The greatest importance of SEO is the traffic it brings. There’s a joke among SEO experts that says that the second page of Google is the best place to hide a body because approximately 75% of people never scroll past the first page of the search engines. 

If you have a website, a blog, or an online business but doesn’t know the importance of SEO then this post is the right choice for you to learn that why you need SEO for your business. The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is one of the best ways to market your business in the digital world. Simply put, SEO helps your website place higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) list.

Whenever someone uses a search engine like Google to search for something, if your website has content relevant to what the user has searched for, it will be displayed on the list of search results. This guarantees that the users don’t end up on a car service website when they’re googling for a cooking recipe, for example.

However, if you google cooking recipes right now, you’ll get around 1.2 billion results.

How Does Google Determine Which Site Should Be on the First Few Pages?

Well, that’s where SEO comes in handy. By utilizing Google’s algorithm, we are now able to optimize websites and help them rank higher on the SERP. However, before we get into details on how to use SEO to your advantage, let’s quickly go over how Google’s algorithm works.

Google Algorithm Continuously Changes

Did you know that we google stuff more than six billion times a day?

While it is one of the most straightforward tools to use, there are actually a ton of different things that happen behind the scenes. Over the last few years, Google’s algorithm kept changing and improving, becoming smarter with every new update in order to deliver its users the precise information they’re looking for.

To better understand how Google works, you should know that whenever you google something, you’re actually browsing through Google’s Search Index. You can think of it as a database for all the web pages that Google has previously analyzed.

Next, Google’s algorithm asks the web page more than 200 different questions and assigns it a Page Rank based on a formula invented by Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Each of those questions has a predetermined value and, by combining those answers into a final score, Google ranks and displays the pages that we search for.

Some of the most important things that Google looks for when determining the Page Index of a web page is the number of keywords available on the site, which are words that you have entered into the search bar like popular travel destinations, for example. 

It also looks for synonyms of those words and collects information whether those words are titles or links to other websites, as well as where those links lead to.

The other importance of SEO aspects includes how long the website has been around, how credible the information on the website is, the overall quality of the website, and what the user experience is like, based on the ad placement and page’s loading speed, for example.

Google even takes context into consideration and tries to be intuitive about what you may want to search for. Then, it presents you with results that are based on numerous relevant factors. By combining those factors, Google is able to produce a custom-tailored experience based on your search in a split of a second.

Introduction to SEO

Naturally, a good portion of Google’s algorithm is kept a secret. After all, there are many other search engines out there, and it’s only normal for Google to be protecting its intellectual property. 

However, among search engines, Google is by far the most popular one, which is why virtually every website is optimized towards its algorithm. While we don’t know everything about the algorithm itself, we know enough to start optimizing a web page.

The entire notion of SEO could be split into three different stages, such as technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Each stage is different from the previous one, but they are all interconnected and serve the same purpose, which is to help bring organic traffic to your website.

Technical SEO

While technical SEO has absolutely nothing to do with the content on your page, it has everything to do with the settings and configurations of your website and is just as important as the other two stages.

As we’ve mentioned previously, Google analyzes websites before it adds them to its Search Index. In the world of SEO, this process is known as crawling. The first steps of technical SEO start with optimizing your website so that it makes the crawling process faster and easier.

One of the first steps of technical SEO is to select a domain — whether you wish your website to be accessible via the www or without it. While we can easily distinguish between the two, crawling engines can potentially get confused and think that there are two different websites under two different domains. This can cause many problems for the website, all of which result in losing a page rank.

Next, you should optimize the format of your URLs. For example, you should make sure that you use lowercase letters and dashes to separate the words in the URL. The URLs should be descriptive and as short as possible.

In addition, there are numerous other technical SEO tips that you can use, such as optimizing the robots.txt, adding SSL protection to your website to ensure that personal data is encrypted, as well as increasing the loading speed and making sure that your website is mobile-friendly.

Many website owners forget that technical SEO is as essential as other types of SEO. If your site doesn’t work properly, then all your other efforts would be in vain. 

On-Site SEO

The on-site SEO is the most engaging one, at least for copywriters. We mentioned briefly that Google’s algorithm tries to understand the context and the meaning behind your content. First things first, we have to make sure that the content is easily readable by the engine crawlers, as well as humans.

To help the engine crawlers better understand what the website is all about and position it higher on the SERP list, we need to optimize all content that’s on the website. It may appear in several different forms, such as text, pictures, audio, video, infographics, or a combination of any of these.

The process begins with researching keywords that you’re planning to rank for. Naturally, they will depend on your business. The first thing that you need to do is decide whether you want to rank globally on Google, or you’re simply interested in gaining traffic from people in your area.

Let’s say that you’re a photographer from New York, running a website. You can use various tools, like SERP Checker, for example, to research different keywords or а combination of keywords that you’re going to use.

Once you find out what people in your area are looking for (for example, “wedding photographers in New York”) you will include that keyword in titles or H1 and H2 headings on your landing, product, and static pages, as well as blog posts. In addition, you can also research and include LSI keywords. Think of them as adjectives that help describe the keywords to the engine crawlers.

If you’re dealing with content that’s not a text, such as images, for example, make sure that they have a name that’s easy to read — ‘on-site-seo.jpg’ instead of ‘2fdjh29.jpg,’ for instance. Also, if there is no text, add some! Use it to further explain the content or insert a link that leads to a new page that explains it in detail.

That said, let’s turn to the next stage of SEO.

Off-site SEO

The last stage of SEO is also known as link building. It involves promoting your website through a wide array of backlinks. However, this doesn’t mean that you can simply make all of your webpage content hyperlinked and clickable, or you might be looking at a penalty from Google that will negatively affect your ranking.

Instead, the links should be meaningful and informative so that they can satisfy the intent of the user. Furthermore, another thing to keep an eye on is that the links should lead back to trusted websites, to help your website’s rank improve.

The Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing

• SEO is pocket friendly rather than PC and other marketing techniques. It is a fixed paid service provided by an agency accordingly.
• SEO helps to attract organic visitors and conversion rate due to higher ranking.
• An effective SEO strategy would definitely work and improve the search engine ranking of your websites.
• Instead of email marketing and SMO technique, SEO is even necessary for website ranking and driving more user traffic on your website.
• Indispensible use of mobile in daily life makes it an important factor in digital marketing. Even Google used to consider mobile website searches as the primary content for search engine ranking.
• Wise implementation of SEO for a website takes it above all of its competitors in search engines.

How important is SEO  for Digital Marketing?

The ranking factor is the key to success in SEO. However, it is not so easy to gather vast user traffic on a website but using advanced search engine optimization techniques it is possible to do so. SEO is an art to increase the visibility of websites in search engines. Constant work on SEO will definitely bring success in digital marketing. Here are some factors which ensure the importance of SEO in digital marketing:

• Generally, a user refers to those websites which have a higher ranking in search engine.
• It greatly helps in the promotion of a website or brand. Users find a website in higher ranking sometimes involves sharing it on social media platforms, like FaceBook, Twitter, etc.
• It will help in increasing customers to your website and keep you up in competition. One of two websites of the same field has more visitors and customers which has a higher ranking in search engines.

Summary

Now you know the importance of SEO which is not very difficult but tricky. In order to help your website rank higher, you can either hire an SEO expert to do the work for you or, if you are curious in nature and wish to expand your skill set, you can learn to do most of the things yourself.

While we covered only the very basics of it, there are many more SEO tips and tricks out there that you can make good use of, so make sure you research the topic thoroughly before you begin investing your time and money into it.

Hopefully, our brief introduction about the importance of SEO showed you the ropes and helped you gain a good understanding of what SEO is and why it is vital for your online business.

Also Read: 

Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2020

Microsoft Clarity A Free-To-Use Analytics Tool

In October 2020, Microsoft launched a new analytics tool, called Microsoft Clarity, that is free and easy to use for every website and blog. After receiving a great response from users, now Microsoft has integrated Clarity with Bing Webmaster Tools. You can use Clarity to make your website as easy to use as possible, which can help grow your business or increase the viewership of your blog.

What Is Microsoft Clarity?

Clarity is a free-to-use analytics tool that helps webmasters and site owners to understand how users are behaving on your website through key features such as session replays and heatmaps, as well as an insights dashboard.

How To Install Microsoft Clarity?

If you want to install Clarity, you can now do so in Bing Webmaster Tools. You can find a beta link to Clarity on the bottom left of the navigation bar in Bing Webmaster Tools. That loads this page:

Then you have to accept the terms: (Add Site Microsoft Clarity)

Add the Clarity script to your website:

SEOBizWorld Successfully Added To Clarity Projects:

After you add your website, it will take around 2 – 4 hours to get access to Clarity Dashboard. According to Microsoft “You can expect to see further developments in our Webmaster Tools integration in the coming months.”

Google Analytics Integration:

Microsoft Clarity Features:

Heatmaps

Heatmaps provide a visual way to examine large numbers of user interactions that help you to see user behaviors and trends.

Session Playback

Session Playback helps to discover novel patterns in session recordings like “rage clicks,” “dead clicks,” and “excessive scrolling,” and you can use these classifications to filter your sessions as well.

Insights Dashboard

You can use the Insights Dashboard to view your website performance. You will be able to see how many users were clicking on non-existent links or how many people scrolled up and down a page in search of something they couldn’t readily find.

Source: Microsoft Blog

Also Read: 

Bing Announced The New Evergreen BingBot User-Agents

Learn about the three Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, and CLS

Google makes lots of small changes to its search algorithms all the time, many of them go un-official and some are announced. In May 2021, Google said that they will update their algorithms to integrate a new ranking factor called Core Web Vitals. Google developed a new set of metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These are the three main pillars of Google’s page experience update which means performance, responsiveness, and visual stability.

What Is Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vital is a new tool of Google to measure the user experience of a web page. It will become one of the key ranking factors in search engine optimization. So the better the UX, the more likely you are to rank on Google.

Web Vitals VS PageSpeed Insights

For PageSpeed Insights, Google crawls your page themselves and uses software to create a report. But Core Web Vitals only measures the experience of real-world users. That makes it super accurate and a great tool for UX web page creation.

What Does Google Mean By A Good User Experience?

They take things like load time, interactivity, and visual stability into account when considering UX. Core Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

The three pillars of page experience:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

The Core Web Vitals Live Here:

You’ll see 2 line graphs, one for mobile traffic, the other for desktop traffic.

You need enough traffic from either platform for Google to generate these graphs

Red lines are bad. Your page loads slowly.

Yellow lines are okay. You could do better.

Green lines are good. Your page loads quickly.

You need enough traffic from either platform for Google to generate these graphs

Core Web Vitals Measuring Tools:

Here are a few tools you can use to help measure the Web Vitals of your webpage on your own:

• Google Search Console
• PageSpeed Insights
• Lighthouse
• Chrome User Experience Report
• Chrome DevTools

Bottom Line

Core Web Vitals is the new way of emphasizing user experience, and it’s a great tool for web marketers who may want deeper insight into their performance.

Source: Google Web Vitals

Also Read: 

Google Core Update What SEOs Need To Know

An Intensive Analysis of Google’s Core Update

Like, I have said many times that Google updates its search algorithm after every few months. The most recent is the December 2020 Core Update which is still rolling out. Danny Sullivan also has confirmed to me on Twitter that Google Core Update is still rolling out. Danny wrote, “It’s still rolling out.”

If you deeply look at the search engine monitoring tools, they are still showing a massive spike over a 24-48 hour period, and then it died down in a big way. Previous updates seemed to have rolled out more gradually. So what things you need to take notice of and do the analysis of your website after the announcement of Google’s Core Update.

What is Google Core Update?

Google Core Update is an algorithm update that can impact the search visibility of a large number of websites. Each time an update is rolled out, Google reconsiders the SERP Ranking of websites based on expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness (E-A-T).

First, you need to know what the core update is about and read what is coming next. Then the most primary thing is you need to do your website audit. It will be:

• Content Analysis
• Backlink Audit
• On-page Analysis
• Technical Website Audit
• Competitor Analysis

The question is, why you need to do website audits? The answer is straightforward; you need to know about all things related to your website’s content, i.e., backlinks, on-page, technical, and competitor before any Google update rolls out. Once Google rolls out its update, then one should ideally wait for 7 to 14 days. Again, the question is raising why we need to wait for 7 to 14 days? As an SEO, we all know that Google rolls out its full update within 2 to 3 weeks and that is why it is best to wait.

After the completion of the core update, you need to do the same thing you have done before at the start of the Google update. Once you complete all the above-mentioned steps, the final task is to compare your website’s audit report from the previous one to the new one. Then you will learn how much your website is affected or not by this new Google Core Update and what effect your competitor has through this. After looking at the before and after analysis, you already know about the bugs and issues that need to be resolved. Hence, it will be straightforward to fix them.

Useful Tip:

If you don’t want your website hit by Google Core Update then you have to put in the work. Quality over quantity, relevancy over irrelevancy, keywords over intent, technical aspects, mobile responsive, Content, render time, and more.

Also Read: 

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 23 November 2020

Google Announced A New Core Update After Seven Months

Google is rolling out a new core update, called December 2020 Core Update. This is the third time that Google announced a core update in the year 2020. The first one was released in the month of January 2020 and the second one was in May 2020.

SEOs and Webmasters know that Google has released a core algorithm update after every few months. It has been just about seven months since the May 2020 core update, which took place on May 4, 2020. So this one took a lot longer than previous updates to roll out.

The Announcement:

Here is that tweet in which Google announced and said “later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the December 2020 Core Update.”

Previous Updates:

The previous core update was announced in the month of May 2020, which was big and broad and took two or three weeks to fully roll out. Before May 2020 Core Update, Google announced January 2020 core update, which was analyzed by many SEOs and Webmasters and said that it didn’t have a big impact like the previous September 2019 core update. Google also released an update in November 2020, but that was specific to local rankings.

What To Do If You Are Hit?

Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. There aren’t specific actions to take to recover, and in fact, a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages. However, Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update. Google did say you can see a bit of recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.

Why Do We Care?

Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, it means that your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to in order to understand if it was something you changed on your website or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm. Today, we know Google will be releasing a core ranking update, so keep an eye on your analytics and rankings.

Also Read: 

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 23 November 2020

Google Search Ranking Shuffles on Thanksgiving 2020

As we all know that the search giant Google always makes changes in the algorithm and search ranking fluctuate. Same like this on November 23rd, many SEOs and Webmasters noticed that Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update like 23rd January 2020.

But I am seeing that SEOs are chattering about the latest changes in the Ranking Algorithm on Thanksgiving Day. Also, there are many search engine monitoring tools are showing big signals.

I just want to remind you that Google has not confirmed any update prior to Thanksgiving and it seems wrong on so many levels. So I also do not know that this is a real big Google update or if some websites are having issues.

Let’s first start with the tracking tools, again, most of them show big swings.

MOZCast:

SERPMetrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

SERPstat:

SEMRush Sensor:

Here I like to share the screenshot that what SEOs are chattering at WebmasterWorld:

I want to say that this is not normal because these tracking tools are showing really big changes but right now the SEO community is pretty cool. Maybe webmasters are taken off due to Thanksgiving week and not obsessing over it. I am not 100 percent sure about this Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update. I did ask a few SEOs who track a lot of sites and they said it seemed pretty calm.

If you have noticed some big changes in the Ranking Algorithm Update so, please share them with me here in this post. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Also Read: 

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on 18 June 2020

Grow your Business and Reach More Customers

Google My Business has added a new option that says “Connect in real-time, with video conferencing.” It says you can “grow your business and reach more customers when you use video conferencing providers.” Then a “set up” button to start to configure it.

I guess this is activated if you have updated your service availability option in Google My Business to specify you offer video appointments but it is not 100% confirmed.

Here is a screenshot of the box on the main home dashboard of Google My Business after you sign in and select a specific business:

After you click on “Set up” you are given these online video service providers including Google Meet, Webex, Skype, and Zoom. Here is a screenshot:

But after that, there does not seem to be a way to set it up more beyond that yet. When you click on Google Meet, it takes you to google.com/meet which I already use all the time. In fact, all the links take you to those service providers. Google does link to this help document with more details on how to configure it. There is a lot of Local SEOs that are chatting about this as well in the Local Search Forums.

Also Read: 

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 18 June 2020

Google Search Ranking Shuffles on Thursday, June 18th

Like we all know that Google always changing search results and update algorithms continuously. Right now I am seeing over the past couple of days that Search Engine Monitoring Tools showing usual changes in the Google search results and also SEO community is chattering at WebmasterWorld about the latest Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on Thursday, 18 June 2020.

Search Engine Monitoring Tools:

RankRanger:

CognitiveSEO:

As you can see, the above two screenshots show the changes in the algorithm, bigger changes, around June 17th. But not all are seeing such big changes on the 17th or this week:

SEMRush:

Accuranker:

Advanced Web Rankings:

SERPMetrics:

Mozcast:

Are you noticing any changes since around yesterday, Thursday, June 18th?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Also Read: 

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on 23rd Jan 2020

Important News For Google Ads Partners Program

New requirements for agencies to achieve and maintain Google Partner status take effect starting in June 2020. Many Google Advertisers has received an email on Thursday about substantial changes coming to Google Ads Partners Program – the badge and certification program for agencies that meet certain criteria.

As far as I have read the news and understood the most important news are:

• Performance criteria for maintaining Partner’s badge will be more transparent and will directly refer to the optimization score highlighted in the “Recommendations” tab of each account (excluding ignored suggestions).
• It will no longer be enough to have 1 certified administrator/standard user to be able to display the Google Partner badge (2 for Premier Partners), but at least half of the administrator/standard users connected to your company’s account manager will have to pass the Skillshop certifications (the accounts on this platform must be connected to the company’s one).
• Growth of invested budgets and new accounts managed will no longer be a requirement to obtain the badge, but you only need to spend more than 20,000$ (it was 10,000$) in your managed accounts in the last 3 months. These requirements will stay still for Premier Partners, who will be chosen among the 3% of the best partners in terms of expenditure, growth of invested budgets and customer retention.

Below is Google’s comparison chart look at what’s changing, which you can find on this help page.

The first consideration I have to make about these new Google Ads Partner Program is starting to get serious about the recommendations tab. All of us PPC Professionals had long noticed that the quality of suggestions has been definitely improving. Now ignoring that section may also have important consequences on the Partner badge (as well as on the performance of the campaigns). So, do it at your own risk.

For now, Google is still not so sure of all its automatic optimization suggestions to consider also the wrong / ignored ones among those used to evaluate the account, but I could bet that there is where we are going.

They have finally understood that more transparency was needed in the evaluation criteria of the managed accounts to obtain the Partner badge and that this has nothing to do with increasing budgets and new customers. This is one of the main reasons why I left the program in 2017, given that in my opinion the added value of a PPC Expert lies in the the fact that he/she has to be independent from the platforms used. The very reason for us being on the market is that we are free to suggest the best solution for each customer, without necessarily having to “push” one or the other for reasons different from expected performance.

Unfortunately, this underlying opacity remains for Premier Partners, but Google has already taken a step in the right direction by withdrawing this criterion for the bulk of Partners, I hope that sooner or later they will also drop it for top spenders.

Note:

Google Ads Partner Program will select based on a number of factors, including but not limited to: annual Ads spend across managed accounts, client growth, client retention, and other information. Evaluation is done on an annual basis and status may not be available in all markets.