SEO for Non-Techies: The 3 Pillars of SEO Get Found Rank Higher
Search Engine Optimization is like cooking. Don’t laugh🤣 because I know you’re hungry🥓.
To cook, you need a few basic tools – a stove, electricity, pots and pans (these are Technical SEO). Raw ingredients, a larder, and a recipe/formula to follow (this is On-Page SEO). (Off-Page SEO) is people getting to know about, envy and talk about your food.
Tech, on and off the page are the 3 pillars of SEO.
As a non-techie business owner answer the three big Search Engine Optimization questions:
- Can you ignore tech SEO, hit publish and let Google flood you with traffic?
- If you ignore three on-page factors how will Google know what your article is about?
- Can you unstick your “dot com” from Google’s page ♾ Without PR, Social Media, outreach or link-building (Off-Page SEO) or don’t-ban-me black hat SEO?
See here: for the Big Answers
See here for the big FAQ
Don’t worry, I am Urban Renström, there is always science and research involved in everything I talk about, teach, and demonstrate.
Look it is simple:
The three foundational SEO parts are Technical SEO, On-Page factors and Off-Page factors.
But you are wondering:
“How do I do all the SEO as a non-techie business owner?”
What is crystal clear though:
If you ignore digital marketing and SEO then search engines will not find your website. No traffic will come. Your website and business are on page ♾️. And you are invisible.
“Obi-Wan you are my only hope”:
Here are three big ways you can achieve success with Search Engine Optimization, internet search engines and the google algorithm:
- (you can) DIY SEO
- (you can) Do SEO with someone, DWY, or
- (you can) Buy in SEO expertise, DFY.
Spend Invest 5 minutes of your time and read this:
Technical SEO is the first of the 3 Pillars of SEO
Technical SEO
is “website and server optimization”. The stove, electricity, pots and pans are the cooking equivalent of Tech SEO. It’s everything to get your website found, crawled and indexed.
Here is the kicker:
Technical SEO allows the Google bots (spiders) to “find”, “crawl”, and “index” your website. FCI so your website displays in the organic search results. Tech SEO is also about pageranks, backlinks, quality score, robots meta tags and link building plus many other aspects.
So we’re all on the same page🥁:
- Find: is your website findable and has a domain name and URL address, https:// www my site dot com?
- Crawl: the automated fetching of web pages by the spider bots.
- Index: the steps search engines take to figure out where in the database the page is placed.
The Not-so-Complete list of Technical SEO factors:
Technical SEO Factors:
* items are one of the 200+ Google page ranking factors
My big dog🐕 caveat on Technical SEO:
I don’t do much of this tech SEO!
Nor should you…
Because: Reputable website hosting (not the cheap and low-quality stuff) takes care of SSL certs and server-caused speed issues. I use and recommend Nexcess (affiliate link), they are part of the Liquid Web family of brands, Heard of Chris Lema? They are Woocommerce and WordPress experts.
New WordPress themes, e.g. Generatepress, Blocksy, Kadence (affiliate), are easy to use, lightweight and fast (speed issues) and “mobile friendly” (feck!! do I really need to state this!! 🙈)
New and reputable SEO plugins, e.g. SEOPress, AIOSEO, and RankMath (affiliate link) automagically create XML sitemaps, video sitemaps and local sitemaps! These SEO plugins add structured data markup to your posts and pages and help with redirects, and breadcrumb setup.
The Tech SEO items you must Manual Action:
Are setting up:
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster tools and
- Google Analytics 4 (formally Universal Analytics (UA will cease on 1/7/2023))
Decide and Set up your Site Architecture
You might be wondering:
I thought site architecture was the job of a website designer.
Well, yes and no.
Designing a site architecture is a cross-functional task.
Because site architecture requires input from a Web designer, high-level SEO, content strategist, content writer and graphics designer.
Site Architecture is the menus and sub-menus. Site Architecture is also designing and setting up the pillar and topical cluster pages.
For example:
Here is a sample navigation menu: the home page menu has About us, Courses, Products, Services, News, Blog etc., and a Contact us pages.
Like this:
The Second of the 3 Pillar of SEO is On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO
Ingredients, tools, and the recipe/formula – i.e. preparing the order and cooking of the food. On-Page SEO is the day-to-day things in your control as a “content writer/publisher”
If that 👆 is not clear then On-Page SEO is the process and practice of making pages and posts easy for a)Google to understand the content and b)for people to consume and solve their problems.
The On-Page SEO Factors and Items You Must Control
On-Page SEO Factors
* Items are one of the 200+ Google page ranking factors
WordPress makes setting up a few of the on-page SEO factors super simple.
The RED arrow is the URL slug which contains the primary keyword
The Blue arrow is the Title as displayed in the SERPs.
The Green arrow is the Meta Description with the primary keyword
Setting these On-Page SEO elements is easy with the new and reputable SEO plugins.
The Third of the 3 Pillars of SEO is Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Getting people to desire to eat the Spicy Lemon Chicken dish 🍗. Off-page SEO is everything you can do to get people to know about, get interested and desire that dish. Know about, get interested and desire your dish sound is PR, Marketing and Sales!
Search engines look at the world wide web as a whole and look for signals. As a whole when determining which information is important and significant.
Here is why all this 👈👆👇👉 is a big deal:
Any signal that tells Google your site is valuable to your audience will improve how your site is perceived in terms of quality, authority, and popularity.
These signals are one of the 200+ odd signals Google uses to rank and serve pages on the SERP.
Off-Page SEO is everything you do, which is not technical SEO or on-page SEO, which has an effect on your page ranking within the SERPs. Each of those things you do is a signal.
Off-Page SEO Factors
* Items are one of the 200+ Google page ranking factors
These👆 off-page factors are part of the “any signal” actions you can take to improve the value to your audience.
- Generate Backlinks – entice other websites to link to yours.
- Social Signals- people sharing or tagging your website.
- Online reviews and recommendations – tell Google people to trust your website
- Content marketing – make things people want to link to or share:
- infographics, reports, original research, and white papers.
- Influencer Marketing – pay to get your products/services in front of someone else audience. Do this to get brand awareness and PR.
- Set up the FREE Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).
What is interesting is:
Any signal that tells Google that your site is valuable to your audience will improve how your site is perceived in terms of quality, authority and popularity.
RELATED CONTENT – Two previous SEO posts are required reading: Understanding the SERP page is a great place to start. Then familiarize yourself with a dozen of the basic and foundational SEO concepts.
The Non-Techie SEO Questions you Need to Answer
The questions were:
*Can you ignore technical SEO?
*If you ignore on-page SEO…?
*Possible to unstick pages from page 2+?
Answers:
Ignore Technical SEO? Yes. The real and present danger is your website is ignored. Remember Google page 2-♾? Yea, you will lean towards the infinity side of the continuum.
Can ignore On-page? No. People are searching for products and services. Without making the best of your pages Google won’t serve them as answers to people.
How to unstick a page ranking on page 2? Put on your detective hat🎩 and look at all holistically – keywords, tags, quality of the page, E-A-T?, links, and the technical stuff. No magic 🧙♂️ to save you.
The 3 pillars of SEO are Technical SEO, On-page and off-page SEO.
All work together and ensure your website is found by search engines. Crawled by the bots, so they figure out what is on your pages. And Index your pages and website into a database.
Because page 2-♾ is the “dead man zone” or “where the bodies are buried!”☠
See this 👇 image:
The chart shows that 56% (30+15+11) of all clicks, for a keyword, on page 1, go to the top 3 positions!
Read that again but slowly.
Position #1 gets 27.6% of all the clicks for that keyword. Position #2 gets 15% and #3 gets 11%.
Ok, get that 🤔? 27.6% of all the clicks for that keyword go to position #1!
Look:
The 80:20 rule is in play. 80% of all clicks for a keyword go for links on page 1. 20% of all clicks go to page 2-♾. Actually, it is 86%, not 80.
For example there are 1,380,000,000 results for “red wine”. 27.6% of all the clicks for “red wine” will go to position #1.
Your page is dead if they are on page 2-♾!
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer.
An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that the website is authentic and enables an encrypted connection.
An encrypted connection is critical to accept payments and handling passwords and email addresses.
If the URL you are shopping from begins with “HTTPS” then you are safe that the website is using SSL and is secure.
On-page and off-page SEO are 2 of the 3 pillars of SEO.
On-page SEO is the thing you can easily control on the page. Words, page/post title, permalink, meta description, add alt description (alternate) to images. Alter the H1, H2, and H3 heading tags.
Off-page SEO is all the stuff done away from your website to affect how Google sees your website.
- Building backlinks
- Social Media
- Reviews and recommendations
- Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
Google says “Structured data is a standardized format for providing information (to search engines) about a page and classifying the page content…”
Schema markup helps search engines understand what your content is about and potentially reflect that in SERPs. Dozens and dozens if not hundreds of schemas exist.
This blog post uses the Article schema and uses the FAQ Schema for this faq (very meta)
“Nothing is more frustrating than a slow website.” 🐢 And with each additional second conversions (sales) drop by 10%!
What is page speed? Google defines page speed in two ways:
- How long it takes to display content above the fold.
- How long it takes a browser to fully render the page?
What is worrying is website speed and page load times are a Google page ranking factors!
1:4 people would abandon a website if takes more than 4 seconds to load.
A 1-second delay drops customer satisfaction by 16%
Crawlability is how easy Google’s spiders, the bots, can access, crawl, and determine the content on your website and pages.
The robot.txt file (tells search engines which URLs it can access on your website) allows or prevents access to the bots.
The Structured Data tells the search engines what type of content it’s reading – news, article, video etc.
Indexation is a search engine process of adding pages to its index or database.
Indexing happens when the search engine crawl pages for the content on the page. Including the keywords, structured data, metadata and other signals.
On-page is important because it helps people and search engines match the questions people ask (searcher’s query) and helps the search engine determine if your page, website and content, are relevant.
Everything you on the page helps a) people solve the problems they have, and b)helps the search engines figure out what the page is about with its keywords, titles, URL, meta description, images and words on the page.
When you don’t care about the on-page stuff then you are handicapping your content. And then reducing the changes will show up on Google page 1.
Stormtroopers Image credit to Will Porada
Blue Lego Blocks Image credit to Iker Urteaga
Purple and yellow Lego Blocks image credit Photo to Ryan Quintal
Getting a Tsunami of Organic Traffic?
Worse is the dwindling email list, the bare appointment book and the underperforming online courses. Time to turn the trickle into a torrent.
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