Free SEO Website Audit

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ranking a website on the search engines to increase its visibility when users search for relevant keywords and queries.

As you can increase the ranking of a site across a range of keywords, you will begin to see an increase in the organic traffic that it receives. Organic traffic is that which comes from Google’s natural listings, rather than paid ads. Our “What is SEO?” guide further answers this question, breaking down the things that you need to do to get your website to show up on the SERPs (search engine results pages):

• Ensure these search engines understand who you are and what you offer.
• Convince them that you are the most credible option for their users.
• Make your content deliverable.

But it’s important to understand that Google ranks results based on the best-fit for the query being searched. 

Yes, your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimization offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click.

When you run PPC ads, you’ll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, it takes investment into skills and resources to rank a website on the SERPs.

If you’re able to rank your website at the top of the search engines, you’ll benefit from a stream of traffic that won’t have click costs associated with it, and that won’t stop when ads are turned off. Rank organically, and you’ll enjoy 24/7 visibility.

But let’s also remember that organic search is responsible for an average of 53% of total site traffic. If you’re ignoring SEO, your competitors are enjoying this traffic. Most businesses cannot ignore the importance of SEO. No matter what type of company you are, whether you’re a local business, sell online, or are a global enterprise, you need to be paying attention to your SEO strategy. 

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work?

Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and these allow the search engine’s algorithms to rank websites based upon the relevancy and authority of their pages. As Jason Barnard comments:

Google is striving to recommend the most relevant answer from the most trustworthy source in the most appropriate format for its user.

To succeed at SEO, you need to ensure that your content is the most relevant result for a specific search query and that your website is seen as a trustworthy source. You can read our guide on SEO basics to learn more about how to optimize your site if you’re a beginner.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work?

You can’t jump into an SEO strategy blind. You need to know what people are searching for on Google to find businesses just like yours to optimize your site for these terms.

You can do this either using Google’s Keyword Planner or the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool. Load up the tool and enter a term that you think people would use to find your business online. You’ll then be served a whole host of related keyword suggestions, including their monthly search volume. 

You can then use these insights to inform your strategy and understand what people are searching for. 

If your website isn’t ranking on Google, there are a few reasons why that could be. But first, head to Google and run a site: search for your website.

e.g., “site:semrush.com”

searcher’s intent or lacks in-depth analysis or quality compared to the pages that rank for the queries you’re looking at. You need to ensure that the pages you serve are at least as good as, ideally better than, what’s already ranking. 

If you don’t see any of your website’s pages listed, this means that it has not been indexed. Reasons for this could include:

• Your website is blocking search engines from crawling it (usually in your robots.txt file) or is instructing them not to index it (generally using noindex tags). Resolve these blocks, and you should see your site indexed.

• Your site has launched very recently (within a few days), and you have not submitted the site to Google or linked to it from anywhere, meaning it hasn’t yet been indexed. Set up Google Search Console and request indexing.

• Your site has received a sitewide manual penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is rare and unlikely. However, you would need to have been using some seriously black-hat SEO tactics for this to happen.

You might have heard that Google hands out penalties to websites that violate their webmaster guidelines? There are two types of penalties; at least as far as webmasters go:

• Manual action penalties
• Algorithmic penalties (adjustments)

However, officially, algorithmic penalties (or adjustments) aren’t penalties. They’re the result of a site’s rankings changing because of the algorithm (for example, the Panda and Penguin algorithms) filtering a site due to the identification of manipulation.

In our Essential Expert Tips on Fixing and Avoiding Google Penalties guide, Olivier Andrieu explains these as:

Manual Actions
“Google Penalties are manual actions, meaning they are a human-driven process. When a site receives a penalty, it’s the result of a real person working for Google and reviewing the case.”

Algorithmic Adjustments
“Algorithmic filtering, on the other hand, is a fully automated part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Google’s set of software and algorithms can detect a certain number of manipulations, or what they consider to be manipulations, on any part of a website and “filter” this site accordingly. You don’t receive any messages or alerts if your site loses positions as a result of algorithmic filtering.”

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends.
Long gone are the days of launching a website, optimizing your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can’t launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority.

You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there. 

A good answer is somewhere between six months and one year, but this is very much based on the level of resources you allocate to your strategy, the level of competition, and what others who compete for the same queries are doing.

It might only take a few months to rank for a local term (e.g., plumber in [location]), whereas it could take years to rank a new website for, let’s say, the term “laptops.”

And Google’s John Mueller recently said that it could take up to a year for them to figure out where a new site should rank, and that fluctuations are expected during this timeframe. 

Back in 2016, Google confirmed its top 3 ranking factors as links, content, and RankBrain.

And in reality, optimizing for these factors means creating great content that other websites want to link to and that Google can understand as the best result for any given search query. 

But various ranking factor studies have delved deeper into Google’s algorithm to shine a light on those areas that have the most significant impact on organic performance.

For example, take the SEMrush Ranking Factors 2.0 study, which highlighted additional factors such as:

• Time on site
• Total referring domains
• Content length
• Followed backlinks
• And more

Google SEO Success Factors resource is another excellent read on this topic.

A question that’s always asked is whether a business should invest in SEO, PPC, or both. It’s the age-old SEO vs. PPC debate.

In an ideal world, a business should balance multiple marketing channels to avoid a reliance on any single source of traffic (and conversions). But, especially for smaller businesses, budget is often a challenge, and resources must be allocated efficiently. Funds aren’t endless.

Even in this instance, it’s essential to balance a long-term SEO strategy with a small but targeted PPC campaign.

There’s a common misconception that posting on social media helps increase your website’s rank on search engines. As Moss Clement states in our guide to 7 Ways Social Media Can Improve Your SEO Results:

Social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, but the links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure.
Your shares across social media sites have no place in SEO rankings. Still, when more people share your content throughout social media, it generates social signals that indicate your posts are useful to your target market.

While social media doesn’t directly increase your search engine rankings, it indirectly affects and helps build your brand.