the ’90s. So while there’s no need to redesign your website every few months, it should look good and reflect your brand.
Make sure it’s mobile-friendly
More searches are now done on mobile than desktop. So it’s critical that your website is as pleasant to use on mobile as on desktop.
Use a readable font size
People browse the web using all kinds of devices. Make sure your content is readable across the board.
Avoid intrusive pop-ups and ads
Everyone hates ads, but sometimes you need them. If that’s the case, avoid intrusive interstitials. Pages with these may not rank as highly.
Make sure it loads fast
Page speed is a ranking factor on desktop and mobile. But this doesn’t mean your site needs to load lightning fast. It only affects pages that deliver the slowest experience to users.
Create a logical site structure
It should be easy for visitors and search engines to find content on your site. That’s why it’s important to create a logical hierarchy for your content. You can do this by sketching a mind map.
Each branch on the map becomes an internal link, which is a link from one page on a website to another.
Internal links are crucial for UX and SEO for a few reasons:
They help search engines find new pages. Google can’t index pages it can’t find.
They help pass PageRank around your site. PageRank is the foundation of Google search. It judges the quality of a page by analyzing the quantity and quality of links that point to it. It’s still used by Google today.
They help search engines understand what your page is about. Google looks at the clickable words in the link for this, otherwise known as anchor text.
Use a logical URL structure
URLs are important, as they help searchers understand the content and context of a page. Many website platforms let you choose how to structure your URLs. These are the five main options for URLs in WordPress:
Plain: website.com/?p=123
Day and name: website.com/2021/03/04/seo-basics/
Month and name: website.com/03/04/seo-basics/
Numeric: website.com/865/
Post name: website.com/seo-basics/
If you’re setting up a new site, go with the clearest and most descriptive structure. That’s post name. If you’re working with an existing website, it’s rarely a good idea to change the URL structure; it may break things.
Install an SEO plugin
Most website platforms handle basic SEO functionality out of the box. But if you’re using WordPress, install an SEO plugin. It’s hard to put even basic SEO best practices in place without one. Both Yoast and Rank Math are good options.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of growing a website’s organic search traffic. It’s where you do things that help you show up and rank higher in a search engine’s organic results.
Why is SEO important?
People are likely searching for what you do, and you can attract customers by ranking for those terms. But you’re unlikely to rank without effort, as others are trying to do the same. This is why SEO matters. It helps show Google that you most deserve to rank.
What are the benefits of SEO?
Most people click one of the first few search results, so higher rankings usually lead to more traffic. Unlike other channels, search traffic tends to be consistent and passive. That’s because the number of searches is usually quite consistent month to month.
Search traffic is also “free.” That’s a big deal because ads can be expensive.
For example, we get an estimated 1.4M monthly visits from organic search. It would cost us an estimated $1.7M per month to get that same traffic from search ads.
Sidenote.
No source of traffic is truly free. SEO costs time and effort.
How do you do SEO?
SEO involves five main steps:
Keyword research. Find what people search for.
Content creation. Craft content for searchers.
On-page SEO. Make your content as clear as possible.
Link building. Build trust and authority from other websites.
Technical SEO. Help search engines find, crawl, and index your content efficiently.
Google uses your location to personalize the results for searches with local intent. That’s why all results for “italian restaurant” are from or about local restaurants. Google knows you’re unlikely to fly halfway around the world for lunch.
Language
Google knows there’s no point in showing English results to Spanish users. That’s why it ranks localized versions of content (if available) to users who speak different languages.
Search history
Google saves the things you do and places you go to give you a more personalized search experience. You can opt out of this, but most people probably don’t.
Discovering, crawling, and indexing content only make up the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search algorithms.
What are search algorithms?
Search algorithms are formulas that match and rank relevant results from the index. Google uses many factors in its algorithms.
Key Google ranking factors
Nobody knows every Google ranking factor because Google hasn’t disclosed them. But we do know some key ones. Let’s look at a few of them.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. They’re one of Google’s strongest ranking factors.This is probably why we saw a strong correlation between linking domains and organic traffic in our study of over a billion pages.
It’s not all about quantity, though. Quality matters too. Pages with a few high-quality backlinks often outrank those with many low-quality backlinks.
Did you know?
You can check backlinks to your website for free in Ahrefs.
Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, enter your domain in Site Explorer, and go to the Backlinks report.
Our crawler is the fifth most active on the web,so you’ll see a pretty complete view of your backlinks here.
Relevance
Relevance is the usefulness of a given result for the searcher. Google has many ways of determining this. At the most basic level, it looks for pages containing the same keywords as the search query. It also looks at interaction data to see if others found the result useful.
Freshness
Freshness is a query-dependent ranking factor. It’s stronger for searches that call for fresh results. That’s why you see a recently published top result for “new netflix series” but not “how to solve a rubik’s cube.”
Page speed
Page speed is a ranking factor on desktop and mobile. But it’s more of a negative ranking factor than a positive one. This is because it negatively affects the slowest pages rather than positively affect lightning-fast pages.
Did you know?
You can check your page speed for free in Ahrefs.
Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, crawl your website with Ahrefs’ Site Audit, then go to the Performance report. In general, the less red you see, the better.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness has been a ranking factor on mobile and desktop since Google’s switch to mobile-first indexing in 2019.
Each search engine has its own process for building a search index. Below is a simplified version of the process Google uses.
Let’s break it down.
URLs
Everything begins with a known list of URLs. Google discovers these in many ways, but the three most common are:
From backlinks. Google has an index of hundreds of billions of webpages. If someone links to a new page from a known page, Google can find it from there.
From sitemaps. Sitemaps tell Google which pages and files you think are important on your site.
From URL submissions. Google lets site owners request crawling of individual URLs in Google Search Console.
Crawling
Crawling is where a computer bot called a spider visits and downloads known URLs. Google’s crawler is Googlebot.
Processing and rendering
Processing is where Google works to understand and extract key information from crawled pages. To do this, it has to render the page, which is where it runs the page’s code to understand how it looks for users.
Nobody outside of Google knows every detail about this process. But it doesn’t matter. All we really need to know is that it involves extracting links and storing content for indexing.
Indexing
Indexing is where processed information from crawled pages gets added to the search index.
The search index is what you search when you use a search engine. That’s why getting indexed in major search engines like Google and Bing is so important. Users can’t find you unless you’re in the index.
Search engines are searchable databases of web content. They’re made up of two main parts:
Search index. A digital library of information about webpages.
Search algorithm(s). Computer program(s) tasked with matching results from the search index.
What is the aim of search engines?
Every search engine aims to provide the best, most relevant results for users. That’s partly how they gain market share.
How do search engines make money?
Search engines have two types of search results:
Organic results from the search index. You can’t pay to be here.
Paid results from advertisers. You can pay to be here.
Each time someone clicks a paid search result, the advertiser pays the search engine. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and it’s why market share matters. More users mean more ad clicks and more revenue.
Each time someone clicks a paid search result, the advertiser pays the search engine. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and it’s why market share matters. More users mean more ad clicks and more revenue.
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