Why Is SEO So Difficult? Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Blue Compass is a digital agency in Des Moines, Iowa specializing in search engine optimization (SEO). Our experts receive many questions about SEO from business owners and other professionals in our industry, and we understand first-hand how difficult it can be to achieve the SEO results you’re looking for. SEO is a vast topic with ever changing concepts and search engine algorithm updates, so it can be easy to miss out on prime opportunities to improve SEO.

Our experts pride ourselves on being proactive and staying on top of Google’s many updates and the latest trends in digital marketing. We are always prepared to answer SEO inquiries in presentations and even created our very own SEO guide. But, what businesses and marketers really want to know is how to improve SEO without necessarily being an SEO guru. We'll cover a little bit about why it can be so challenging to compete in the online market, and steps you can take away the mystery of understanding search engine optimization.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engine optimization helps make your website more visible in search results, which means more traffic and opportunities for increased conversions. Having a better understanding of SEO and creating a strong strategy can ensure your brand appears in front of the right audiences to drive traffic, leads and sales.

Why Is Search Engine Optimization So Difficult?

There are so many factors that go into understanding SEO and executing a successful strategy that you need to consider everything from the content that is on the page to outside resources that boost your business's credibility - which makes it really hard to solve the SEO puzzle.

A few of the components you need to consider:

• The keywords on your page
• Each page’s coding, including technical aspects of schema
• The set up of your content management system (CMS)
• Outside resources like Google Business Profile, Angie's List, Better Business Bureau, etc.

Our team loves working on any challenge to truly help you understand search engine optimization, but we struggle with the fact that there’s no one right answer to any problem. Unlike math where there’s a single right answer - you’ve done it, you know you’re done and you can put it away and move on - SEO is ever evolving. You can do so many things to get to a similar, same or better outcome.

When our team sees success, one of the things we like to discuss is how did we get the result and is this replicable? Sometimes a different content management system is not as replicable for the same solution. We can go in so many different directions with everything we try from an SEO perspective, and there are a lot of gray areas. Every person’s approach and every website is so unique that it’s hard to understand why you got the outcome you did anytime you try something.

Understanding SEO As A Long-Term Strategy

We know the frustration of SEO - so many organizations feel like they have a great service or product, they have a wonderful webpage – but they go out and search, and their competitors are ranking well above them while they’re three scrolls down. That can be so frustrating. We know for a fact that Google’s algorithm, that determines what ranks higher than other pages, is incredibly complex - it has over 200 components that it looks at. Which means there is not something we can give you that will provide a quick and easy solution. Sometimes organizations come to us and want to do just a quick SEO project – 10 hours to get us to rank better. But can a project like that be successful?

There’s definitely something you can do within 10 hours, but part of understanding seo is that 10 hours is not going to lead to long-term success. If you want long-term success with SEO, you need to continue to evolve. At the end of the day, SEO is not a set-it and forget-it tactic. It’s not something you can do once and check it off and be ready to go. It’s something you have to continually work at and improve on because that algorithm that we talked about is changing every month, every couple of weeks even. Google is making updates, therefore your website needs to update and you need to shift your content and your practices with it.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization

You can do all 200 of those things that are in the algorithm – but we recommend you start by thinking about what your user needs. Think about what is going to provide the best experience for somebody coming to your website and try to deliver on that. And unfortunately, that is one answer but it involves content, it involves the layout of the page, it involves the code, it involves your meta title and description. At the end of the day, we see the most success on websites where we’ve continually been looking at what’s going to make the experience better for the user. We like to consider:

• What’s going to help them have a clear path to the page they need?
• What’s going to help them convert on the page?
• How can we provide them all of the resources they need from a content perspective?

Search Engine Optimization Tips To Improve SEO

One of the things that we always try to keep in mind here at Blue Compass is that Google’s entire purpose is to provide valuable results for its users. Just thinking about the user and your target audience is really the key to SEO these days. Years ago, it was more about trying to get backlinks or trying to put in the right keywords – and that still has some power, but when it comes down to it, just providing value to your audience at a high level is the best search engine optimization tip we can give to help genuinely improve your search engine optimizations.

How To Improve Your SEO With Website Audits

One of the things we do here at Blue Compass is audit websites to see what’s working, what’s not and what the low hanging fruits are that could be fixed quickest to help improve SEO and search results. Some of the things we find most often include:

• Redirect errors. Usually with any website, if it’s been around for more than a year and it has more than one person updating it, there’s some older content or older links that we can help clean up and refresh. Not even big overhauls. If we’ve changed the URL of a page there’s a redirect in place so you can still get to that final destination, but you have to go through the bots and users have to wait a couple extra seconds to go through those steps.
  
  Finding all of those pieces and really setting a clean foundation from a technical SEO perspective is a great way to take care of some of the smaller errors. Simple things, for example, like when you have a redirect in place – a bot has to crawl two URLs instead of just one. So, you’ve now cut out another page of your website that they could be crawling because they have to crawl that redirect. Taking the time to maintain that, making sure your navigation is set up in a way that directs user to the exact end result instead of passing through those redirects – those are ways you can spend a little bit less time, do some bigger clean up and have a better result within Search Console and get better metrics. It's not really a quick solution, but these are ways we help sites after audits to see some benefit quickly with some technical maintenance.
• Page load speed. This is one of the factors that Google looks at, and from an audience perspective, the faster your page loads the better the experience is for users. If someone is on their phone and they’re waiting too long for that page to load, they are very likely to take off and leave. So, the faster you can make something load, the better. That can get very technical and come down to codes, but one of the simplest things we often encourage website owners to do is eliminate the big image file sizes. Sometimes we’ll see images on web pages that are 1mg, 2mg, 6mg – that’s really, really big. In general, we try to keep images under 100k, 100 kilobytes, which does help with load time. Headshots are sometimes the biggest offender. They show up small, but when you get a headshot, the gigantic image takes over a full screen, the resolution is super high and we often see a lot of compression come into play on headshots.
• Copy issues. Understanding search engine optimization includes looking at your copy. We recently saw a site that was getting ready to launch with only 400-500 words of copy on the entire site! It’s not a big site, but that’s not a lot of copy. One of the things that to consider is engagement time. In general, the longer someone spends on one of your web pages, the more likely Google is to increase that in rankings because it sees that people are spending a lot of time on it and having a good experience. If you want to bring more value and keep people on your pages longer, try to provide really good, helpful copy that’s interesting to users. More copy is better than less copy.
  
  Lately, over the last few years people have wanted to cut down on the content on their website. They want people to get in, see what they need and get out. Unfortunately, that mentality, while it might work for some mobile users, does not work for search engines. If you’re not able to talk about the content and you’re not able to add value for the user – how are Google and other search engines supposed to know that this page is reliable and a good resource? At Blue Compass we say, if it does not have 300 words, Google is not going to consider that valuable. There are a few exceptions to that rule when it comes to the contact page or the homepage, but anything that is interior or talks about your product or service or even blogs need have 300-words minimum and should probably be in the 650-850-word count to start adding value by answering multiple questions about a single topic.

Additional landing page elements.

• Adding quality images that are unique (not stock photos), add interest throughout the page.
• Embedding helpful videos, usually from YouTube, helps with engagement rates and further explaining a product or service.
• Linking to relevant pages shows users other resources on your website, helps bots figure out which pages are related and can boost ranking value.

Our Experts Can Help You Improve SEO On Your Website

These are just a few things that you can consider when you’re working through your search engine optimization journey. We’ve been there before; it can be difficult. The good news is there are so many things you can do to make your website more valuable. So, if you’re wondering how to improve your SEO, want to better understand search engine optimization or ever need help from experts, we have a fantastic team of digital marketers here at Blue Compass. Simply reach out to us, we’re more than happy to help!