What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services. The more visible a website is on search engines, the more likely the brand is to attract new customers.

Website visibility is typically measured by the site's placement or ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Businesses in every industry are always competing for the first page to get attention.

On Google, SERPs typically include ads at the top of the page. These ads remain as long as businesses pay to be placed on that first page. The rankings after the ads are the normal search listings that search engines call organic search results. The SEO process aims to increase a business's organic search results and attract organic search traffic to the site. Thanks to SEO, a website can attract organic search traffic instead of traffic from paid search, social media, referrals, and other channels.

Organic search traffic is higher quality traffic for websites. This is because users are actively searching for a specific topic, product, or service that a site can rank for. If a user finds this site through a search engine, better brand engagement results.

What are the Applications of SEO?

Almost every business can benefit from search engine optimization (SEO). If you have a product or service to offer, you will have an audience searching for it on search engines. At this point, you need SEO work. Businesses need to ensure that their customers can find them when needed, and they can do this with SEO. When an effective SEO strategy is implemented, potential customers can search for relevant terms on search engines that attract them to your business.

We said that SEO can be effective for almost every industry. However, some industries can benefit more from SEO than others. Especially if you are in fields such as e-commerce, restaurants, hotels, healthcare organizations and services, law, or blogs in our country, you need SEO strategies.

What are Effective SEO Techniques?

In this section of our article, you will find SEO techniques you should pay attention to in order to increase your site's organic traffic in 2022. You will find not only on-page SEO tactics but also off-page SEO techniques here. By working on some of these SEO practices, you can work to improve your visibility and traffic.

1. Find Your Competitors' Best-Performing Pages

The more you know about your competitors' SEO strategy, the better your own site can perform.

When you take the time to find out what works for the websites you compete with in the SERPs, you can take your analysis to the next level and use that data to determine your own approach.

In SEO, finding your competitors' best-performing pages will be a good start. This way, you can get data on where their organic traffic comes from and what drives it. Analyzing your competitors' best pages will help with the following:

• You can catch a content/keyword gap.
• You can find a link gap.
• You get an opportunity to improve your existing content.
• You can find successful keywords.

2. Inform Your Content Strategy Using Keyword Gap Analysis

You have two methods to create a content strategy;

• Optimizing existing content
• Creating new content

Optimizing existing content will usually be the most effective option. This is because improving indexed content allows you to get results faster.

You must create content with a purpose and provide value to users in the content you create. In other words, you should develop a strategy for creating new content and plan every detail of the content.

One of the fastest ways to guide your content plan is to perform a keyword gap analysis, which will help you see the keywords your competitors rank for but you don't. This way, you can create content around these keywords and topics to fill that gap. And you can do this faster and more efficiently with specialized SEO tools.

3. Use Digital PR to Earn Authority Backlinks

One of the biggest challenges in SEO processes is how to earn authority backlinks.

Backlinks continue to be one of Google's top-level factors, and there are many different link-building strategies that can help you successfully earn relevant links.

4. Improve Your Organic Click-Through Rate Using PPC Testing

Click-through rate is used as a ranking factor and is a metric that needs to be optimized. However, you need to know the elements that can affect your site's click-through rate;

• Title tag
• Meta description

Therefore, title tags and meta descriptions are still important factors for effective ranking on search engines.

5. Provide a Flawless Page Experience

Page optimization has been a relatively weak ranking factor that SEO practitioners have never taken too seriously.

In the SEO world, processes are changing very quickly. With the release of BERT and MUM updates, the latest SEO trends have changed. Now, metrics like on-page site optimization have gained more weight in Google's ranking algorithm, as you might have guessed.

6. Increase Your Dwell Time

The SEO industry continues to see an increasing impact of user experience on Google's ranking algorithm. Therefore, a simple site architecture, fast loading speed, and mobile experience are important ranking factors. However, none of these factors had more impact on rankings than others.

The most important metric showing that the user experience is high quality is dwell time. Therefore, you should develop strategies that will increase your dwell time.

7. Focus on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords

Google is evolving and its algorithm is changing more and more. Now Google's goal is to understand the intent of its users. It tries to find out what they expect, what they are looking for, and more specifically, which search results will answer their needs.

Therefore, do not expect your website to appear on the first page of Google by only creating keyword-focused content. Just looking at keywords is not enough. You must now enter a content creation process focused on users.

8. Create Voice Assistant-Friendly Content

Do you perform voice searches on Google? Usually, searches are done by typing into the search bar.

However, with the emergence of voice assistants, this process has also begun to evolve rapidly. Now, there are 4.2 billion voice assistants used worldwide (estimated to reach 8.4 by 2024.) You should create more fluent and voice search-focused content for Google. And in a more conversational search engine world, you should optimize your website for voice search.

9. Regularly Repurpose and Refresh Your Old Content

You may find it difficult to find the motivation to write a long blog post. In this case, why don't you increase your existing content from 1,200 words to 2,000?

Existing content already has a certain authority and a certain established readership. It can be much easier to increase the performance of an existing post in search results by refreshing it with updated information and extra content than to create a new post from scratch.

10. Create Video Content and Create a YouTube Channel for Your Business

We said you should increase your dwell time. Is there a better way to do this than using video?

For this, be sure to share video content in the content on your website. This way, you can increase the time your visitors stay on the page.

• 60% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
• 74% of marketers say video provides a better return on investment than static images.
• 49% of marketers say video helps them engage with their audience.
• 52% of marketers say video helps them build trust with potential customers.

11. Target Local Searchers with Landing Pages and Entries

46% of all Google searches consist of people who perform local searches. These searches can be as follows:

• Local stores
• Working hours
• Phone numbers
• Address

For physical business owners who serve a specific area, local SEO is a must.

This way, you can get the necessary steps to capture potential customers living nearby. 72% of people who perform a Google search for online local businesses visit the business within a 8 square kilometer area.

12. Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords - especially those with three or more words - play an important role in voice search. To rank for this type of keyword, you need to create content on your website that targets them using the following process:

• First, define a long-tail keyword (e.g., "how to wash a car").
• Find many semantically relevant keywords (e.g., "car washing guide" and "best soap for washing a car").
• Write a long-form, comprehensive blog post that positions the semantically relevant keywords appropriately.