It’s really Google that people are referring to when they talk about optimising their content for search engines. In spite of the fact that there are three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo), Google attracts the lion’s share of traffic (90.61%).

Google changes its search algorithm hundreds of times a year, but some SEO fundamentals never change. Technical SEO and content-based SEO can be divided into two categories.

Your foundation is technical SEO. Your content won’t appear on the first page of Google if your site isn’t built correctly.

Your ranking is largely determined by how quickly your website loads, how mobile-friendly it is, and whether there are any technical issues that prevent Google from crawling and indexing your site, such as bad page redirects, HTML issues, and poorly structured URLs.

To resolve these issues, it is best to work with a developer who understands SEO, but marketers can audit their websites to find out what needs to be improved.

When that’s done, Google looks at how well your content is written and structured to determine its rank. Based on how people interact with the page, it gauges this. Google assumes that if users aren’t clicking on it, or bouncing off the page, then the content isn’t helpful, and it gets pushed further down the results.

What SEO can do for your brand

Many brands lose patience when it takes time for their content to appear on Google’s first page. It takes about two to six months for a new piece of content to rank on a website with high domain authority. It takes time to rank well in SEO.

However, the services that you have utilised from an SEO agency,  pays off in the end. Once you’re on the first page, your brand is visible to thousands of potential customers for months at a time – and you don’t have to spend a dime. Jump shot found that 62.2 percent of all clicks on Google come from the first 10 organic results. Paid ads at the top of the page receive only 2.8 percent of clicks.

Google has changed the way people enter search queries. In place of simple, one-word search terms like “laptop”, people are now typing in long, conversational search terms like “where can I get my laptop fixed in Melbourne”, since they know Google can provide them with specific results. Marketers use long-tail keywords in their content to target long-tail search queries.

The situation has changed even here, however. It used to be common practice to include your keyword in certain sections of your content to maximise your ranking chances (the title, meta description, first paragraph of the body copy, etc.). Today, there are hundreds of variations for each keyword, and Google understands synonyms and different meanings. As a result, long-form content has become more important than exact match keywords.