It does not matter if you are a small association, a large company, or an authority: everyone benefits from being seen well on Google. If you do not see, you do not exist, they also said before when they talked about advertising, in today’s situation it is at least as true but it is about Google and it is really only about Google for more than 95% of all searches on the web are done today on Google, and if you are not there, you will not be there. That is why getting good with Google is considered one of the SEO basics.
In other countries, there is a greater variety of search engines, and Microsoft’s search engine Bing may have a larger share of the searches, and in countries where Amazon is located many searches are made via that interface.
Google has even said that it is not one of the traditional search engines that is their biggest search competitor today, but Amazon in the markets in which they operate.
But: the good news is that in Sweden, only Google applies, and that is why it is so important to invest in search engine optimization (SEO) to be seen well and continuously get relevant search traffic to your website.
SEO Is Not Complicated
One can often get the impression that search engine optimization is very complicated and that Google often changes how they prioritize and rank sites, which is certainly true, but the most important parts and basics of SEO that give the most results and the most bang for the buck are relatively simple – it is no special magic or magical knowledge needed: it’s your time and your care.
This article is divided into two parts:
- Technical SEO: It may sound difficult, but it does not have to be as complicated as it sounds. And if you have the basic technology in place, everything else you do to enhance your presence at Google will be so much easier.
- On-page SEO: Also called on-site SEO, it is about your content and how you structure and present your content.
Note on Off-page SEO: Also called off-site SEO, that is, what you get others to do to primarily link to you – simply what happens outside your site. In addition to good and relevant content, links are still the most important thing in Google’s eyes, but they should be relevant and natural links – not any spam links or links from other dubious sites. Nowadays, quality precedes quantity. We’ll focus on that in the next article.
Technical SEO
At the beginning of the web, there were many technical limitations that made it difficult for Google and other search engines to access a website. For example, there could be so-called frames, where only a small part of the page was reloaded but the page’s outer frame remained, so search engines did not understand that there was more than one page, which was really bad when it comes to SEO.
That’s not how it looks today. Today, most pages are easy to access for Google and it’s about what content you have on your pages and how you structure this content, not about a lot of technical challenges such as which publishing tool (CMS) or which e-commerce platform you use.
But: there are three very important things to keep in mind from a technical perspective of SEO basics that you need to be aware of and that you want to be better at than your competitors.
And that is that your site must be:
- Mobile friendly
- Fast
- Safe
We will now go through these areas one at a time. But mobile-friendly, fast and secure is a prerequisite today for your site to be able to succeed well on Google. If you have a slow page that does not load well or is not presented well on all types of devices, you will have a hard time succeeding with SEO, no matter how good content you produce or how many links you manage to attract to your site.
So, we start with the first two requirements: to be mobile friendly and fast and they are also connected. The majority of today’s internet users come via a mobile device. So then your page must be adapted for mobile. The connection on a mobile is often slower and users have poor patience. They do not want to wait long for your page to load, speed is very important.
Google also has a strong focus on user-friendliness. There is the time it takes for a page to load an important part. The faster it loads for a user the better.
SEO Test Your Site
The basics of any strategy, even SEO, is testing. Otherwise you wouldn’t know how well you’re doing. Are you unsure if your site is mobile-friendly? No worries, Google has a great online tool where you can test your site. Called ” Google Mobile-Friendly Test “. There, you can enter your site’s web address. Or URL as it is also called, and get a result that shows how well mobile adapted your site is. You will also get tips on how you can improve your site for mobile phones.
When it comes to how fast your page loads, Google also has a tool for that. That tool is called ” Google PageSpeed Insights “. Here too you will get tips on how you could improve your page and get it to load faster.
One more thing:
Feel free to enter your competitors’ URLs in these tools. So you have full control of how you are in relation to them. If they are better off than you, then it is time to prioritize the technical part directly. If you are well located and your site works well on mobile devices and loads quickly, then you can go directly to part two and part three in the audiobook. Or this article series on Dagensanalys.se. Start working with your content and your links instead. But go to Google’s tool a little now and then. Just to check the status of your page, so you have not slipped behind.
Then we have a technical aspect of SEO basics left. Your page must be secure, that is, use https:// instead of just http://
It is about your site using an https certificate that makes it more difficult for an external party to access information transferred between the user and, for example, an online store. Google also now warns in its Chrome browser for sites that do not use https. So be sure to get an https certificate if you do not have one. Your own IT department or technology supplier can help you with that.
