Building an in-house team gives you complete control over your SEO strategy, but it requires a significant investment in hiring and training staff. This approach is best suited for larger businesses with ongoing SEO needs. Salaries for SEO professionals vary, with entry-level positions starting around $50,000 annually and senior roles potentially exceeding $100,000 annually. In addition to salaries, you’ll also need to budget for tools, software, and ongoing education.

Yet, the link selling industry is quite alive and buying backlinks is a common practice. There is no official metric by Google that would represent the authority of a page but there are many metrics by commercial tools that can help you with the estimation. As we’ve explained previously with PageRank, pages with quality links pointing to them also pass more link equity to your page. If you have a post about hiking tips and you have two backlinks, one from a post about outdoor sports and the other from a post about politics, the former backlink is much more valuable. They are not the same and while the PageRank metric was discontinued, the PageRank algorithm is still a part of Google’s ranking.

User Experience (UX)

By structuring information clearly and implementing semantic SEO principles, websites can improve their chances of appearing in voice search results, especially for long-tail, intent-driven searches. Instead of recognizing them as variations of the same intent, results would be fragmented, often prioritizing keyword-heavy pages instead of truly helpful content. This inability to process conversational queries and user intent made search less effective, something semantic SEO was designed to fix. Pages with a lot of repeated keywords, even when they lack useful information, ranked better than useful pages. Search engines struggled with synonyms, context, and what users actually wanted and so provided unhelpful results. SEO is generally lengthy, typically taking a few months to see noticeable results.

• You can use the previous chapters in this guide to explore those optimizations in-depth.
• So it should come as no shock to learn that over 51% of mobile users have found a new company or product while searching on their mobile.
• A type of self-competition that occurs when multiple pages from one website rank for the same query on a SERP.
• The three practices work cohesively, so it’s ideal to cover each when possible.
• So if you think about it, you are losing around 9,900 potential customers just because you are not on the 1st position.

Review your title tag and meta description

SEO companies perform multiple tasks to achieve these goals, including SEO audits, content creation, link building, keyword research, and technical optimizations. In the past, meta descriptions were heavily stuffed with keywords to boost rankings. Google’s algorithms have evolved, and today, meta descriptions aren’t a direct ranking factor. Because while they might not push you higher in search results, they can improve your click-through rate.

These steps improved SEO performance and the overall user experience. In simple terms, when you search for something online, search engines sift through their index to find relevant pages. They then use algorithms to rank these pages, placing the most relevant and high-quality results at the top of the SERP. SEO is the process of improving your website so that it ranks higher in search engine results for certain keywords.

If you’re wondering how meta descriptions actually work, you’re not alone. Below, you’ll find real-world tips for crafting meta descriptions, plus examples showing what works and what doesn’t. Most CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Wix, along with SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, let you easily create and edit meta descriptions without touching any code. Most website owners — especially small business owners (fewer than 50 employees or making under $5 million a year) — don’t realize how much power they have over what users see in Google search results. Reach global audiences and boost visibility in local search results with multi-language landing pages.

It’s great having well-thought-out and useful content, but if a search engine can’t crawl your website, it’s likely that very few people will actually see it. Having an XML sitemap is a plus, and can greatly improve the way search engine spiders crawl and find content on your website. Check out the free Technical SEO Site Audit Checklist to quickly check your own website’s technical SEO performance. By optimizing your website’s content, structure, and technical aspects, SEO helps improve its ranking on search engines. A higher ranking leads to more visibility BHS Links and traffic, which can translate into more leads and sales. This can be achieved through several tactics, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, technical optimization, and link building.