What is SEO? The 2023 search engine optimization guide

SEO is the name given to the methods that raise your website’s position in search engine results. It increases your site’s visibility to users who turn to search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing looking for the solutions your company, product or service can offer.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The term is an acronym formed from the initials of the English words “Search Engine Optimization.”

It is defined as the optimization work carried out on your website to increase the organic visibility of your products and services for the queries people run on Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines.

The main improvements made through SEO include creating original, high-quality content, optimizing that content around focus keywords, and building backlinks.

SEO is the sum of the work done to get ahead of our competitors and reach the top organic position in Google search, outside the ads.

To put it another way:

SEO helps you attract potential customers to your business by improving how the product and service pages on your website rank in organic (unpaid) search engine results pages (SERPs).

If you haven’t started working on SEO yet, don’t ever think you have missed the boat. The opportunity is still there: you can still invest in it and put your energy into SEO.

That is because this SEO guide, which also covers SEO techniques, is a complete handbook for you.

What is SEO?

SEO aims to get you to the top of the search engines. It means being present where life actually happens, and appearing in front of someone with a single click the moment they look for you.

The biggest benefit of SEO is that you can bring “free” organic traffic to your website every month for the keywords you focus on, which makes it a sound investment for reaching potential customers.

Website traffic sources

As the chart shows, more than 60% of all traffic on the web comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. Compared with social media, that means roughly 10 times more traffic comes from search engines.

Let’s explain why SEO is necessary with an example.

Say you have a website that sells makeup products. According to Google keyword statistics, an average of 50,000 people search for “makeup products” every month.

Going by general statistics, if we assume the website in first place on Google gets about 20% of all clicks, then ranking at the top through good SEO work would bring 10,000 visitors to your website every month.

If we assume an advertiser spends an average of 1 TL per click for this search query, the organic traffic of the 10,000 visitors reaching your makeup site is worth 10,000 TL a month.

Do you realize that this figure applies to just one keyword?

Considering that some keywords cost 30-40 TL per click in advertising, we will leave it to you to work out what that traffic would be worth.

With equally successful SEO for other keywords, you can increase the value of your site further.

These days we even ask search engines and YouTube about the weather. We find out how the stock market is doing online. We ask search engines for the result of our favorite soccer team’s match. In short, our lives run through search engines. Companies that want to get their website to the top of the results in particular are researching SEO and other optimization topics such as YouTube SEO.

When we are about to buy a product or service, we find out who is in the market from search engines. As a result, search engines have become an indispensable part of both our physical and our online lives.

Why is SEO important?

For a marketing manager, SEO work covers the full set of key technical and design improvements that form the backbone of a digital marketing strategy.

A marketing manager lives by the marketing strategy and has marketing actions to bring that strategy to life, and those strategies have components. SEO work is one of the components of the marketing strategy, and it has goals of its own.

Take a marketing manager who runs a TV commercial. It is not really possible to measure whether a TV commercial succeeded or how much of it turned into sales.

There are ratings measurement companies, but they work only from samples. In other words, they have devices in 1,000 homes and measure how many of those 1,000 people watched. So setting a target and determining whether that target was met is unfortunately not possible here.

Why SEO?

According to a study conducted in the United States, only 2.8% of all search queries in the country end in a click on an ad. The remaining 97.2% click on purely organic results. That study alone explains why SEO work is necessary.

A comparatively large share of website pages are informational or introductory pages. In that context, users do not click on ads. Users want to be able to trust; they do not want to be misled by advertising. They recognize and see that an ad is an ad. A user tries to reach a buying decision by researching, gathering information, looking at other factors that support the decision already forming in their mind, checking after-sales service and comparing you with competitors. So if you do not appear in front of the user at the information-gathering stage, your chances fall to almost nothing, and you can only show up by spending very large sums. In a highly competitive market such as the United States, there are cases where a single click on a keyword in Google Ads, that is, the PPC (pay per click), exceeds one hundred dollars. Although it varies by industry, the conversion rate of these ads into sales ranges between 5% and 10%. That shows just how expensive it is to acquire a customer through advertising.

SEO work is far easier and cheaper than advertising. It stands out as an excellent marketing strategy that can deliver the same or a similar benefit for many years. That is why SEO has to be an indispensable strategy for companies whose marketing budgets are limited, and why companies need it so much.

When you do SEO work on search engines, you can find out clearly:

whether you were clicked as a result of a search query,
whether your page was visited,
how long visitors stayed if your page was visited,
how many different pages were visited during that time,
how many times each of those visited pages was viewed,
how many actions were taken on each page,
whether the form was filled in,
whether items were added to the cart and whether a purchase was made

with real precision.

For a marketing manager, SEO work is the most important and most enduring marketing tool, one whose measurable results can be clearly identified and made to last.

So how did SEO work in the old days?

Say you are a tailor working in London and you want to show up right away for people looking for a tailor in London. You could place an ad in the Yellow Pages. Today we would call that the cost of running Google Ads. You could also appear organically, on the page that is dog-eared from being used so often. For that to happen, the page has to be opened constantly and has to hold content that keeps attracting interest.

So today we can describe SEO through the Yellow Pages analogy.

What are the benefits of SEO work?

It increases your sales
It helps you gain market share
It delivers a better user experience
It brings higher sales close rates
It lowers your advertising costs
It encourages local users to visit the physical store after they search
It helps build brand credibility
It helps build brand awareness

It increases your sales

SEO work is part of a growth strategy. Fundamentally, SEO is done to grow and to increase sales. Demand will rise, demand will turn into sales, sales will turn into growth and into a better-quality service or product, and in this way we will want to turn our company, growing like a snowball, into a leader in its industry. That makes SEO one of the most important ways to increase sales.

So how does SEO increase your sales?

When we do SEO work, we produce valuable, original content. That content appears on our web pages and on our social media accounts. Users who see it are pleased with the page, take an interest and spend time on it. As a result, your time on page goes up. Click-through rates on the various links on the page rise too. When users find valuable information on the page and spend more time there, you are automatically marketing to your visitors. You have brought a visitor into the marketing funnel at the right point, and you begin to get the full value out of that visitor. That helps sales increase, either directly at that moment or in the following weeks together with your other integrated marketing activities.

Say you are searching for something, for example.

Whether it is B2B or B2C, you are searching for something. You may have no need for it at all, but let’s say you are looking for a beauty mask. You will probably want to get information about that beauty mask first.

You will run searches such as “What does a beauty mask do?”, “Where can I find a beauty mask?” or “Can I make one naturally?”

Now say I have a website that produces beauty masks, and this is where I need to catch you. I need to catch you and give you information first, then gradually create a sense of trust, loyalty and value, and gradually get you to visit my page again and move toward a purchase. In this way SEO will increase your sales, either directly or indirectly in the days and weeks that follow.

It helps you gain market share

SEO work helps you gain market share. Achieving successful sales is not as easy as it sounds; it has several sub-components. One of them is gaining market share, because when you say “let’s increase our sales and do everything really well,” you cannot draw every consumer to you: you have other competitors too.

So it matters to gain market share gradually and, once you reach a certain share, to have reached critical mass. In Türkiye, for example, we can currently name four or five marketplace brands, such as Trendyol, Hepsiburada, N11, Amazon and Morhipo.

We do not pay much attention to anyone outside these brands, because of the market share issue. Saying “I’ll set up a marketplace from scratch and take a share of the market” is not easy at all. It takes tactics and a strategy, and there has to be room for it. That is why SEO work will help you gain market share.

Say you are going into the organic food business. Building an e-commerce website, sourcing the materials and products, setting up the supply chain, investing and running the marketing activities can require very large budgets. Now imagine that, alongside your SEO work, you build a website drawing on many topics: the benefits of organic foods, which food is good for what, where they can be found, what is good for which organs of the body, and so on.

You have started your SEO work and you are measuring the incoming traffic. You see how much of that traffic is interested, and perhaps you offer them forms. You said “Contact us for more information,” and you began collecting this demand with a form saying “Sign up for our newsletter for our organic food surprises.” You are not even in the market yet and you have not said “I sell products,” but once you start generating this demand you are in fact entering the market and are about to take market share.

The moment you tie your SEO work to that, your market share, whether it is one percent or two, will flow to you ready-made. Before you make those investments, your SEO work will have served as a preliminary lab test of whether you can really establish yourself in the market. An SEO project will let you discover how sharp the competition is, how much room it leaves you and where the gaps are.

SEO delivers a better user experience

SEO can be misunderstood by our colleagues in the digital advertising agency and consulting sector. SEO should not be technical work done for search engines. Fundamentally, SEO is done for the user. SEO work should be done for the visitor who is going to come to your website. Its most basic benefit will therefore be to make the user’s experience a positive one; in other words, it improves the user experience. Thanks to SEO work, the user will encounter far more original and satisfying content. With this work, the design within the page, meaning the on-page copy, the articles and blog posts, and the flow of the product and service descriptions, will also be designed around the user’s needs. The question in the user’s mind will be answered.

If you want to go to the top of the Empire State Building in New York, you first take an elevator. Then you get out of the elevator and climb 145 floors of stairs. After that you take a second elevator for another 10-15 floors. As you climb those stairs, they have stationed an attendant right at the middle floor.

That attendant’s only job is to point upward and say, “This way, please. You can go up from here.”

So why does the attendant do this job?

After climbing a few floors, the visitor starts to wonder whether they are going the right way. Someone who thought carefully about the user experience put an attendant there. It is the physical version of the SEO work done on a site. The process has been designed around the user experience. Using images or video, backing the page up with frequently asked questions, linking to another page on a topic you mention in case the reader does not know what it is, earning links to your page from elsewhere, adding a table of contents: SEO brings with it many pieces of work like these that enhance the user experience. So even if you do not turn it directly into money, SEO work lets you keep the user experience at a high level through an effect that will snowball for many years, and that keeps generating a positive effect of its own.

It brings higher sales close rates

The sales close rate is a term that sales professionals in particular take very seriously. For a given opportunity, in cases where a quote was submitted during the talks, it is the rate at which the deal stays with you, that is, the rate at which your customer responds positively to the quote.

So how does SEO serve sales?

When a user visits your website, a perception of you forms in their mind. This is where you should have carried your brand identity onto your page as part of your SEO work. When you have, that is, the moment the user truly feels and perceives it, you get your message across. Even if you do not describe your service at all, you are introducing yourself through many elements: the design of your page, the flow of the questions, the way you express yourself and how polished it is, the color palette you chose and the visuals. These elements enrich the user’s experience. When the visitor senses them, a positive perception of you forms in their mind.

For example, a beverage brand’s commercial comes on TV. If that brand always explores the idea of family, it connects with the audience, and the people who watch that commercial will put that brand in their cart when they go grocery shopping as a family in the coming days. That is the most basic reason SEO work brings a higher sales close rate too.

Through SEO work, you indirectly present your brand identity to your visitor. When similar quotes come in, even if you are ten percent more expensive, your visitor forms the impression: “This company won’t leave me stranded. It will support me when a problem comes up.”

It lowers your advertising costs

SEO work is one of the techniques for cutting costs.

Questions about SEO work may come to mind, such as “Is SEO work done for free?”, “Don’t we set aside time for it?”, “Don’t we put in effort?”, “Don’t we employ professionals in-house?” or “Can’t we get professional services for this from agencies like 360DSGN?”

Yes, all of that is true, but remember this: when you want to sell a product or service, the first thing that usually comes to mind is advertising it. SEO is a concept that belongs inside the marketing mix.

Say we are going to advertise on digital channels. Let’s imagine we sell Ezine white cheese. Because “white cheese” is a heavily searched term, we advertise on it.

Well, if I also rank at least in the top 3 in Google search through SEO work, will I still need to advertise?

Google has its search metrics. The advertising side of the strategy should be kept quite small. So where I had set aside an advertising budget of 10,000 TL a month, when I back the same ad up with SEO work, more traffic can convert into sales with just 2,000 TL of advertising. At that point I get organic and paid traffic together.

So in this example, SEO saved me 8,000 lira.

It encourages local users to visit the physical store after they search

This point matters a great deal for local businesses in particular. Mobile searches need to be taken into account here as well. The moments when we are on the move keep increasing. For example, you are on your way somewhere, you search for “best restaurant” on the road and find out right away.

Say you have arrived at your vacation spot. You were wearing flip-flops and they fell apart on the way. You need to buy a new pair from somewhere nearby right away. Now you will look for local sellers to see where you can get them. So you will need to find local sellers for the product or service you are after.

So how does SEO work encourage this?

When you do SEO work and appear near the top on Google, especially in mobile search, the user clicks on the top two or three sites without going into much detail and quickly checks whether they are trustworthy. Once they trust the site and see that what they are looking for is there, they will move on to the contact page and the product or service page and want to find you. Like booking a table at a restaurant, they will want to go straight to the store and get that product or service there and then. That is why ranking high in search has become so important among local users.

In the core algorithms Google uses to produce search results, local search, meaning your geographic location and how your query maps to that location, is a very important metric. In other words, you may get different results when you run a query in different cities. A result that appears within the top 35 in one district may appear in the top 10 in another.

So you need to act with this in mind. When we do SEO work on Google for local product or service providers, it will also increase physical store visits by 100%. To avoid neglecting this and to give it the importance it truly deserves, you should invest in local SEO.

SEO builds brand credibility

How do you come to trust a brand?

If you have used that brand before, benefited from its service and been satisfied, and had good experiences again each time you bought from it, brand credibility has formed in your mind.

But how can you establish that brand credibility for a product or service you have never used before? How does trust form when any two people first meet in person?

Trust forms through facial expressions and through the other person’s manner, behavior, attitude and the clothes they wear. For instance, wherever you are, if you see someone scruffy, with torn pants, an untucked T-shirt, grease stains and a hole here or there, you are unlikely to trust that person. Just as in this example, in SEO work a visitor looks for credibility on the website they land on. And credibility is about whether they find the information there in a neat and organized form, whether that content is presented to them with an excellent user experience, and whether they can get the amount of information they want, at the speed they want, when they want it.

Think of it as two people seeing each other. Say there are couples dancing at a dance event. On these dance nights you choose a partner. Even if the couples do not know one another, they dance together by switching partners, so that they both practice and learn the dance moves better. For instance, a new song starts and you ask someone to dance who appears in front of you at that moment and whose look, outfit and manner seem right, in other words someone you think you can keep the rhythm with. You pick from the two or three people in front of you. If you walked around the whole dance hall, looked at all 500 people one by one and only then decided, the song would be over. Just as in that example, those who appear at the top of Google search through SEO work automatically gain brand credibility as well.

Google and other search engines put the content they consider most relevant to the user’s query and most trustworthy at the top. So the moment you appear in the top positions, you have truly built brand credibility.

It helps build brand awareness

For more standard products or services, you can make a purchase without any brand awareness. For example, if you are hungry, looking for something to fill you up and asking which pizza places are near you, you might just go and buy from the first place you find. Alternatively, you might search directly for Domino’s or Little Caesars, and that is what having brand awareness means.

If we appear on the first page and near the top as a result of our SEO, the user looks at our content and our site layout the moment they land on our page. Once the user likes the site, they also take note of your brand name.

Because SEO work is a whole, it takes in many areas such as content, images, video, speed and code management. Through these parameters it also creates a very real opportunity to raise brand awareness.

Why is ranking high on Google important?

Ranking high on Google matters for visibility and recognition. To buy a service or product, or to get information about it, people have to enter the marketing funnel we call AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) at some point. Say you have built technology capable of sending a rocket into space, but no country and no institution in the world knows about it. Nobody knows how you will get to space or what you have done. At this point you need to create awareness, recognition and visibility. Without climbing to the top positions on Google, you cannot establish your own recognition. You cannot put yourself in front of people who want to buy, as if opening a display of your own. For example, if a market stall never says “I have beautiful tomatoes” and does not display its tomatoes but still wants to sell them, that runs against visibility. And if there are 50 other tomato sellers in front of you, the consumer would have to pass those 50 sellers and come to you, which is not going to happen. So ranking high on Google is absolutely essential.

At 360DSGN, we carried out a study to complement our work as a digital agency. In this study we crawled and analyzed about 100,000 different websites and examined those 100,000 websites for about 10,000 different keywords. Some were put through a more in-depth analysis, others through a broader, more general one. We looked into questions such as how much of the traffic you get, on average, depending on your position on Google for a specific keyword.

According to our findings:

The page in first position on Google takes roughly 35 to 40 percent of the organic search traffic for that query all by itself.
The page in second position in Google search draws 18 to 20 percent of the traffic from organic searches on its own.
The website in third position takes 10 to 12 percent of the traffic on its own. Adding up the top three, more than 50 percent of the traffic has already been captured by the first three positions.
Ranking fourth earns you 8 percent of the traffic.
When you rank fifth, you can draw 6 percent of the traffic.
When you rank sixth, about 5 percent of the organic traffic comes to you.
When you rank seventh, 4 percent of the traffic comes to you.
When you rank eighth, it is 3 percent, meaning 3 out of every hundred searches click through to you.
When you rank ninth, you get 2 percent of the traffic.
And when you rank tenth, about 1.5 percent of the traffic comes to you.

Add up the top 10 positions, give or take, and you arrive at 95-98 percent of the traffic. This tells us that practically all clicks happen on Google’s first page of results and that the other results pages are not looked at.

Appearing on the first page of Google is vital. There are a few critical thresholds here. The first is ranking in the top 3, and the second is appearing on the first page. Say you publish a page and it appears on page 4 or 5 of Google. You need to look at how competitive that search query is. If competition is very low and you still appear on page five, you have serious SEO problems.

Now say you are in a very competitive field and you are on page four or five. That actually means you are in a good place, because if you appear even on page 4 or 5 for a query where competition on Google is very high, you have made it to a good point to leap from. SEO work from that point on therefore holds real promise for moving you up to higher positions.

Let’s go into more detail.

You are in a very competitive environment and you are on page 4 or 5 for that query, but perhaps that is not a query you should be competing for. There is an area where SEO work can easily put you in a top position or on the first page of Google. You can use your page to capture that area, so you can set your first targets not on the word that springs to mind, but on another query with enough search volume to convert into sales or generate serious organic traffic for you, and rank at the top of Google for it.

How can I grow my business with SEO?

Say you are going to open a store and you expect it to be visited by a lot of people. You have two options: the Champs-Elysées in Paris or a street in a village in the Alps. Which would you choose? It should be the Champs-Elysées, of course. When you could open a store on the Champs-Elysées, you would not go looking into that village street.

Google is the single leader among search engines by a wide margin. So if we are going to do SEO work, we need to be talking about Google. This may change in the future, because the internet world is dynamic.

Imagine walking into a shopping mall. Let’s say the reason you went in is that you got soaked in the rain outside and your shoes let the water in. So you want to step quickly into a shoe store and buy a pair that fits. The mall is a very big place… There may be 10-15 shoe stores, spread over 4-5 floors. On top of that there are very wide walkways, and perhaps shoes are sold inside other clothing stores as well…

Search engine optimization is handing the person who wants to buy shoes a map of the mall, walking along with them and finding out their shoe size. So, as a consumer, the moment you walk into the mall, SEO is what makes what you need appear in front of you at the flick of a finger (with a single click).

In fact, within SEO, which is a subset of digital marketing, you should be the North Star and bring forward the search result that best matches what the searcher has in mind. For example, creating a Google My Business account is perhaps the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps and gain visibility in Google Search local results. You can succeed by making sure a new product, service or information provider, that is, the owner of the web page, appears at the top of Google search for its search terms.

How is SEO done?

Make sure your website is in Google’s index and is accessible from all devices.
Check your website’s technical infrastructure and its security.
Create your sitemap and help Google find it.
Identify the keywords your target audience can find you with.
Analyze your competitors and keep your analyses up to date.
Write original, accurate page titles.
Describe and summarize your page content accurately.
Optimize the images you use in terms of size and appearance.
Offer your visitors high-quality, original content and define your site hierarchy.
Define your on-site and off-site link strategies.

For Google, SEO means correctly reading the search intent in the user’s mind and putting the most accurate result in front of them.

When we talk about search engine optimization, “Google SEO” is what immediately comes to mind. In every country except China, when we say search engine optimization we really mean Google SEO work.

Because Google is by far the leading company in the search engine market, in this guide we will focus on optimizing your site for Google.

Did you know that Google’s algorithm has more than 200 ranking factors?

It relies on an algorithm that takes relevance, page load speed and more into account when determining “the best search result.” So let’s get started on the optimizations the algorithm likes in Google SEO work.

The concept of Google RankBrain in SEO

RankBrain is Google’s machine learning-based search engine algorithm, confirmed by Google in 2015. RankBrain works out what a user wants and makes it possible to serve them the best results for that search.

That is why keeping Google happy and keeping the reader happy both matter.

b) Original content

Do you think producing a 3,000- or 5,000-word piece of content is enough? Let’s answer right away: no!

If the content you have prepared simply repeats, point by point, information that is already on other sites on Google, why should it give you a top position?

A footnote is needed here.

If you cannot be original for highly competitive keywords, you will not achieve a good ranking. For keywords with low volume and low competition, however, there are few user searches, so there is a small chance you can rank high.

How can you measure your SEO performance?

Ranking high on Google will bring you:

a higher number of visitors,
a longer time spent on the page,
Google valuing you more and more,
a higher share of returning visitors to your page,
a longer average time on page,

and other very significant positive effects like these.

So ranking high on Google should be both the essential requirement and the goal of SEO work.

At the same time, SEO has to be an absolutely essential strategy for companies to increase sales and grow.

So how will we know whether these metrics are working? What do we need to watch?

Essentially, you can track 3 metrics.

Total clicks

The purpose of doing SEO is to draw more traffic from Google. One of the most accurate ways to see how much traffic we draw from Google to our pages is

the “Total clicks” figure in Google Search Console.

This metric shows exactly how many people clicked through to your site from Google’s search engine results page (SERP) and how much organic traffic your site receives.

If your clicks are rising, it shows that the SEO work you have done is on the right track.

And it does not stop there.

You can also see the impressions and average click-through rates for your website as a whole or for all your pages.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic, as the name suggests, is another way to measure how much traffic you get on the organic side of Google search, where there are no ads.

You can easily use Google Analytics for this metric.

Although “Total clicks” in Search Console and organic traffic in Analytics measure the same thing, they do so with different calculations.

Let’s go into more detail.

“Total clicks” measures only the traffic coming from Google.

“Organic traffic,” on the other hand, takes all search engines into account (including Yandex, Bing and so on).

For that reason, when tracking performance you need to look at total clicks and organic traffic together.

User experience metrics

Tracking user experience signals will certainly help you improve the performance of your pages. Average time on page and bounce rate give us important guidance.

Average time on page: The average amount of time users spend viewing a specified page or screen, or set of pages or screens.

Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.

You can use the signals in Google Analytics to find out how the users or customers who come to your site interact with all the pages on it.

What is on-page SEO?

Commonly practiced on-page SEO is the work in which we optimize title tags, content, internal links and URLs, that is, permalinks.

On-page SEO is, in short, optimizing the content on our web page for search engines, readers, users or potential customers.

Why is on-page SEO important?

Today, whichever keyword we search for, whether competition is high or low, we see that almost all of the top-ranking pages use exactly that keyword in their title tags.

What is more, we see the keywords in the URL structure of the page we clicked on too.

These are already the most basic on-page SEO practices. Google’s bots will crawl your page for specific words and phrases in particular. When search bots see the keyword you are competing for again and again, it helps your content be understood more accurately. Of course, we should not overdo it.

When optimizing our content as part of on-page SEO work, user experience and user behavior should be taken into account. Based on these analyses, on-page SEO should be carried out with every factor in mind: bounce rate, dwell time, search intent, page load speed and, of course, click-through rate.

With that, we can start looking at how to optimize the basics of on-page SEO.

If you manage your website with WordPress, you can start by installing the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast makes things easier when you set your page titles, define your focus keyword and write your description tags. But there is one thing you should not forget: Yoast and similar plugins should not be seen as a miracle tool that automatically optimizes all your pages.

Let’s assume we have installed the Yoast plugin.

It is very important that our keyword appears at the start of our title tag. If we want to tell Google that our page is about the keyword we are targeting, we need to use that keyword in the title tag.

Since the keyword we are targeting for this page is “brand positioning,” the keyword must appear in the meta title (title tag).

Improve your meta description

A simple way to show that your content holds the answer to the queries users are searching for is the “meta description,” the description shown beneath the title. Although it is not as important as the title tag, Google sometimes rewrites this part automatically depending on the words searched and shows that in the search results.

It is worth noting that this change is not a ranking factor.

Matt Cutts, one of Google’s software engineers, makes clear that it is not a ranking factor with his statement that “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.”

You may ask why we improve it, then. Users, customers or readers skim your description to decide whether to click on your content. It is a factor that improves click-through rate.

So why bother writing a description at all?

Because people use your description to decide whether to click on your result.

Google shows the keywords you use in your descriptions in bold, depending on what the user searched for. Used well, they can earn you more clicks.
If you overuse your keywords in ways that are not relevant, you damage your content. You should not fall into the mistake of using your main keyword hundreds of times on your page.

Here is an example of how not to do it.

Be sure to use variations of your keywords

In this blog post, for example, our keyword is used in several variations.

Let’s illustrate with another example.

Say you have published on your website an SEO-friendly article focused on the keyword “digital transformation” and optimized around that keyword.

In your content planning you will want to use variations of the term “digital transformation”:

Digital transformation in Türkiye
Digital transformation around the world
Digital transformation in businesses and corporate structures

Important: When doing Google SEO work, you can type your keyword into the Google search bar and build on the suggestions to add more variations. This is how you can expand a keyword that will be useful for your content.

Content quality

If you are not new to SEO, you will have heard “high-quality content” time and again.

Google wants to see content that fully answers what people are searching for and asking about. It always gives that content a chance.

In areas where competition is very low, basic SEO work is sometimes enough.

But what about where competition is high?

This is where the parameters that make the difference come into play. The most important of them is original, comprehensive content.

You may be applying the rules of SEO very well. Your website may even be very well optimized for SEO. But if you do not have original content that converts, breaking into the top positions for competitive keywords will be very difficult.

That brings us to one more question: what is quality content?

The answer is two words.

Original and comprehensive…

a) Comprehensive content

As a team, we have worked on hundreds of product, service and blog pages.

An industry study has confirmed that comprehensive content holds better positions on Google.

Research into the relationship between word count and the position content currently holds indicates that comprehensive content comes out ahead.

The first thing to keep in mind about comprehensive content is this:

Content plans need to be built by putting yourself in the place of the reader and the customer. We should keep asking ourselves: does this give the reader and the customer what they want?

For example, suppose you search Google for “SEO rules” or “SEO examples.”

There is a huge difference between a piece titled “The 20 Most Important SEO Rules, Successfully Applied” and one titled “What Are SEO Rules?”

On top of the SEO work itself, when you make the content easy to read, that is, when we present it in clear sections and turn it into content where readers find answers quickly, Google will understand the scope of our content more easily.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is the optimization work done outside a website with the aim of raising its ranking further.

In other words, we describe the work you do outside your site to make Google see your website as trustworthy and authoritative as off-page SEO.

Why is off-page SEO important?

Although the exact algorithmic weight of backlinks and backlink analysis has not been disclosed, everyone knows they are an important ranking factor for Google.

Google states that it uses other off-page SEO signals as well in helping your website grow.

The main strategies you can use to optimize off-page SEO:

If you really want your ranking to rise, building backlinks is very important for off-page SEO.

There is a great deal of confusion about whether social media signals help with rankings on Google.

At a time when 5,000 Facebook likes or 5,000 Instagram likes can be bought, would Google’s advanced algorithms allow that kind of manipulation?

Of course not. That is why earning backlinks from trustworthy, high-authority sites is so important.

What is technical SEO?

The most important goal of technical SEO is to make sure search engines can easily find, crawl and index all the pages on your website correctly and in the way we want.

We keep all of this work under control using Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a dashboard where we can track everything from the indexing of our site and pages on Google to your organic rankings.

Measure and optimize page speed

None of us has much patience for a website that loads slowly. That is why it has become one of the important parameters for SEO.

We can see these metrics with the “Google PageSpeed Insights” tool. Do not focus only on the 0-100 score it gives us. It can also list all the parameters that affect that score or pull it down.

Site architecture and internal linking matter in technical SEO.

When we have a new site with just 3-4 pages, website architecture does not matter that much. But once our page count reaches three or four digits, that is when architecture becomes important.

You need to build a hierarchy. That is really what lies behind creating categories on e-commerce websites. And pillar page structures are set up through prioritization. If you are a service company, the links in your blog posts bring your service page to the fore. If you sell products through e-commerce, you should plan the linking for the products you want to highlight. When e-commerce SEO techniques are applied correctly, you can increase your sales potential.

There is one criterion: internal links need to be made rich in keywords. Linking is carried out along those lines.

To give an example, say we have 2 separate pages on our own site. Let one be called “What Is SEO” and the other “SEO Agency.”

When linking between our own pages here, we should not write “you can reach our What Is SEO content here” and bury the link in the word “here.” Whatever our keyword is, we should link the words that contain it.

Optimize for mobile

We should start by saying this: Google’s algorithm is mobile-first. So if your site loads fast on desktop but slowly on mobile, Google will rate your site as slow.

The place where we see this is, as we just mentioned, Search Console. You can also use Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test” tool.

If your checks show that your site is not mobile-friendly, this is a parameter you should put at the very top of your list for improvement and optimization.

In short, if the technical SEO side is poor, then no matter how comprehensive and original your content is, you can only climb so far in the rankings. Sometimes you may not rank at all.

For that reason:

Website architecture, sitemaps, page speed and mobile-friendliness are very important for technical SEO.

SEO rules

Although Google’s algorithm has hundreds of ranking factors, you do not need expertise in every one of them. The most important rule here is to apply the standout ranking factors with the greatest impact, guided by experience, and observe the results. Through practice we can see which SEO rule contributes more and which contributes less. Because we as a team have been involved in hundreds of content projects, we do SEO around 6 core areas.

Content that matches search intent

If your content matches what the searcher wants at that moment, your ranking gains will be stronger. Google uses “user experience signals” to see whether people interact with your content differently.

To sum up, when we get the two most important pillars of content right, you will have a big competitive advantage.

A mobile-optimized site, in other words a mobile-friendly site

Although this is sometimes an improvement people dread, Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test” comes to our rescue here. When we run our page through it, it tells us which parameters we have or have not addressed.

Backlinks

Another SEO rule is backlinks. Think of the references we list on our résumés. When you apply to a company, they run a reference check. And at the final stage they call the references you listed. If our references say good things about us there, it works more in our favor. Google, too, takes this driving factor into account when listing pages in the top 10. And it takes the number of inbound links, in other words the number of backlinks, into account.

Search engines like Google measure these votes. And they use them to work out which pages deserve a place in the top 10.

The more backlinks your content or your site earns, the greater its chance of ranking well in search engine results.

Anchor text

For the content we publish, Google uses anchor text to understand and weigh up what a page is about.

The message anchor text gives Google is essentially this: other sites and pages are linking to this page with this anchor text, so the page is probably about the topic that anchor text describes.

Site load speed

Your website’s load speed is now a very important ranking factor. How fast your page loads on mobile devices in particular is a significant trigger.

In short, all that needs to be said for this rule is: “page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches.”

Keyword usage

If you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page.

Otherwise Google will not know that your page is about that keyword.

One more thing to remember: you do not have to use your exact keyword every time. In fact, including variations of your main keyword in your content is the best approach.

For example, if your keyword is “What Is SEO,” you will also need to use terms such as “SEO Examples” and “SEO Rules.”

Examples of SEO-friendly content

If you want the content you prepare to stand out, you definitely need to cover trending topics.

The ones we all come across in search:

complete lists,
comprehensive tips,
techniques,
recipes,
step-by-step guides or handbooks…

have always been content formats that capture readers’ interest. Once this kind of content starts getting high traffic, some websites may even link to you.

If you explain every step, make it detailed and add originality on top, your content will begin to stand out step by step

Including data in your content

It is very important to back your content up with data and to support that data with references. After all, the first step of comprehensive content is building on data.

Following trends

For example, in recent years, in a market dominated by searches for cosmetic dentistry or smile design, the “Hollywood smile” suddenly became a trend. Many dentists and clinics wrote blog posts on the subject and shared them on social media. That is why creating content that catches the current agenda is so important.

Visual content

Visual content should not make you think only of an infographic. Videos, flowcharts, diagrams and screenshots are all parameters that will strengthen your content.

The Up-to-Date Google SEO Guide for 2023