Alternatively, check out this post where you can find over 350+ guest blogging sites across so many niches. As you can see above, 4+ word phrases (which are long tail keywords) have low competition but they produce higher conversions. Long tail keywords have less competition and higher conversion rates when compared to short tail keywords. As mentioned before, engaging with your audience is a good SEO practice. Including videos, images, or documents in your posts attracts attention and boosts engagement.

what is seo

Google wants to make sure that the information it’s gathering for its AI Overviews comes from credible sources. One sign that a professional source manages a website is when it operates at peak performance and is designed to SEO Anomaly improve the user experience. AI Overviews are helpful because they essentially create clickable summaries of relevant data points. For example, if you were to Google “how long does it take to ride a bike?

Backlinko readers get:

  • This structured data powers rich snippets that boost both visibility and click-through rates.
  • On the other hand, this keyword isn’t super competitive, has a high CPC and gets a decent number of searches every month.
  • That way, you can focus 100% on content… without having to worry about keywords, H2 tags, alt text and other on-page SEO stuff.
  • Let’s dig into the practical tips for making your content not just seen but loved by both users and algorithms.
  • And, these are a part of search engine marketing (SEM) and not SEO.

However, once organizations can supplement their SEO strategies with SEM, they typically do. Companies use paid advertising to appear on the first page of search results, but most traffic still comes from organic or unpaid, searches. Using SEO the right way means your company’s website will rank highly without the need to spend money. Ensure your website offers a good user experience for all screen sizes and fast loading times. You can start with simple fundamentals like proper site structure, engaging content, and basic keyword research to set yourself on the right path.

what is seo

SEO takes longer to deliver results than SEM

what is seo

PPC allows you to buy immediate visibility, making it a fast-track option for driving traffic to your site. In simple terms, when you search for something online, search engines sift through their index to find relevant pages. They then use algorithms to rank these pages, placing the most relevant and high-quality results at the top of the SERP. But make no mistake about the factors at the bottom of this list. As you can see in the below chart, “Other” factors, like unlinked mentions, social signals, domain history, outbound links, and site structure, carry 1% weight. But given that there are at least 200 Google ranking factors; that’s at least 189 “other” factors that collectively make up that 1%.

Focus On Untapped Keywords That Are Trending Up

And this little shortcut helps me use internal links without having to analyze every page on my site. That said, you don’t just want to add a bunch of random internal links. Yes, random internal linking is probably better than no internal linking at all. It’s a free tool that tends to give a more accurate feel of how your site loads to actual users.

what is seo

Most of us would like it to be higher, but it still means that about half of the sources used rely on traditional SEO results. This means that right now the best way to get featured in AI Overviews is to ensure that your site ranks on the first page for relevant queries. An initial knee-jerk reaction might be to stop marketing and SEO activities to see how the dust settles. Even the most conservative studies show that about 52% of sources mentioned in AI Overviews rank in the top 10 results. Publishing less content—but increasing the quality of information you release—will go a long way in helping achieve this. Once you recognise your target watchwords, deliberately joining them into your website’s substance is crucial.

So if you make money with your website in any way, a quality paid keyword tool is a great investment that will pay off sooner or later. There are many search engines, but only Google has made by far the most advances in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Understanding, and Natural Language Processing. If you’re serious about SEO, you shouldn’t neglect the useful data and insights provided by various SEO tools. They give you a great competitive advantage and save a lot of your time. Black hat SEO is a set of unethical (and usually spammy) practices to improve the rankings of a website. That’s why all the tips and techniques in this guide are mainly about Google SEO, although many things are universal and apply to the optimization for any other search engine.