SEO can be complicated, in many cases, too complicated. It’s easy to get lost in the SEO rabbit hole, spending significant time with minimal results.
This article will help you cut through the noise and focus on the four key pillars of SEO that will help you improve visibility in 2024 and beyond.
The four pillars of SEO
The four key areas of SEO that site owners need to consider are:
Technical SEO: How your content can be crawled and indexed.
content: Have the most relevant and best answers to a prospect’s question.
Onsite SEO: The optimization of your content and HTML.
Offsite SEO: Build authority to increase trust and rankings.
By working procedurally through these four pillars of SEO, you can improve your visibility, traffic, and engagement from organic search.
1. Technical SEO
Technical SEO can seem a bit daunting. But you need it to make sure search engines can read your content and crawl your site.
Much of this will be handled by the content management system you use, and Google Search Console can help you understand your site’s technical setup.
The main areas to consider here are:
Crawl: Can a search engine crawl your site?
Indexing: Is it clear which pages the search engine should index?
Phone: Does your site offer a solid mobile experience?
Speed: Do your web pages load quickly on mobile, desktop and beyond?
technology: Is your website search engine friendly?
Hierarchy: Is the content organized to aid categorization?
If you’re a small business using WordPress (or a similar CMS) for your website, technical SEO should be something you can check off your list pretty quickly. If you have a large, custom website with millions of pages, technical SEO becomes much more important (and problematic).
In 2024 and beyond, much of what is “technical SEO” is actually part of your website and CMS. The key is to partner with a developer who understands SEO principles and builds you a properly configured, SEO-friendly website. Doing this should get you most of the way to effective SEO.
note: If you’re a small or micro business, don’t obsess over it too much or feel like you have to perfect everything. We still see a lot of sites that do basically everything wrong and rank well, so do your best!
2. Onsite SEO
Once your technical SEO is in place, you need to optimize your site content.
Structural optimization
The first job here is to make sure your site is structured in a way that helps Google understand the relevance of each page. Think of your website as an archive. The website is the closet, the sections are drawers, and the pages are folders within those drawers.
You should be able to draw this structure on the back of a napkin and understand how it all relates.
Home Services Locations Team Department Team member A Team member B Case study Case study A Case study B Who we are Contact
You get the picture, and so does, hopefully, Google. By structuring your site this way, you provide context to a page before Google has examined the page itself and set the stage for optimization.
Page-level optimization
With a reasonable structure in place, you can now optimize individual pages.
The main areas to focus on here are:
Keyword research: Understand the language of your target audience.
Descriptive URLs: Make sure each URL is simple and descriptive.
Page Titles: Use keywords naturally within the page title.
Meta descriptions: Craft meta descriptions like ad copy to improve click-through rates.
Content optimization: Use keywords and variations judiciously in your page copy.
User Experience (UX): Make sure your site is a pleasure to use and navigate.
Strong calls to action: Make it easy for your users to know what to do next.
Structured data markup: Help Google understand your content.
If you’ve taken the time to structure your site properly, then on-page optimization is pretty simple to overlay. If it helps, put your list of pages into a spreadsheet and detail the keyword you want to optimize for each page.
Many tools will evaluate how well a page is optimized for a given term that can help you with the nuts and bolts of optimization.
Don’t think of it as a one-time job either. Once your site is indexed, you can gather much more information from Google Search Console about what keywords each page is ranking for and refine your page-by-page optimization.
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3. Content
Content is king. That’s the saying, right?
It’s true in a way. Your website is just a wrapper for your content.
Your content tells potential customers what you do, where you do it, who you did it for, and why someone should use your business.
And if you’re smart, your content should also go beyond these obvious brochure elements and help your prospects reach their goals.
For service businesses, we can divide your content into four categories:
Business information. Who are you and why should people care?
Content of the service. What do you do and where do you do it?
Credibility content. Why a potential customer should engage with your business.
Marketing content. Content that helps position you as an expert and puts your business in front of potential customers early in the buying cycle.
SEO is important for each type of content in different ways. SEO is often forgotten when it comes to credibility content like case studies and reviews, but in an EEAT world, this is a missed opportunity.
For example, I recently renovated a Victorian house in the UK. The house is 140 years old, falling apart, and is known as The Money Pit!
Finding good people to help with this project was difficult, and it was those with good testimonials and case studies that we ended up with:
Search using localized search results. It is used because of the clear examples of relevant experience and knowledge.
EEAT might sound like another painful SEO acronym to sort out, but in reality, EEAT just stands for what we, as consumers, want.
Adjusting your thinking to demonstrate your EEAT in your content will only help you rank better, get more visitors, and convert those clicks into customers.
Also, be sure to optimize your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries, and testimonials, not just the obvious service pages.
For larger businesses, a strong content marketing and SEO strategy is also the most scalable way to promote your business to a wide audience.
This generally has the best ROI as there is no cost per click, so you are increasing your marketing without directly scaling your costs.
Throw in some remarketing ads and others that build on that first organic touch, and you’ve got a winning combination of tactics.
Make sure your SEO tactics align with your overall SEO strategy. We still see too many paint-by-numbers approaches to SEO, where local businesses are paying agencies or using generative AI tools to publish blog posts that will never rank.
Create content that helps your customers find or choose you and focus on optimizing it.
Dig deeper: What is useful content, according to Google
4. Off-site authority building
Ultimately, all SEO rivers flow to this one place: authority building.
Building your authority, historically, was all about link building, a much maligned and maligned SEO practice by 2024.
Authority remains crucial to developing strong organic rankings and is part of the EEAT’s approach. However, this can be the hardest part of SEO to get right.
The best way I’ve ever seen to describe the right link building mindset was written by the great Eric Ward: “Connect what should be connected.”
This philosophy is beautiful in its simplicity and corrects the “more, more, more” mentality of building historical links. We only want links from relevant sources
This often means that in order to scale our link building efforts beyond the obvious tactics, we need to create something link-worthy. Have links where it makes sense to have links. Simple.
Wikipedia has millions of links, but I’m pretty sure they’ve never done any link building. This is because they have a lot of useful content that is linked. These are real, natural links that enrich the link page, provide more context, and serve as the real connective tissue of this hyper-linked world we live in.
This type of natural link should be the backbone of your link building efforts. This may mean that you first need to review your site’s content and create something of value, but if you can pull this off, you’re halfway there.
Any secure and scalable link building strategy should be built with this mindset in mind.
Summary
SEO becomes more manageable when broken down into four basic pillars.
Technical SEO ensures that search engines can properly crawl and index your site.
Optimization of elements on the page it provides useful clues to search engines regarding relevance and ranking.
Invest time and resources in useful content that answers your customers’ questions and establishes your experience lays the foundation for rankings.
Adopt a strategic but authentic approach to building external authority cement your site’s position as a trusted resource on relevant topics.
Be sure to set clear SEO goals and track your performance KPIs to continuously improve these four pillars.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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