- All right, newsflash 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 gonna explain what SEO is
and why it's crucial to building an online business.
I'm also gonna 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 Planck 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.
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 onsite 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about false and outdated SEO you're likely to run into.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,
you know, sprinkled on top, just little, little salt bae,
you know why?
'Cause we care about you and we wanna see you succeed.
Now that you've downloaded 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 backend.
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.
And I'm sure you're thinking yourself,
"Wow, fancy words, Jamal, I'd love an example."
Good, I'm glad we're on the same page
'cause 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,
nah, 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.
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 and 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 outta my mouth, frankly.
And you could 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 you heard of HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform
so it shares its data across every application.
Every team can stay aligned,
no out sync spreadsheets or doing databases.
- [Narrator] HubSpot, grow better.
(funky music)
- The other component to onsite 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 lots to be fortunate for here,
HubSpot's 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 backend.
Nice.
If you wanna 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 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 at 2022 and beyond.
So now you should understand 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 offsite 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 linking 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 worldwide web of links goes.
And the stronger each strand leading to your site,
the stronger your own site will rank for SEO.
So, how can you influence the endless web of links
that end up connecting to your site?
Well, much like onsite SEO,
strategies for optimizing offsite SEO are really complex,
but if you wanna 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.
Hala.
I feel like the bloopers over time
have just become me making noises.
And you know what?
I hope that's okay.
I hope that's truly all right with everyone.