Principles of SEO

Search Engines

Essentially, SEO is all about Google (or any other search engine) trying to find the best or most useful result for the searcher.

It is in a search engine’s interest to return the most useful searches it can, because search engines make money through advertising on their platform. The more useful the search engine’s results, the more people use it, the more ads get shown, and the more money they make.

Google is the ubiquitous search engine with 91% of the search market, although this may be changing.

Ranking Factors

In deciding what results to return to the searcher in order to be of most use, the search engine will consider 2 or 3 things:

Relevance – how relevant or useful is this page or website to the person making this search
Authority – how authoritative is this website, traditionally measured by the quality and quantity of inbound links it has
Location – if the searcher is making a local search, what is the location of the Google Business Profile

Google do not tell us what the ranking factors are and give only vague advice, which often turns out to be misinformation. See this guide to local ranking factors.

Technical Factors

Technical optimisation of your website is called Technical SEO and covers two different areas:

Making your website function correctly, load fast, etc.
Ensuring the search engine is told clearly what your website is about, partly by using signals which can’t be seen on the page but are read by the search engine, such as certain tags and metadata. See our guide to SEO tags.

A well-functioning website is still important, but most SEOs no longer break a sweat over things like improving load speed metrics or mobile experience. After years of saying these things were ranking factors Google eventually turned around and said they had been lying all along. But the real reason we don’t worry too much about them is that website technology has improved to the point that most websites will easily be optimised for mobiles and load fast.

Keywords

We have already covered choosing keywords for a local clinic in the guide to choosing your keywords. You might also like to see the guide to keyword research using SEMRush.

Keywords are central to SEO. We first choose the keywords we want to target based on what our market is typing into Google (e.g. “dentist in london”) and then optimise our website to be seen as relevant as possible for those terms by Google.

Content

It is a very general principle in SEO that the more and better information you have about something, the higher you will rank.

For this reason websites will publish extensive information around a topic, such as blog posts or a knowledge base (like this one), which makes them a more comprehensive source of knowledge on the topic and helps them to rank higher.

Features such as FAQs and videos on the page can also help improve ranking as they enrich the content.

Behavioural Factors

Although Google continues to deny they are a ranking factor, it is well known in SEO that behavioural factors are important to your rankings. By behavioural factors we mean:

How long the user stays on your website or webpage
Whether they “finish” their search on your page, or hit the back button and try another website.

The only way to improve behavioural factors is to make your website as useful and appealing as possible to the searcher. This approach is also a general principle in modern SEO – it is all about creating lots of helpful, useful content.

Want to Know More?

If you have more questions about SEO, we’ll be happy to help. Feel free to reach out, come and ask a question in Free Webinar Friday, or book a free strategy call.

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