What is SEO? Here's How To Rank In 2023

All right, news flash for everybody that didn't know. If you're looking for the most effective way to build your online business, nothing beats search engine optimization or SEO. That's because 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. And 61% of B2B marketers say that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot, and welcome back to the Channel. In this video, I'm going to explain what SEO is and why it's crucial to building an online business. I'm also going to teach you the best ways to rank in 2022 and give you the free tools you need to get started. Be sure to subscribe to the channel and ring that notification bell if your business lives online, you already know that every day is a battle against the competition to occupy the top spots on search results. Because occupying the top spots means more organic traffic coming to your site every hour, every minute, even every second, maybe even every nanosecond, a plonk length worth of a second. Look that up if you don't know what that is. SEO is an ongoing process that helps your website rank higher in search results, making your brand, product or service more visible to people who are looking for the solutions you provide. SEO I say ongoing because the algorithm that determines where your site ranks on the search results page or SERP is always being updated. And you can bet your bottom dollar, and not your bottom line, but your bottom dollar that your competition is constantly working to improve their SEO and top your business in search results. That means SEO is a race that never ends. And while that may sound tiring, it also means that every day is another chance to improve your own ranking and increase your leads. So where do you start? Well, to help you get a handle on your on site SEO, HubSpot offers a free SEO Starter pack that you can download from the link in the description. It includes a 30 day planner to help you move through your SEO optimization step by step. It also has content planning and keyword research templates that help you stay organized, plus a list of the top 31 myths about false and outdated SEO you're likely to run into. That's just a little something we sprinkled on top little, little salt bae. You know why? Because we care about you and we want to see you succeed. Now that you've done the tools, let me take a few minutes to explain how SEO works. SEO can basically be divided into two categories. On page SEO and off page SEO, each with their own methods and metrics for success on page SEO means everything you can do on your own website to make it more attractive to the algorithms that determine search page ranking. This can be divided into two categories itself, content and code. Content means every word on your site, and code is the way that the site is built on the back end. Let's start with content. At the root of all the content is your keywords. Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of SEO because they distill what people are searching and match it with what your website offers. Success in SEO is often gauged by how your site ranks for keywords relevant to your site. I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, wow, fancy words, Jamal. I'd love an example. Good. I'm glad we're on the same page because here's an example for you. When America's Best Eyeglasses wanted to increase its organic search traffic, it started by conducting extensive research into what eyeglass related keywords people were typing into search engines. By incorporating those keywords into their website, America's Best was able to achieve first page ranking results for over 140 targeted keywords, resulting in a 41% increase in traffic. I don't know about you, but if I was ranking for 140 of anything, uh, I don't know, that'd be nice. You know. The challenge in 2022 is that nearly every keyword possible has dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of other websites with those keywords. So just having those words on your website isn't enough. Fortunately, search engines have gotten a lot more robust and sophisticated in their ability to analyze the context in which keywords live inside of a site's content. The better the content in which the keywords live well, the higher the search ranking. Google determines which content is better using what it calls the EAT principle, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. To determine your site's EAT ranking, Google compares it to millions of other sites and rates it by hundreds of factors. The good news is you don't have to consider these specific factors when creating the content on your site. Google rewards sites that reward users with a quality experience. So the things you would already do to make your site rewarding for users is what improves your SEO. The this can mean informative blog posts, easy to understand landing pages, or useful user tools, and other quality content. One thing Google is looking for in 2022 is long form content that provides users with plenty of useful expertise and keeps them reading. Google also looks for trustworthiness in content that links to other authoritative sites to prove that you're just not making things up, which if you knew me in college, I was certainly liable to do. You know what I'm saying? You shouldn't have trusted a word that came out of my mouth, frankly. And you can increase your own authoritativeness rating by creating content other sites link to, but I'll talk more about that in a few moments. I can find this Client info have.

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The other component to on site SEO is what we call code. Code is the literal computer language that makes up your website and how it's all put together. Because the crawlers that constantly analyze your site and send that info back to the search engines aren't looking at the content you and I see, it's exploring the code in the backend to find out what's there. So the structure of your site can really make a difference. And great content on a poorly built site will generally fail to rank well in search. Optimizing your code for SEO is way more complicated than I can get into here. That's why Most businesses in 2022 choose to use a reputable website builder that takes care of all the backend specifications. Fortunately for you, and there's a lot to be fortunate for here. HubSpot CMS Hub offers a complete website builder that lets you create a modular site that looks great on the front end and provides all of the technical specs for site security and SEO optimization on the back end. Nice. If you want to know if your current site makes the grade, check out HubSpot's free website Grader, which analyzes your site on key indicators like performance, SEO, security and and mobile optimization. All these factors are important, but mobile is especially a major concern. In fact, Google has been using mobile first indexing since 2019, and with mobile search making up more than 60% of all searches and growing, you can be sure that its importance to Google will keep increasing in 2022 and beyond. So now you should understand why on page SEO is critical to search success. But as I said, it's only half the story. And I'm not a half storyteller. So the other half is called off site SEO, and it includes all the activity that happens on other sites to make your site more authoritative in the eyes of the search engines. Remember when I mentioned other sites linked to yours a few minutes ago Those, unsurprisingly, are called backlinks. And they're the final ingredient to a strong SEO strategy. From the very beginning, Google used backlinks to help determine which sites to rank in its search results. As the Internet has grown exponentially bigger and more complex, so has Google's metrics for evaluating backlinks. They now include a vast algorithm that not only counts the number of links to your site, but the quality of the site's linking to your site. It's almost like there's like a two tier system there going on, you know what I'm saying? And the quality sites linking to those sites that link to your site and on and on the world Wide web of links goes. And the stronger each strand leading to your site, the stronger your own site will rank for SEO. So, so how can you influence the endless web of links that end up connecting to your site? Well, much like on site SEO, strategies for optimizing off site SEO are really complex. But if you want to learn more about backlinks as well as social media SEO and some of the special tools Google offers to help local businesses stand out in Regional Search, HubSpot has a whole blog post about offsite SEO to get you started. You can find the link to that in the description below. You can also sign up for HubSpot Academy's free online SEO certification course. Or stick around on the channel and watch our video about how one website, glassdoor.com used backlinks to become one of the top career sites in the world. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go make myself a top search result for every single search on Google. You're gonna see me, even if you don't want to. You're welcome. I'll see you next time. I feel like the bloopers over time have just become me making noises. You know what? I hope that's okay. I hope that's truly alright with everyone.