The moment search engines became popular — especially Google, which dominates this billion-dollar market —, the act of improving website pages and content so that they are found in the top positions of searches stopped being a luxury and became a necessity!
Also known as SEO (which is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”), optimization for search engines is essential to make your company:
- Be found on the Internet;
- For the public that buys what it sells;
- With the least possible waste of resources.
In this definitive, up-to-date guide, you’ll learn how to perform complete website optimization to get your product or service in front of your ideal audience — and at the time they need it most!
My name is Rodolfo Benetti and I created this manual for you to sell much more on the Internet!
What is website optimization?
The great thing about optimizing websites to sell more on the Internet is that your brand has the opportunity to stand out from the competition by educating your potential customers as they search for the solutions that your business can offer!
When a person searches on Google for a solution to a problem, a facilitator for a desire or the answer to a question, they are on what is called a “buying journey” in Digital Marketing.
This is the route someone takes from the moment they decide to search for a solution, until the moment they come across your company — and are convinced to close a deal!
The opportunity to attract and convince someone in need to buy from you is so colossal that the competition to win that person’s attention is fierce.
If you don’t educate your potential customers to convince them that your company is the miracle they expect, your competitors will steal them from you!
Since advertising on the Internet is a democratic act and publishing optimized content with the intention of generating traffic (flow of people) to websites of any topic seems simple, what makes your company stand out from others is the emphasis on the qualities of your product or service that your competitors don’t have!
This originality — which is made up of your company’s tone of voice (which is built by Marketing) added to its practical experience in the market — has the Midas touch capable of converting strangers into consumers by making the purchasing journey more predictable and automated by account of that.
But there’s no point in being original if people can’t find your business — or worse: if your competitors appear in the top positions, above you, in search engines!
One way to make sure your business is found by exactly the perfect audience (which is the one most likely to buy your offers without much questioning) is by investing in paid media.
As the name suggests, you pay to have other websites, social networks and search engines display your media in a rented digital space within them — in other words, you pay to advertise and boost your content!
Although paid media plays an important role in a website optimization strategy (usually involving a kickstart for content that needs to stand out quickly or to boost conversions on pages that have already proven popular in a non-paid way), it has a short lifespan.
Since you have to constantly invest money and effort to keep your ads up and running — and in perfect working order — once you reduce your budget or cut it completely, your paid traffic will immediately reflect those decreases.
Adding this detail to the fact that every year paid media undergo readjustments caused by the increase in advertisers on the platforms (which also increases competition for capturing people’s attention) and by the financial objectives of these mega corporations, depending exclusively on ads to sell can be a hassle for your business , as your customer acquisition cost (your CAC) also increases.
The catch is that you probably can’t afford to pass these increases on to the price your customer pays for your service or product — and that’s where many businesses go bankrupt after years of seemingly unwavering success!
To avoid such a morbid fate, you need a lifelong flow of people coming to your website, product or service, organically — paying for paid media only when it is part of a growth-oriented Digital Marketing strategy (not bankruptcy) of your brand.
And that’s where another way to bring your business’s originality to the perfect audience comes in: search engine optimization (SEO)!
The importance of Technical SEO and other parameters
Since search engine optimization makes your pages and content appear at the top of searches on platforms like Google (or even on social networks like Instagram), you ensure independence from paid media adjustments and keep your CAC at a fair price for:
- Increase your company’s profit;
- Beating competitors by ensuring market dominance;
- And keep your customers happy!
To reap these benefits, you need to make sure that your company, product or service website meets the main parameters that search engines use to decide:
- Include your pages in listings (which is called ” indexing “);
- And in which position to display (the so-called ” ranking “).
Many of the parameters used by algorithms on platforms like Google are closely guarded secrets to prevent malicious marketers from abusing website optimization techniques — but the most important requirements are widely publicized, including things like:
- The technical quality of your website;
- Your visitors’ experience on it;
- And the usefulness of its contents.
The certification that the quality of your website will meet the expectations of the algorithms that define the inclusion and position of your business in search results is covered by Technical SEO, which is responsible for building the invisible foundation (using programming codes) on which everything else will be built.
Technical SEO:
- Sustains the performance of your website, which, the larger it is, the more it will contribute to the experience of your visitors;
- It ensures that your pages load quickly, reducing the number of people who leave the site out of impatience (which is one of the most important factors for an algorithm during indexing and ranking);
- And it avoids security flaws that can be very expensive and compromise all the work invested in building your presence on the Internet!
A backlink building strategy (links to your website from external pages) also accelerates the construction of authority — which is the sum of the qualities of your website’s entire presence on the Internet — because it borrows the authority of portals already established in the digital scenario, causing the algorithms to give a vote of confidence to your company because of this morale.
If these key parameters are too much to keep in mind, remember this: User experience is the most important metric for search engines.
It means that your pages will be better ranked and indexed faster if:
- Your users spend a lot of time consuming content on your website;
- Your visitors don’t have to wait long for your pages to load;
- Your content is relevant to your visitors and has the true potential to transform their lives for the better!
Since people use search engines to find out about their doubts, problems and desires, your company will gain more authority if it focuses on educating its users!
Website optimization brings this advantage, in addition to:
- Create a database that will allow you to intimately know your ideal audience;
- And make their buying journey more predictable and easier to coordinate with your company’s financial goals!
To help with this mission, below I will present the other Technical SEO parameters that can make all the difference when it comes to appearing above your competitors on the search page — and guaranteeing your generation of organic traffic!
URL Structure
From the English “Uniform Resource Locator”, URL is the acronym used to refer to the address of a website, page or content on the Internet — the same one you type in your browser’s search bar!
The URL structure takes into account how easy this address is to be understood by your visitors, so the more organized and simpler it is to be read and typed by a human being, the better.
Using keywords that describe the content and help it to be found in searches is also an attitude that boosts the indexing of your pages and shows the algorithms that your company knows what it is talking about!
When you follow these recommendations, you create a URL structure called “friendly” in Digital Marketing.
If your company sells shirts, for example, an interesting way to structure a friendly URL (so that your store can be found and well ranked on search engines) would be:
enjoyminder.com/sales-via-whatsapp-secrets-to-online-success/
Or, if you have published
content with the intention of making your website discoverable — and only then, using a link within the content, direct visitors to your online store —, the URL could be:
enjoyminder.com/post/sales-via-whatsapp-secrets-to-online-success/
Note that in both examples, I used keywords (even in the main website address, which usually reflects the brand name). Keywords , the ones that will come up in front of people searching for them on Google, are:
- “Best shirts” (from the public’s intention to find quality shirts);
- “Men’s” (with the intention of finding shirts for men);
- “Printed shirts” (from the intention to find casual shirts);
- And “How to wash colored shirts” (which is a long-tail keyword, more like a short phrase than one or two terms, and which serves the intention of finding content teaching a “how” to wash colored shirts without cause damage to them).
When structuring friendly URLs, adapt the keywords and assembly needs to your business priorities (and, when in doubt, ask for help from an agency specializing in SEO — especially if it is one of the best in Brazil, as is the case here from Organic!).
Sitemaps
Instead of creating content on your website and relying on luck for search engine algorithms to add your pages to search results, your SEO team will proactively create sitemaps!
Sitemaps are maps of your website listing all pages and content that will be sent to search engine consoles as a reference about:
- What to index (add to search results);
- What to monitor to ensure new content is indexed quickly;
- And what to ignore, since you don’t want every page on your website to be easily found on the public Internet (like the login page on your content management system).
Creating sitemaps ensures greater control and comprehensive coverage over all the materials published by your company that you would like your future customers to find — in addition to increasing your level of control over the parameters that are taken into account when ranking your pages!
Loading speed
Hundreds of research studies (and companies revealing their own data) demonstrate that reducing website loading times by just a few milliseconds significantly increases page conversion rates.
This can be achieved with basic strategies such as:
- Compress images to the smallest possible size (without compromising readability);
- Improve the code that makes the website run (something I introduced in the previous section of this guide);
- And resource minification (another work by Técnico SEO, aiming to reduce the use of resources that your pages require from visitors’ devices).
No wonder!
In the digital age, the public is increasingly impatient and anxious, meaning that websites that take a long time to load completely miss the opportunity to capture them — and that is why people’s attention is such a valuable asset for increasing revenue. Internet sales !
Since Google itself prioritizes user experience above all else (and the visitor experience begins when they open your company’s website), any optimization in the loading speed of your pages is welcome — and can make the difference in placing your brand in the first position, when there is a quality tie with your competitors!
PageRank Channeling
Ensuring that all links within your pages and content follow a friendly URL structure multiplies the chances of your publications being better ranked in search results — this is called PageRank in Digital Marketing!
Each internal link architecture , within each content linked to other pages, influences your company’s positioning because the algorithms don’t just look at the page they are on.
In practice, they observe the entire structure of such a page — and all the other links within it — like the branches of a tree!
The more standardized and user-friendly these architectures are (with code tags that indicate whether the content in a link indicated by the page is for an original destination or a sponsored one, for example), the more authority your website will gain in the quest to get the first position on Google!
With more popularity and authority on a page, you can point to links to other content on your site that may also be useful to the same audience consuming your popular page — thus making this other content receive a little bit of the authority and trust that it your main content generated!
Both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO (I’ll talk more about both in a moment) contribute to the final result: you selling more online!
Robots.txt and Meta Robots
While the sitemap creates a list of all the public pages on your site, the robots.txt file acts as a warning to the algorithms that come to your site with the intention of cataloging it, saying: “These are the pages you can inspect — but not these others!”
It is also possible to create indexing guidelines by site type (allow full indexing by Google, but limited by Bing, for example) and by file type (whether image, video , e-book or audio, as well as which of these media at an individual level).
Meta Robots play a similar role, except that instead of prohibiting algorithms from accessing the content in its entirety, they allow access to pages and files, but prevent the content from being indexed by search engines!
These are useful features for hiding pages that do not contribute to your SEO strategy or that have data that is too sensitive to make available to the public.
Canonicalization
The name is big, but the task is simple: canonicalization creates a single “location” to gather, find and manage your duplicate content or content with similar URLs!
You can set your canonical page — the one you want to appear among duplicate or similar options on your site — so that no matter which link your visitors click, they’ll be taken to a single destination that you think is most appropriate.
A very common example of canonicalization are online stores, which normally present dozens of variations for the same type of product (various colors and sizes for the same shirt model, using the example I gave earlier).
Since each of these variations will have a different URL, Google will interpret each of them as an independent but duplicate page — and Google’s algorithms don’t like spending time on duplicate content!
With website optimization, you can make all URLs for variations in the colors and sizes of a shirt model point to the main page of that clothing model when Google robots come to index your content.
This saves the search giant resources, simplifies the mapping of your site and ensures that your page will be positioned in search results!
Other essential elements of website optimization
On-Page SEO
I promised I would talk about On Page SEO and here it is: it’s a simple way to optimize the internal content of your website — page by page!
This optimization is achieved through small initiatives, but when done together, they define whether your content appears at the top or bottom of search results.
These initiatives are:
- List the keywords that your audience is likely to use to search for information on the Internet (which requires you to know your ideal audience well);
- Use meta tags, which are information normally hidden in the page’s code structure, which identify what the content is about, who the author is and what would be the ideal title and description to be shown in search results for your visitors;
- And organize your content into internal titles and subtitles (making a point of adding important keywords), starting from the main title (called H1 in the title hierarchy), then following through the subsequent subtitles (the H2) and the sub-subtitles within of them (from H3 to H6).
In addition to contributing to the user experience (who finds it easier to consume and understand content divided into complementary sections), it also shows search engines that your company is focused on educating its audience — which adds points to your authority on the Internet!
Off Page SEO
While On Page SEO concerns optimization within each page of your website, Off Page SEO focuses on creating an authority that takes into account how much other websites recommend your company’s portal as a source of information!
The backlink strategy, which I briefly explained in the previous sections, is usually part of a larger Digital Marketing plan: link building!
- The translation of link building means “building links” and aims, for example, to close partnerships with other company websites, news portals or celebrities on social networks so that they can list your business on their portals;
- Speaking of social media, maintaining active and relevant profiles for your perfect audience on social media contributes to your Off Page SEO because it demonstrates your brand’s commitment to being where your audience spends the most time and maintaining an active presence in the digital world!
You can’t ignore this kind of thing — and you also can’t receive nominations or publish content that doesn’t meet the quality parameters I described earlier.
The more relevant your content or the more authority the sites recommending your company have, the better your pages will rank!
Local SEO
Internet searches are not limited to distance purchases: you would be surprised by the number of people who search for nearby places to visit or to get an idea of the type of company they will be dealing with when making a digital payment!
Local SEO is website optimization aimed at covering these needs:
- Your business is added to listings for local, real-world spaces;
- In which a rating system is used to allow your customers to give their opinion and rate your products or services;
- And where can your brand be found if someone searches on a search engine focused on regional searches, such as Google Maps!
The key to success in selling more online involves covering all the areas your potential customers are browsing — and hitting them with the right content when they’re looking for a solution you can offer!
Visibility, usability and user experience
One of the main benefits of website optimization is making your business known to the most relevant audience and increasing your company’s reach on the Internet.
Imagine that someone from the audience you want to reach does a Google search and your website doesn’t appear. You’ve lost more than just a sale: you’ve lost the chance to create a relationship that could generate multiple sales over the next few months!
Just as bad as not appearing in search results is appearing in the last positions on the page: the chances of someone clicking on your link are minimal, since people trust the sites in the first positions much more and don’t have the patience to scroll to the end of the search page!
The opposite of all this is true: when you have an optimized website, it appears in the top positions on Google and other search engines, generating visibility for your company, your products or your services that your business never imagined!
I’m talking about tens of thousands of people with the enormous potential to access your pages every day, exponentially multiplying your chances of closing deals — especially after the dominance of cell phones in Brazilians’ lives, which made everything faster and more accessible from anywhere and at any time!
And since I’m talking about exponential gains, the visibility gained through website optimization is lifelong — but it requires you to stay up to date with new research tools and how your users access these facilitators.
Unlike paid media , where traffic is cut off the moment the campaign ends or is terminated, people who come to your site through your optimized content will continue to come — possibly forever!
If your page loads quickly, if your site is simple to navigate, if your content meets users’ search intentions, if it is presented in an organized manner and has the potential to be truly useful in their lives, your brand will be rewarded more and more by search engines — making life very difficult for your competitors, since it is difficult to take down a company that has built up real authority on the Internet !
With lifetime organic traffic from quality content (that provides the best possible user experience), you only need to invest in this creation process once.
Then, month after month, even though it may not appear immediately, the result of the authority generated by website optimization makes a geometric progression in the numbers that you will start to reap later!
And then, as you invest more and more in website optimization, what you have already invested in the past will also give results.
They accumulate just like an investment with compound interest: in an unstoppable snowball effect once it gains momentum!
Economics for business
Website optimization makes your pages more relevant to the public (because your company starts publishing content focused on the keywords and search intentions of your potential customers) and easier to find organically.
In other words, in search results, you don’t need to pay to multiply your company’s reach on the Internet and end the monopoly of your competitors.
This absurdly reduces your ongoing paid media spending (which can be reserved for one-off impulse campaigns or to strengthen your organic and lifetime traffic)!
When your website assumes a position of authority in the segment in which your company operates, your business becomes a reference and becomes the object of desire of buyers in addition to your products or services, thus reducing the amounts invested in educating your audience regarding your product or service.
Your audience will do this on their own using the optimized content you have already published!
To be perfectly honest, you’re wasting time — and tons of money — if you’re even considering whether there are any benefits or savings to website optimization for your business.
With the competition for people’s attention (and with more and more companies taking advantage of the visibility generated by search engines), the future looks increasingly promising for those who come on board as soon as possible — just as it promises to crush the dreams of traditional companies that are resistant to change.
It’s up to you to choose which side your company deserves to be on — and the very fact that you’re reading this guide shows me that you’re in this game to win!
Evolve along with the algorithms!
Search engines like Google have revolutionized how people use the Internet: from a passive way (in which it was necessary to wait for content to consume it) to an active modality (in which each person can search for the subject that interests them most and find the most relevant materials for on your own)!
Website optimization ensures that you are found by this active audience with the greatest potential to purchase what your company offers — and I taught you how to do this in this guide:
- That website optimization is also called SEO;
- That SEO is the acronym in English for “search engine optimization”;
- Which aims to make your company be found in the first search results;
- Through relevant content presented with quality;
- On pages optimized in a way that pleases search engines!
You also learned that:
- On Page SEO involves all optimization within your website;
- Off Page SEO searches for referrals from other sites to yours;
- And that Local SEO covers searches carried out on regional search engines such as Google Maps!
It all culminates in:
- In the visibility of your company for tens of thousands of people per day;
- In the economy of your business in the short, medium and long term through organic traffic;
- And dominate your niche above your competitors all over the Internet!
If keeping an eye on new search engine developments is too much work for you — or if you prefer to have a strategy that you’re 100% sure will work on the first try — you can contact Enjoy Minder so we can put together a personalized strategy!
Our team involves people from all necessary areas (from psychology to programming) to:
- Understand the behavior of your ideal audience;
- Attract you using comprehensive SEO techniques with Artificial Intelligence;
- And convert it automatically by optimizing your entire website!
It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
So take the real test: talk to Enjoy Minder now and try it for yourself!
As I said before, the choice is yours — and I really hope you choose to win!
