We tell you what search engine optimization is, how to promote websites, which methods are relevant now, and which will become obsolete in 2024.
What is SEO and is it needed in 2024?
SEO (from Search Engine Optimization) is a set of actions that help optimize a web resource to improve its visibility in search engines. The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic to a website and attract users through natural search results, without spending money on advertising.
Imagine that your website is a store in a shopping center. Without SEO, the store will be difficult to find: it is located in the most inconspicuous place. But when you apply SEO, it’s like placing bright signs and signs along the way to the store that attract visitors. Or you negotiate with the owner of the shopping center so that your store is located right at the entrance. SEO promotion increases a site’s ranking in search results and attracts more potential customers, just like a bright sign attracts the attention of passers-by in a shopping center.
It turns out that when a site meets certain requirements, it is more likely to get to the top of the search engine. This means that interested users will come who can become potential buyers of the product.
An SEO specialist works on website promotion through search engines. He selects keywords, optimizes content and internal site structure to achieve high positions in search results.
Stages of SEO website promotion
Sites may have different SEO promotion strategies, but most often the sequence of steps is as follows:
Conduct a site audit
An SEO specialist conducts a comprehensive analysis of the technical, content and structural aspects of a web resource. For example, it pays attention to page loading speed, analyzes URLs, uniqueness of texts and keywords. He also studies meta tags and headings (title, description) on each page of the site.
The purpose of the audit is to identify problems that may affect search visibility and promotion: coding errors, duplicate content or indexing problems. Indexing is a process where a search engine, such as Yandex, crawls and stores site pages in its database.
Collect a semantic core
The semantic core is a set of keywords and phrases that are related to the theme of the site; they directly affect promotion. An SEO specialist uses a semantic core to optimize content. And also to improve search results.
Steps to help create a semantic core:
🟡 Research the business and target audience: you need to find out what key topics and terms are of interest to potential site visitors.
🟡 Analyze competitors: this way you will understand which terms are important in the industry and which queries are most often used by the target audience. Special tools and services will help with this—we’ll talk about them further.
🟡 Create a list of keywords and group them by priority: this way you can better structure your content and focus on the most significant queries. Grouping is also called clustering.
Optimize content
SEO optimization of a website affects its position in search results and promotion, increases organic traffic, and improves user experience. If the site is inconvenient to use or the content is of low quality, the user will most likely switch to a competitor’s site. Optimization will help avoid such a scenario.
An SEO specialist reviews website pages and looks for possible errors or inconsistencies: in keywords, texts, structure, links.
Index site pages
Website indexing in SEO is the process by which a search engine, such as Google, crawls, analyzes and includes the pages of a website in its database. Once pages are indexed, the site appears in search results.
Indexing is important because it determines which pages search engines find. If the site is not indexed, it will not be visible in the search results even for targeted queries.
Before you index your site’s pages, it’s important to make sure you’ve completed the previous three steps.
Try different snippets
This will help improve search results and make it more convenient. A snippet is a summary of the page with the most important excerpts. It can display keywords and sections that the user navigates to.
SEO Tools
We tell you what popular services SEO specialists use to work on promotion.
Yandex Wordstat
Yandex Wordstat is a free online service in which you can analyze the search queries of Yandex users. The service displays information about frequency—the number of requests per month. For example, a frequency of 50 means that 50 people entered certain words into the search.
In the service you can also see what people from different regions were looking for and what devices they used. The history of the popularity of queries is also available.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is an online service that allows you to research both your own website and competitors’ websites. There is a wide functionality here: you can evaluate competitors, target audience, flow of organic and paid traffic, search engine optimization, external links and much more.
In the SEO analysis section, you can study the keywords that users most often use to navigate to the site. You can see the bounce rate for them – when the user leaves the site too quickly, as well as the average duration of a visit and the most popular pages on the site. These indicators can be compared with the indicators of competitors. This way you can determine the most successful solutions that you can implement for yourself.
The service is paid: a tariff with all functions costs $167 per month. It is possible to purchase only some functions, and before purchasing, you can try the service’s capabilities in a demo version for seven days.
Rush Analytics
Rush Analytics is an online service that helps automate work with SEO and contextual advertising. The service has many functions for different purposes: 18 tools for determining the positions of a site and competitors’ sites, 10 tools for working with semantics and other convenient functions, such as auditing.
There is convenient functionality for SEO analysis: you can automatically collect keywords, and also quickly collect a semantic core using clustering.
The cost of individual tariffs: from 500 ₽ to 2,399 ₽ per month, and for corporate ones – from 4,799 ₽ to 39,999 ₽.
CheckTrust
CheckTrust is an online service that helps you search for sites for off-page optimization. For example, it shows how spammed a site is – when the same words are repeated too often. The service also determines the number of incoming and outgoing links and loading speed.
Tariff plans: from 599 ₽ to 4,799 ₽ per month, depending on the limits on the number of sites and other functions.
What affects the cost of SEO website promotion?
The final cost of SEO website promotion may vary depending on various factors.
Competition in industries
Highly competitive areas require more intensive optimization work to stand out from similar companies. For example, there are many companies with building materials in every major city, so they have to spend more on promotion. But in the B2B sphere (when a company sells goods and services to other businesses), on the contrary, there is much less competition and demand, and in this sense it is easier to advance.
Site content
The more pages and the more complex the site structure, the more effort is needed for auditing, content optimization and technical improvements.
Keywords and geolocation
The choice of keywords and location for which the site is optimized also affects the cost. Highly competitive keywords and large geographic regions may require additional effort. For example, for a beauty salon in Moscow and a hairdresser in Krasnodar there will be different promotion options and different costs.
Current state of the site
If a site has a lot of technical issues or content needs to be revised, this can affect the amount of optimization work.
Outdated SEO Methods
Search engine ranking algorithms are constantly changing. This is necessary to ensure that users receive only targeted, useful content. If some of these methods worked 10 years ago, today they are dangerous for promotion: the search engine can recognize violations and block the resource.
Using them now is a 99.9% guarantee of getting into the shadow zone forever.
Doorway
Doorway is a page or site that automatically redirects the user to another resource. The content on such a page or site is mostly randomly generated, filled with keywords, and does not provide useful information.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a method in which the content for search engines is different from what users see. For example, hidden text may be added for these purposes or hidden links may be used. Search engines react negatively to such practices.
Hidden text and links
When an SEO specialist uses links and text that are invisible to users (for example, white text on a white background), the search engine may view this as an attempt to deceive.
Link cheating
Artificial methods to increase the number of inbound links, such as buying links or participating in exchange schemes, can result in penalties from search engines.
Spam with keywords
The more keywords, the better – this used to work, but now frequent abuse of keywords can cause problems. Search engines now use semantic analysis – Yandex and Google have learned to understand human language. Even if you use synonyms or indirect keywords, if you have good content, you can get on the first pages of search results.
Modern search engine algorithms are becoming more and more intelligent, so outdated SEO methods can only lead to negative consequences. Instead, it is better to focus on white hat optimization techniques.
SEO Trends in 2024
SEO remains a critical part of digital marketing: it increases visibility in search engine results and attracts organic traffic. We talk about the three main trends in SEO promotion around the world.
Google Artificial Intelligence – SGE
SGE (Search Generative Experience) is Google’s search engine powered by artificial intelligence.
SGE improves user contact and provides clearer and more concise answers to the user’s search query. There are corresponding visual effects and a chatbot. The resource differs from the usual ChatGPT – here Google turns into a conversational assistant that answers requests in a more humane way.
SGE collects and analyzes information from multiple sources to construct a response. The system gives priority to expert opinion, on which the search result will be based: you can take note of this. It will be easier for SGE to understand the structure of sections and lists.
SGE was launched in one hundred and twenty countries, but the service is not yet available for Russia, Belarus, the EU and a number of other countries.
Search without clicks
Users often don’t click on any of the displayed results in the SERP because they get the information they need from the snippet.
According to a study by Semrush, 57% of mobile users and approximately 25% of desktop users do not click on links that appear in search.
Authoritative and reliable content
SEO increasingly values content that demonstrates strong expertise on a specific topic. In this case, the site can become an authoritative source and gain popularity in a certain niche.
Search engines, especially Google, are gradually giving priority to such content. The EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) principle is important to them: expertise, authority and reliability.
The main thing about SEO promotion
🟢 SEO is a set of actions that optimize a web resource and increase its visibility in search engines. SEO attracts users, increases site rankings, and generates potential clients. An SEO specialist works on selecting keywords and optimizing content to achieve high rankings in search results.
🟢 Different strategies can be used for SEO optimization. Most often, there are several stages: conduct a site audit, collect a semantic core, optimize content, index pages, try different snippet options.
🟢 An SEO specialist uses different tools, the most popular are Yandex Wordstat, SimilarWeb, Rush Analytics, CheckTrust. The cost of SEO promotion is influenced by various factors: competition in industries, site content, keywords and geoposition, and the current state of the site.
🟢 It is important to avoid outdated methods in SEO, because this can lead to resource blocking. Among such methods: doorway, cloaking, hidden text and links, link cheating and keyword spamming.
🟢 Among the trends in the direction of SEO are the development of artificial intelligence in search engines, search without clicks and an emphasis on thematic content with authoritative sources.
