Holistic SEO: Collective Effort To Rank - AdMarketing Titan

Optimizing a website is not only limited to texts and multimedia.

In fact, only for Google, there are more than 200 ranking factors, according to Backlinko.

That means, for the website owner or organization, tweaking and optimizing every part of the process is important to gain the trust of the search engines.

In this post, we will talk about holistic SEO, why it’s important, and how to implement it.

What is Holistic SEO?

Holistic SEO refers to a strategy that considers all aspects of a website’s performance, including on-page optimization, off-page factors, technical SEO, content quality, user experience, and overall brand presence.

It prioritizes the needs and behaviors of users, aiming to create valuable, relevant, and engaging content that helps in achieving long-term search engine rankings and user engagement.

Why is Holistic SEO Important?

The ultimate goal of the search engine is to provide the best possible answer to the end user. That means search engines need to evaluate every page and the website to test, based on hundreds of factors, is suitable for ranking in the search engine’s results page.

The goal for websites is to go beyond optimizing the pages of the website and to think of the buyer journey as a whole. This could include not just providing text-based answers to the readers, but also providing images and videos at a fast pace without interrupting the user experience.

Beyond the regular content optimization, businesses or websites also need to consider the technical side of the webpage, their value-giving outside the website (that is, in emails, messaging, or other channels), security, and so on.

To summarise to say why holistic SEO is important

• Better search engine rankings
• Content relevance and quality
• Long-Term results
• Adapting to algorithm changes
• Competitive advantage
• Enhanced user experience

How to implement Holistic SEO?

Implementing a holistic SEO approach requires understanding the already present audience and then figuring out the needs, wants, and demands they might have down the buyer’s journey and answering those questions.

Several aspects include implementing a holistic SEO into your content process:

Content

Content is essential for users and search engines to place any value and interest in the website.

For users, it is essential to provide high-quality, research-based, and trustworthy content that is directed at answering the main as well as related questions of the users.

For search engines, the page's content should reflect the relevant keywords, with proper use of headings to show hierarchy in the content and maintain proper structure.

A complete content strategy includes not just blog posts, but also videos, images, and infographics that go in tandem with each other.

Well as the saying goes, Content is King.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website that would help improve the search engine rankings, ensuring that the website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines.

Some of the aspects of technical SEO involve

• Crawling and indexing: Search engines should easily find and index the website’s content.
• Site speed: Optimizing the website’s loading speed for a better user experience.
• Sitemap and Robots.txt: Helps guiding engine crawlers.
• Canonicalization: Avoiding duplicate content by using canonical tags.

On-Page

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing pages for search engines and improving relevant traffic.

Some of the on-page SEO elements include:

• Keyword optimization: Using relevant keywords and content to satisfy the user.
• Title tags: writing compelling and keyword-rich titles to entice the user to read the article/post.
• Meta descriptions: writing meta descriptions that give more information about the content on the page.
• Internal linking: creating links between the pages on the same website. Helps in distributing link equity.
• Image optimization: using descriptive and alt texts to describe the image.

Off-Page

Off-page SEO refers to the actions taken outside the webpage that help boost traffic and give more signals to the search engines to rank the page on the search pages.

This helps show the website’s trustworthiness and relevance to the algorithm.

Some of the key components include:

• Backlinks: Getting high-quality backlinks from other reputable and relevant content sites is important to show search engines that your website can be trusted.
• Social media: Promoting the website’s content on social media to get traffic and visibility on the website.
• Brand mentions: Sometimes earning brand mentions can help increase your brand presence.
• Forum and community: Participating in online forums like Quora and other websites, helps other people get answers and directs them to your website for more answers.
• Building relationships: Build relationships with other influencers and competitors in the industry by being guests or collaborators and providing value.

User Experience

Danny Sullivan of Google has said that Google treats page experience as a ranking signal.

That means that it is important to provide a good user experience through the page. Focus on creating content that is better than others in the competition and provide assets that can be useful for the reader.

Google examines how a user reads a site and calculates the time spent on a site to decide its UX.

Website elements like navigation, content quality, and internal linking to relevant pages are a must for contributing to better UX.

Conclusion

By adopting a holistic approach, a website can be adaptable, resilient, and continuously aligned with best practices, ultimately driving long-term success and growth in the online world.