According to Internet Live Stats, an estimated 100,731 Google searches are made every second. And while SEM and careful ad placements can be a boon for your brand, organic search results are essential for building brand awareness and influencing conversions.

And yet, research shows that about 90% of content doesn’t get any traffic from Google. 

This is a real missed opportunity, especially when you take the time to create well-thought-out pages for your site. The good news: You can make a much bigger impact. All you need is a little help.   

How can search engine optimization help my business? 

Organic search traffic is essential for building brand awareness and trust. Let’s break it down: Imagine you’re looking to purchase a diamond ring. It’s a sizable investment, and you want to be sure you’ve done your due diligence. 

Of course, you’re aware of the big brands — Kay Jewelers, Jared, etc. You could go to their social media profiles or head directly to their website to find information about the different rings available. But perhaps you want to support a local business or a smaller seller. A quick Google search can give you access to many brands you may be unfamiliar with. And if you’re looking for “rings near you,” a quick glance at Google’s Local Pack will show you stores in your area. 

And since it is such a costly purchase, you want to be sure you’re working with a trusted company. Just about anyone can purchase an ad that will show up first on a Google search, so consumers might skip over this and instead go to the listings. In general, they trust search engines to surface reliable companies in the top results, which explains why the top three listings collectively earn 75% of clicks and less than 1% of users clicked on results that show up on page two. 

See what we’re talking about? Now that you know why it’s important, join us as we share what to search for in a strong SEO strategy. 

What elements should a beginner SEO content strategy have? 

Like all marketing plans, no two SEO strategies should look alike. Your industry, goals, and target audience should determine what tactics you use. However, all good plans should have a strong foundation in both content and technical SEO. Both elements focus on the overall user experience, but they do so in vastly different ways. 

Content SEO focuses on the writing that will live on your website, and one of the key elements of this is the mighty keyword. Having a strong keyword strategy in which you identify relevant words and phrases for your goal and optimizing your content to focus on them is essential. Another key element is creating high-quality content that people actually want to read. If people are constantly clicking back to the search engine to look for another answer after a page leaves them high and dry, Google will take note and lower their rankings accordingly. 

Meanwhile, technical SEO involves making sure the site itself is providing a good user experience, which typically happens through web development. As you can imagine, there are several factors that go into this, including page load time, ease of use, and more. This has driven the push for optimizing Core Web Vitals, a group of three benchmarks that websites should achieve. These include: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This refers to the time it takes for the largest item on a page to load for a user. This should not take longer than 2.5 seconds. 

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This refers to how elements on a page may shift while loading, and good practices state that a shift of 0.1 or less is acceptable. If you’ve ever clicked on an item while a page was pulling up and, due to a shift, you ended up clicking something else, you know how annoying a large CLS can be. 

• First Input Delay (FID): This refers to the time between when a person clicks an interactive element on a page and when the request starts processing. An example would be clicking a button to go to a new page. This should not take over 100 milliseconds. 

When considering an SEO strategy, be sure that both of these work harmoniously. Having strong content that does not load would harm your rankings, as would having a well-performing website with nothing of value to readers.  

How do I get started with SEO for my brand? 

If you’re beginning your first foray into SEO, it helps to take stock of your site. Google offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that can help you measure how your site performs for the three Core Web Vitals, and you can create a free Semrush account to see which keywords your site ranks for. 

Once you get a solid idea of where your site stands, consider contacting an agency. SEO can be very complex, and SEO specialists have the expertise to guide you through best practices and help you see the results you dream of. 

Let’s face it: Search engine results pages are noisy — not in the traditional sense, but more so in that standing out on them can be difficult. Our team finds the space in between the noise to provide your organization with the opportunity to find consumers in all stages on search engines.