It's week seven of my internship, which puts me halfway through my journey at Zooma. The past days I have been working hard to keep up with a slightly more hectic, but fun, schedule than usual. In this week's article, I want to share my latest learnings on SEO.
This week, I have started up two new projects with my mentor, worked on my e-commerce site, had a monthly meeting, HubSpot Academy certifications and, more relevant to this article - I have had an SEO session with our expert, Daniel. Here are my reflections on my week's most significant topic, technical SEO.
Technical SEO involves optimising a website's technical framework to strengthen its performance in Google's crawling, indexing, and ranking processes. In simple terms, "crawling" refers to the process by which Google's bot visits websites, scans their content, and gathers data, links, and other relevant information. The main purpose is to ensure that a site is user-friendly and easily accessible for search engines, which helps improve its ranking on Google's search results page—a crucial goal for any business. The higher your SEO efforts, the better your position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), making you more likely to rank higher.
According to FirstPageSage, 39.8% of users click on the first organic result, 18.7% on the second, 10.2% on the third, and only 7.4% on the fourth.
Imagine being in tenth place—this illustrates why SEO is so critical. If your business doesn't appear on the first results page, it could severely impact your conversion rates and overall success.
In my latest HubSpot Academy course, I learned how to conduct a technical SEO audit. This approach was concrete and straightforward, so it's the best explanation.
How you should divide your audit sections:
What you will need:
Completing HubSpot's Technical SEO Certification gave me a deeper understanding of how to approach SEO from a technical standpoint. The course broke down complex concepts into actionable steps, concrete tips about categorising and structuring, and the most critical parts of conducting a qualitative audit. This was particularly helpful to me since I do not have much technical experience.
It became clear that it's essential for businesses and marketers to prioritise technical SEO as an absolute necessity to ensure a website is built on a solid foundation. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and rank content but also helps users to find you, hopefully, precisely what they are looking for. It's important to continuously do audits on a regular basis to improve site performance and maintain competitive rankings.
In Zooma's monthly meetings, a couple of Zoomers present the latest news and updates from their area of expertise. This week, our SEO expert, Daniel, reminded us of the importance of producing content according to Google's Helpful content principle. The update aims to provide even more authentic, helpful, and qualitative content for users to prevent websites from solely creating content for search engines and not actual humans, e.g. keyword stuffing and content that doesn't give information about what the users are looking for. Even though this change came a couple of years ago, the updated guidelines focus on making marketers refine 'people-first content' and ensure that users are presented with the most relevant source for their search query. This means it's still highly relevant to continuously optimise and refresh to keep up with your competitors.
Google provided a list of questions to ask yourself to assess how your website aligns with the new guidelines. These questions are a few examples of what needs to be addressed to make sure you are creating content with quality:
To learn more about this topic, I recommend reading marketing expert Neil Patel's article, which provides a deeper insight into how 'Helpful content' can affect your SEO.
Have a great weekend!