3 Pillars of SEO: How to Maximize Your Rankings

Learn how optimizing each pillar of SEO can help maximize rankings for any size business or campaign.

3 Pillars of SEO: How to Maximize Your Rankings

The query engine is responsible for displaying the parts of the content of a website that it considers to be the closest response to a user's query. This query engine will display websites according to ranking from most relevant to least relevant. But it's not just about getting content out to people; quality content is both the precursor to rankings and a powerful aspect of a campaign of any size. For a quality SEO strategy, one must devise a coherent strategy that doesn't consider rankings, content, and results as separate pieces, but rather considers them as interlocking pieces of the same puzzle.

With nearly 51% of web traffic in the world coming solely from smartphones, Google rewards mobile-friendly sites. Tools such as the Mobile Optimization Test show how well your site is performing. Ask yourself what purpose your page or publication offers to viewers. If your answer is simply “improve the ranking,” that's not enough for quality metrics.

Your content should be authoritative, useful and provide answers to questions. Remember that search engines are trying to offer users the best and clearest answers. While it's not technically an SEO factor, there's definitely a correlation between rankings and social engagement. You want to make sure your content is shared across different social media platforms. When it comes to that, you want to add value to the content you're producing.

You want to generate user engagement to test your services, pick up the phone and get in touch. A solid SEO strategy is not a simple and cold algorithm; it is a living methodology for judging your success with consumers. It's an incredibly complex and ever-changing field that encourages websites to produce high-quality content, optimally format and organize their material, and keep up with results. If you're a small business that uses WordPress for your website, technical SEO should be something you can cross off your list pretty quickly. If you have a large, personalized website with millions of pages, then technical SEO becomes much more important.

Much of what is considered “technical SEO” here is actually part of the design and development of your website. The trick is to make sure your developer understands the interplay between website design, development and SEO and how to create an incredibly fast and mobile-friendly site. Your website must be optimized as a whole and at the individual page level. There's a crossover here of your technical SEO, and you want to start with a well-structured content hierarchy for your site. With strong technical SEO in place, layered page optimization is simple. Use tools like Screaming Frog to track and identify weaknesses and work methodically on your pages.

That's the saying, right? In a way, it's true; your website is just a wrapper for your content. Your content tells potential customers what you do, where you do it, who you did it for and why someone should use your business. And if you're smart, your content should also go beyond these obvious brochure-like elements and help your potential customers achieve their goals. As a simple example, I recently renovated a Victorian-era house in the UK and, throughout the process, looked for several professionals who could demonstrate relevant experience. In this case, having a well-optimized case study showing renovation work on a similar house in the local area would serve as excellent long-tail SEO content; it also perfectly demonstrates that the contractor can do the job, which perfectly illustrates his credibility. Make sure you optimize all your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries, and testimonials, not just the obvious service pages.

We're still seeing too many paint-by-numbers SEO approaches where local businesses are paying agencies to publish blog posts that strategically don't fit well. Make sure all your content is optimized, and if you're doing content marketing make sure it's a good fit for your marketing tactics. This type of natural link should be the backbone of your link building efforts. This may mean that you first have to revisit the content of your site and create something of value but if you can do that you're halfway home. Last but not least we have technical SEO which revolves around Google's ability to properly crawl and understand your website. However technical SEO goes much further since it includes aspects such as the structure of the website internal links and proper rendering and indexability (which explains why it is called technical SEO).

In short technical SEO is what will help you ensure that your website has everything to rank well on Google in addition to the content itself. Whether you want to get more relevant links work on your brand image and reputation or take your technical SEO efforts to a new level having a good knowledge base means it will be much easier for you to decide what step to take next. You'll soon see that SEO is much simpler than it seems at first glance. We know that SEO can seem intimidating but break it down into its four pillars and address each one at once. The three components of SEO have become extremely important and for a business owner it is imperative to work to obtain high-quality links from reputable and relevant websites as well as refer domains and backlinks to their website. So how do you improve each of these four pillars to ensure you maximize the effects of your SEO? Every new blog post you publish is more content for Google to index on your site and another possible search list that takes people to your domain as long as the quality of your content is high enough. These refer to having a technically sufficient website creating optimized content and building your domain authority. Every campaign and SEO decision you make (as well as every challenge you encounter) will fall into these three categories so when you're trying to improve your strategy and determine which direction you should take just go back to the pillars and remember what your main objectives are.

Kendra Ursua
Kendra Ursua

Webaholic. Unapologetic social mediaholic. Incurable music fan. Hardcore twitter enthusiast. Evil beeraholic.