What is Foundational SEO? Pro Tips to Turbocharge Your Online Results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more than a series of steps you take; it's a strategic approach. It involves not only your website, but also how search engines such as Google crawl, index and rate your content.

If you want online business results, you need to apply proven SEO practices. After reading this blog, you'll understand the basics of foundational SEO, so you can turbocharge your online presence and results.

What is Foundational SEO?

Foundational SEO deals with the fundamentals of search engine optimization. It's about ensuring your website is properly optimized, and your content is relevant and authoritative. There are three key elements to achieving foundational SEO success:

1. Technical Crawlability: Crawlability refers to the ease with which a search algorithm can catalog and index your website. An indexable site is easier to rank, which improves your search engine results pages (SERP) results. It should be noted that web crawlers constantly update their catalogs and check for changes on your website.
2. On-page Usability: Usability refers to the ease with which users navigate your site and find what they're looking for. Usability consists of learnability, memorability, efficiency, satisfaction and errors.
3. Off-page Authority: Website authority, also known as domain authority (DA), indicates how well a website will rank on search engines by measuring how relevant the website is in a particular industry or topic. Websites are ranked from 1 to 100, with 100 indicating the greatest relevance. If you want to rank well in search engines, it's critical that you optimize all three areas.

Why Does Foundational SEO Matter?

The aim of SEO is to ensure that your website and content appear at the top of search results. Most marketing efforts are outbound, where you reach out and interrupt people. Search engine optimization gives you a powerful magnet to attract people looking for information about the goods and services you offer whenever they are looking for them.

How Do You Approach Foundational SEO?

Laying a solid foundation at the beginning of an SEO initiative, with the right tactics in the right order, not only sets you up for success but also establishes the baseline required to measure performance and strategy effectiveness over time.

Website Architecture: Website architecture is how a website’s pages are organized and linked together. Navigation, breadcrumbs, URLs, and sitemaps help search engines understand your site structure. An ideal website architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they're looking for on a website.

Page Architecture: Page Architecture refers to the structure of the individual page components, including header structure, copy structure, lists, etc. This influences both the way search crawlers understand the page and how screen readers and the visually impaired absorb the information.

Meta Descriptions: A meta description is the HTML element that provides a brief summary of a website. The meta description tag of a page is displayed as part of the search snippet in a SERP and should give the user an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to their search query.

Schema Markup: Schema markup is code used to more clearly provide information to search engines in order to understand your content which can be placed on each page of a website. Want to learn more about schema markup? Check out THIS RESOURCE.

Keyword Research and Optimization: Keyword research and optimization is the process of researching, identifying and applying the best keywords to target on your website pages and other digital content to drive qualified traffic from search engines to your website.

Technical Audits: Technical audits help to identify the overall health of your website at the base technical level, investigating the site structure, indexability of the sitemap, and any issues that may need to be addressed.

Google Business Listing and Citations

1. Optimize Your Google Business Listing: You must first claim and/or gain access to your Google Business Listing before you can optimize it. Make sure your business profile has a clear business description, engaging images, and the right primary categories and services. An effective Google Business Listing allows companies to appear on Google maps, enables companies to gain and show more online reviews, and provides helpful consumer information. Due to all these factors, it can be a significant lead generator.

2. Boost Citations with High Level Marketing’s Footprint™ Core70 Technology: Citations are mentions of your business name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) on a website that isn't your own. NAP consistency is an important SEO ranking factor. With High Level Marketing's Core70 solution, our customers can ensure their citations are consistent across the web, they can also voice search via Amazon’s Alexa and expand the power of their citations.

Bottom Line

Foundational SEO is the cornerstone of your SEO strategy and should be the basis of your digital marketing approach. Websites easily crawled and indexed by search engines rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Boosting your Google ranking through SEO is crucial for your business, as search engine ranking is closely linked to brand visibility and website traffic.

When building a website, it's important to follow best practices, including ensuring your website is mobile friendly, accessible, and indexable. Regardless of how good your other SEO strategies are, it won't benefit your business if search engines can’t find and index your site.