S-E-O Who? What SEO Is and How to Use It
Every marketing expert loves talking about the importance of SEO and why you should hire them to do it for you. But what really is it and how can it make a difference for your web application?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for driving traffic and visibility to any website or web application. With the right SEO strategies, you can enhance your web app’s search rankings, attract more organic visitors, and establish authority in your niche. At Paragon Cloud Consulting, we use SEO on a regular basis to both optimize content for web applications, as well as provide our clients with digital marketing campaigns for their business. The aim with this article is to discuss key techniques and best practices for optimizing web apps for higher search visibility and more users.
Types of Websites That Excel at SEO Optimization
Certain website structures lend themselves better to SEO optimization. The new “popular” type of web app is a scrollable landing page, very much intended for users accessing web applications from mobile or tablets. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best option for SEO, even though it looks really cool. In reality, multi-page websites with layered navigation menus tend to perform much better in search rankings. The modular structure with multiple pages allows you to target different keywords across various sections. It also makes a big difference in internal back-linking, which we will cover further down in this article.
E-commerce websites also have high SEO potential thanks to their product-focused structure. Each product page can be optimized for relevant long-tail keywords, driving targeted traffic from search. The assumption for most people writing content for a product would be to summarize concisely, without over-doing it. But that’s not actually what drives SEO. Have you noticed that Amazon products sometimes have a 20 word description in the title? You guessed it, to make your product more likely to be found, sometimes you need to put “similar to” keywords in there. But again, we will discuss this further down. Review sites, blogs, news portals and other content-rich websites also excel at SEO when structured effectively, for more-or-less the same reasoning: content is king.
Techniques to Boost SEO
Let’s explore actionable techniques to optimize your web app’s SEO at multiple levels:
Keyword Research
Thorough keyword research provides the foundation for your entire SEO strategy. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner, you can find terms and phrases that users search for in your niche. Make sure to include relevant long-tail variations too. Optimize your web app for searcher intent by targeting informational, transactional and navigational keywords. Keep your focus narrow instead of targeting overly broad terms.
The best tool that we have discovered so far for this is Semrush’s SEO keyword tool. (link below)
Sure, you do pay for it, but it indexes multiple search engines to give you the best SEO keywords for your page. You can also use metrics like “keyword difficulty” to sort, so that you can chose words that are within your scope. We could deep dive into just this topic alone, but long story short, if you aren’t high ranking, don’t pick high ranking keywords because you are competing with more articles, more products and more companies — so it’s unlikely that you will place in Google’s top search results.
On-page Optimization
On-page optimization entails tweaking elements of individual pages/posts to boost rankings. Some key tactics include:
- Strategic keyword placement in titles, headers, content, URLs, alt text and meta descriptions (basically making sure your keywords are everywhere!)
Here is an example of keyword placement using Claude AI:
- Crafting compelling meta descriptions that generate clicks (and tailoring it to the type of content you are creating. While Youtube may focus on clickbait, tech articles won’t be as flashy)
Here is an example of a “clickbait” youtube video vs an informative one:
You can see that the top one has more people viewing it, most likely because the topic of tech is generally endorsed by other tech enthusiasts who don’t want to be baited into reading clickbait (no offense to this content creator). Although this depends entirely on the audience.
- Optimizing page speed and technical elements for better crawlability
Backlink Building
The number and authority of external sites linking to your web app impact search rankings. Cultivating backlinks from reputable sources helps improve domain authority. Strategies like guest posting, contributor outreach, local citations and partnerships help build natural backlinks at scale. Just avoid low-quality links from spammy or irrelevant sites.
So how does this work on the backend? Well, search engines like Bing or Google assume that the user’s actions define the quality of your content. That means if a user clicks on your article, and then clicks off because you don’t use internal backlinking (aka, linking to another interesting blog or contact me page), then Google assumes they didn’t find what they wanted and that the quality of your web page maybe isn’t up to snuff. Now do you see why SEO matters?
Optimizing User Experience
Beyond technical optimization, focus on improving real user experience. Easy site navigation, fast load speeds, engaging content and seamless UI enhance conversions and reduce bounce rates. Happier users lead to better rankings. For the same reasons mentioned above, you want to show Google that your web application is engaging it’s search users.
Here is a summary in diagram form of these concepts to make it easier to process (we hope it helps!):
It was made using Drawio.
The Benefits of SEO Optimization
The positive impact of optimizing your web app for SEO includes:
More Organic Traffic
Ranking higher in search results converts to increased organic visits. For instance, moving from page 2 to page 1 for a keyword can boost traffic by over 70%.
Enhanced User Experience
SEO best practices like faster load speeds and engaging content also improve user experience on your site.
Greater Brand Visibility
Ranking for your brand name and keywords helps establish authority and trust in your niche.
According to SEMrush, SEO was responsible for over 52% of total website traffic in 2022. Optimal SEO implementation results in a virtuous cycle of more organic visibility, lower cost-per-click, and higher revenues. (We don’t have the data for 2023 yet, but not much has changed in terms of searching Google)
Choosing the Right Web Application Frameworks for SEO
Now, this part is a little more high level, but if you are a software engineer reading this, it may come in handy. Certain web development frameworks lend themselves better to SEO based on their technical capabilities. When choosing a framework, ensure it allows web crawlers to easily index and understand your content. And what I say “frameworks” plural, we really only mean Next.js and let’s explain why by comparing it to regular React.
Next.js excels in SEO optimization compared to regular React because of its server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) capabilities. When a page is requested, Next.js pre-renders it on the server, creating a fully formed HTML page with populated data, which search engines can easily crawl and index. This contrasts with traditional React’s client-side rendering (CSR), which can hinder search engine interpretation and indexing of dynamic content. Also, Next.js includes features like automatic code splitting and efficient data fetching, improving website performance and load times, factors crucial for search engine ranking. These SEO advantages make Next.js a preferred choice for developers aiming to achieve strong search engine visibility without the need for intricate SEO workarounds or additional efforts.
In summary, if you are new to SEO and want to know where to begin, focus your efforts on:
- Crafting an SEO-friendly website structure
- Optimizing content with keywords and meta tags
- Generating high-quality backlinks from authority sites
- Improving overall user experience and conversions
- Selecting the ideal web frameworks like React and Next.js
With the right SEO implementation, you can unlock tremendous organic growth for your web application. At Paragon we build web and mobile applications and are experts at optimizing the content for SEO. For more information, visit our website and reach out to us using the “contact us” section.
