SEO – or search engine optimisation – can be broken up into seven major pillars, all of which will impact your online – the actual wording of the website, the website architecture, back-linking, social signals, site speed, GMB listing and the inclusion of a blog.

1 – Content

When it comes to the actual wording or content of your site, it needs to be relevant to the keywords you’re trying to chase. While the words you’re trying to rank for need to be mentioned with sufficient frequency create an impact, they cannot be used so frequently that Google sees it as spammy.

2 – Architecture

The website architecture refers to components of a website such as page URL, meta title, meta description, alt tags, heading tags & more.

The page title and meta description are particularly important because this is the headline and the first two lines of of text as shown in the Google organic search results, and have a heavy impact on the click through rate and resulting SEO clicks.

3 – Backlinking

Arguably the most difficult pillar of SEO marketing. A backlink for a given web resource is a link from another website to your website. Google likes your website to be linked from as many high-quality domains as possible. It is also essential to ensure that the number of backlinks you have is proportionate to the number of domains you are getting linked from. I.e. it is preferable to have 1000 links from 200 sites than having 10,000 links from just 50 sites.

The quality of websites that link back to your own is crucial when it comes to impacting your SEO ranking. Furthermore if your links are from low quality sites, the toxicity score of your links will be high which will have a detrimental effect on your ranking, and you may even incur a penalty where you will be removed from Google’s search results completely. You need a quality SEO agency like Search Rescue to provide quality, transparent backlinking.

4 – Social Signals

The fourth pillar is social signals. It’s essential to have your social buttons set up correctly on your website and to have consistent posts on your social media profiles because Google will then determine your business as being active.

If your social signals aren’t up to date and active, Google may see your business as dormant and your SEO strength will suffer as a result.

5 – Blog

The fifth and final pillar is the inclusion regularly updated blog page on your site. If you have a blog page and are frequently contributing useful and informative content to your website, Google will look upon this favourably which will have a positive impact on your SEO. Furthermore if the blog topic is something frequently searched, your blog page will not only rank in Google but sometimes bring in considerable traffic.

6 – Speed

Website speed is another important SEO ranking factor. Google wants its users to click through to sites which have a good website experience including a fast load time. Note that desktop and mobile load times are different so both renders need to be considered. We look at the factors that affect your load time. We action standard speed elements and for more complex script / file issues we will work with your website developer to prioritise these slow elements and resolve them. A complete SEO marketing agency like Search Rescue can help diagnose and resolve this important SEO pillar.

7 – Google My Business (GMB) 

If you have a location where you service your clients, you need to claim and complete all information of the GMB page. Furthermore, by getting positive reviews from happy clients, this will increase the rankings of this page.