What is SEO?

Google has been the most widely used search engine in the world for years. There’s a reason for that: it works incredibly well. Google has always made delivering high-quality and relevant information its primary goal. The best and most relevant information is placed at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

That way, Google makes sure that when you search for “airline tickets Bahamas,” you see reliable sellers first, and only much later the shady websites. How Google distinguishes the “good” from the “bad” information? If we knew that, we’d be in the Bahamas ourselves a long time ago.

Google values information (you may also read this as pages, videos, websites or content) based on a complex and constantly changing algorithm. Over the years, however, we have learned what Google generally likes and dislikes. Based on these insights, you can optimize your website for the world’s largest search engine.

This process is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

SEO strategy

So SEO allows you to get higher on the Google SERP, generating more organic traffic. There are all kinds of ways to optimize your website, we know from experience and research. Do you want to improve your website in a focused way? Then you’ll need a solid SEO strategy. Here are 5 tips to help you turn your SEO strategy into a successful formula. Number 1 position, here we come!

SEO strategy Tip 1: keyword research

The basis of a successful SEO strategy is good keyword research. When you look something up in Google you use keywords. Think again about those tickets to the Bahamas. You don’t then search “I do want to go on vacation to the Bahamas, where can I buy plane tickets?” No, you search “airline tickets Bahamas.”

So if you want to reach the right people, you will have to use the right keywords. Broadly speaking, you determine those using 3 metrics:

Search volume and competition are nicely quantifiable. These can be measured, for example, with Google’s keyword planner. Normally, you want a keyword with the highest possible search volume with the least possible competition. After all, that’s when you reach the most people, right?

This is not always true. This is because you are not thinking about the relevance of the keyword. Suppose you sell LED lighting, then “order LED lamp” or “buy LED lamp” is a lot more relevant than “LED lamp”. After all, you want to reach people who want to buy an LED bulb. You have pretty little use for the people who are looking for the history of the led bulb. They may see you in the search results, but they won’t click on you.

So get into the skin of your target audience. What are they searching for? And more importantly, what keywords are they using? Once you figure this out, you’ll end up with a list of keywords you want to focus on. Then analyze this list with the keyword planner to see which have the highest search volume and the least competition. This is how you find the words you are going to shine on. When people use these keywords they should eventually come to you.

SEO strategy Tip 2: content, content, content

Now that you have a list of keywords, it’s time to do something with them. You can stuff your entire website with keywords, but that’s not going to accomplish much. After all, Google only wants to put the best and most relevant information at the top of the SERP, remember? In that respect, Google is not so different from people. When people realize that your website does not offer the information they are looking for, they quickly click away. This causes a high bounce rate, which in turn is a hint to Google to rank your page lower.

So you must provide valuable content. Content is king, they sometimes say. Content can be anything. From videos and infographics, to text and photos. Everything is important, but we’re going to zoom in on text in particular. After all, this is still the most common form of content on the Internet.

When it comes to text, there are a few rules of thumb you can use to make Google happy. Your texts should meet the following requirements:

Fresh texts

Google likes fresh content. This does not mean that old texts are not appreciated. But, if you write new blogs or web texts regularly, Google does seem to appreciate it. Therefore, try to put a new blog online regularly, or update your web texts.

Long texts

People have long thought that online texts should be short. Swift. Youthful. Pointy. However, it seems that longer texts perform better in Google time after time. What is long? Think at least 2,000 words. A text like this one. Of course, you don’t have to make every blog a long read , but occasionally a stunner of a long blog can’t hurt.

Relevant texts

You can write a long text every week, but until you offer relevant information, it’s worth little. Are you starting to see a pattern yet? Relevance is always of utmost importance to Google. So don’t go wasting 3,500 words on something you can also say in 500 words. And don’t start writing blogs purely to fill your site. If you have nothing meaningful to say, it’s better to keep your mouth shut.

Semantics

Google is kind of blind. The search engine doesn’t really look at the content on your Web site. Instead, it crawls your Web site. This happens sometimes every minute, and is Google’s way of “reading” your website. Therefore, for SEO text, it not only has to be easy to read for humans, but also for Google.

To do this, your text must be semantically sound. This is a huge technical story, but basically it boils down to this: you have to assign the right value to the words in your text. It should be clear that a title is a title, an interline is an interline, and a caption is a caption. People see this by the formatting of a text, but Google sees this by the tags you attach to words.

If you were to look at the html code of this text, you would see that most of the words are in a <p> tag, for paragraph. The title is in a <h1> tag, the headings in a <h2> tag and this italicized sentence is in a <i> tag. It doesn’t look like it, but to Google this makes a text clear. It allows the search engine to see exactly which words are important and which are not. The trick, then, is to include your keywords not only in your text, but especially in your title and headings. That will really benefit your SEO.

Important bonus: good semantics will also make your website more readable for voice search engines such as Google Home and for website readers for blind people.

SEO strategy tip 3: technique

For most people, SEO stops at a few keywords and some fancy blogs. But there’s more. Google also looks at your website’s technology and link traffic. First, the technology. That needs to be tiptop. There are a few metrics that Google is very strict on:

Usability

Nothing more annoying than a website that doesn’t respond well, or that doesn’t navigate easily. Google gets that, too. That’s why usability has become increasingly important to the search engine. Usability – or UX, for the hipsters among us – is a profession in itself. Fortunately, there are easy ways to make your Web site user-friendly.

For example, you can use a Content Management System (CMS). A popular variant is WordPress. This is a free CMS that you can expand with all kinds of plug-ins. There are even plug-ins that check your SEO! WordPress is built to create user-friendly websites. A professional programmer and UX developer are fine, of course, but a good CMS will get you a long way.

Speed

Usability is the main thing when it comes to technology and SEO. Speed is a hugely important part of this usability. What do you do when a page doesn’t load? Exactly, you click away. You don’t want that, the user doesn’t want that, and Google doesn’t want that. The faster your website loads, the higher you rank. This is about tenths of seconds, so every bit of gain counts. You can make your website faster by coding effectively, omitting animations, and not making your images larger than necessary. A solid CMS will make sure these things are taken care of as well.

A dynamic design

More and more people are using their phones or tablets to look up information. Google has therefore indicated that their credo for the future is “mobile first .” In short, your website must always be mobile friendly to show up well in the rankings. Therefore, keep the mobile user in mind when formatting your website. That means shorter paragraphs, but also a design that automatically adapts to mobile users. A CMS often does this automatically for you, but if you want to learn more about this, you can google responsive design. SEO does make sure you get to the right source 😉

SEO strategy tip 4: backlinks

It is incredibly difficult for Google to determine the value and relevance of information based on the above elements. It’s like trying to buy a new phone, where the brand is the keyword, the content is the design, and the technology is the – well, yes – technology. All useful information, but to know if the phone is really good, you want to know what others think of it. You go check out some reviews.

Google doesn’t look at reviews, it looks at backlinks. If someone else links to your website or blog, that is the ultimate proof to the search engine that you offer relevant and valuable information. Backlinks therefore play a major role in Google’s algorithm. In doing so, Google roughly looks at two elements:

Quantity

This one is basically very simple. Think of each link as a 5-star review on that phone: the more, the better. There is a caveat to this, however. If 30,000 links come from one website, all of them still count as one link. So the algorithm doesn’t just take into account the website URL. The server it comes from and the IP address also count. This makes this data difficult to manipulate. So you will always have to have as many unique links as possible.

Quality

There is also the quality of the links. Quality is expressed by many experts in a number of metrics. The most well-known is Domain Authority, abbreviated as DA. This metric is provided by SEO software developer MOZ. The DA of any website is between 1 and 100. A DA of 1 is comparable to a demented senior citizen writing a muddled review about that one phone. In contrast, a DA of 100 is like an experienced tech expert writing for a reputable platform. These are sites like nu.nl and rijksoverheid.nl

Starting at a DA of 25, a website is really of value. These are the websites you want to receive backlinks from to boost your SEO. You can look for the relevant sites and blogs yourself to get links from, but you can use our services at Hulc.co.uk. Link building, so to speak, is really our thing.

SEO strategy tip 5: tools

If you have good keywords, popping content, perfect technique and valuable links, you’re probably feeling pretty good. You’re well on your way with SEO. But just going by your gut isn’t enough for a successful SEO strategy. In this digital world, almost everything is measurable. So take advantage of that.

Only by measuring results will you find out if your actions are having the desired effect. Measure, analyze, improve, repeat. That’s the credo. Therefore, our last tip consists of a list of tools that can help you do this. Earlier we mentioned tools like the DA-tracker from MOZ and the keyword planner from Google, but these SEO tools you should definitely know about as well:

Seo tool tip 1:Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website completely to death. Here you can see, for example, what the visitor numbers are, where those visitors come from and on which pages they enter your website. So you can see what page they come in on and what they do next on your website.

Google Analytics provides you with such a huge bin of data that you will have to refine it to make sense of it. For example, you can refine by date. Knowing how many visitors your website has is of course nice, but it only gets really nice when you know how many visitors you get compared to last week, or compared to the same day last year. Only then can you see what kind of growth you are experiencing.

Another nice section within Analytics is Acquisition. Here you can see what goals you have achieved. In a webshop this is often an order, in a b2b website this is for example filling out a quote form or downloading an ebook. You can even see which source these purchases came from. This is how you measure which channel has the best return.

Should you want to learn more about using Google Analytics, we from Hulc are happy to advise.

Seo tool tip 2: Google Search Console

Google Search Console also used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. With this tool, you can see which search terms visitors land on your website through Google’s organic results. You can determine which search term the visitor entered and on which page of your website that visitor actually lands. You understand that this is a tremendously useful tool for assessing the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

An example: you sell phone cases. Then you really want to know what type of case you are best found on. So you can look again in Google Analytics to see what kind of conversions you get from that. What we as an online consultancy use Google Search Console for is indexing a page. By Indexing, we mean that Google knows your page is online.

This page needs to get a place in the search engine and this is done by the so-called crawl. By turning off a crawl request, you can be sure that Google will visit your website. In addition, GSC is also useful to determine which pages have errors on them. Is Google having trouble reading your website? Then this program will display the errors.

Seo tool tip 3: An SEO analysis tool such as SEMrush

SEMrush is our favorite tool. You can do very detailed analysis. The big advantage is also that you can look at URL level on which search terms you and your competition rank for. This allows you to respond very sharply to your competitor’s path and thereby determine what the winning SEO strategy is for you.

Taking the example of a phone case again, it’s better to focus on a type of device that your competitors don’t rank as well on. With SEMrush, you can see what the search volume is and who ranks in the top 10. We only look at the top 10, because with a lower ranking you don’t actually count in Google. People are generally lazy and rarely look beyond the first 10 results.

Seo tool tip 4: An SEO ranking tool such as SEranking

What is very important to have success in terms of organic findability is to know where you stand. That’s hopefully obvious by now. Of course, looking it up in Google itself every time is way too much work. Plus, search results can be distorted by your search history. You probably spend a lot of time on your own site, so it might rank higher than usual with you.

That’s why we recommend a tool like SE Ranking. For a few tens per month – so really low budget – you always have the latest rankings. In addition, you can connect multiple contributors so that everyone working for your shop or website knows the positions within Google. Besides the daily or 3-day ranking update, it also includes many tools that can help you roll out a better SEO strategy.

Seo Tool tip 5: A link building tool such as Buzzstream

If you want to become the king of the SEO market, you will have to do link building. Remember? Bring in lots of good links. Of course you already use Hulc.nl to make sure the new influx of relevant blogs doesn’t elude you. But what if you’ve played Hulc.nl out? Then you start looking for a tool that scours the market for you.

We are fans of Buzzstream. This is because this tool is affordable for entrepreneurs on a small budget and provides a great way to keep track of who you already know and who you don’t yet know. This advice is not beatific, because deep down we think you should outsource it a real expert.

That’s why we have Hulc managed in addition to the Hulc platform. With this service, we take over the management and make sure that all options are mapped, and that you get a monthly list of new options. So that means less hassle and more valuable links for you. Sound good? Then ask about our service.

Long-term thinking

SEO is not for the people who want to score quickly. SEO is for the people who want to score forever. Getting your website on the map and claiming that number-one position in Google takes time. But once you’re there, you reap the flights of fancy in the form of a steady stream of organic traffic.

So start today with a good strategy that consists of the following:

Persevere and stay relevant. Then you’ll reach the top. Will we see you there?