SEO bits – What does SEO and international SEO mean?

basic glossary

It's on everyone's lips, but what is SEO? In this little glossary, I'll introduce you to the main concepts of SEO. There is an index, you can read only the relevant information.

• SEO

• Inbound marketing

• Keywords

• SERP

• Buyer personas / Search personas

• Customer journey

• Search journey

• Keyword types: navigational, transactional, informational

• On-page SEO: information architecture

• Title

• Meta-description

• URL structure

• Other on-page factors: writing

• Off-page factors: link and citation

• International SEO

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is a key factor in the performance of a website.

How does it work? When you have a billboard printed to advertise a particular service or offer, you make sure to place it in strategic locations and get it to as many people as possible. Here, the purpose of your website is the same. If it is readable and rankable by search engines (especially Google in our neck of the woods), then it will also be easy to find for users looking for the products, services, or the information it contains.

The difference you can make with the website, compared to a billboard, is to reach a targeted audience, just those people who need your product or service, even those who may not know it yet. With a billboard you do blanket advertising (outbound marketing), you pull up everything, whereas with the website your marketing is "inbound", targeted, you attract only potentially interested people.

But what does it mean that a website is easy to find? All of us when looking for something we go to Google and type in the search bar a group of words, keywords, which condenses the gist of our need. It could be, for example, "hair salon woman Milan" or "hair salon woman Milan center".

As you may have experienced yourself, you never search for a single word because it would deliver too generic results. The most important keywords are therefore long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific keyphrases.

The purpose of SEO is to detect these keywords and find the right place to insert them into your website. It is therefore about defining your services or products speaking the language of your present and future customers.

The ultimate goal of SEO is the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google has to recognize the content of our website as relevant to a given search and present it as high as possible, the best would be if you could reach the first position.

Where to start? Why don't you try to imagine, in the flesh, what your ideal customer might be?

Try to visualize your ideal client from this piece of information (you can also add other data, if relevant to your business):

• Name

• Age

• Nationality, City

• Job

• Character

• Needs

• Fears

• Income

How can your service or product meet their needs?

Now put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and trace the path that starts from his/her needs and brings him/her to you.

The customer journey consists of 7 phases:

1. Interest in the topic

2. Problem awareness: the customer has a need or a problem and does not know how to satisfy or solve it

3. Awareness of the solution: he/she has identified a solution

4. Decision: considers the offer to choose the product or service he/she wants to purchase

5. Purchase: he/she buys

6. Use of the product or service

7. Further needs

Once the customer journey has been identified, it is useful for SEO purposes to understand how the customer approaches the various stages in terms of the actual search. Simply put, what keywords does he or she type into Google to find what they are looking for?

Try now to convert the various stages of the customer journey into keywords.

Now that you know your ideal customer better, you can define your keywords.

Keep in mind that there are three types of keywords:

• Informational keywords: the user is looking for general information: advice, instructions, inspiration. He or she is often at an early stage of the buying process, i.e. he or she does not even know if there is a product or service to satisfy his or her need. He/she expresses a signal of strong interest in topics related in some way to our product or service.

• Transactional keywords: the user is looking for products and services in a targeted manner. He/she is in an advanced phase of the purchasing process, he/she does not know you directly, but he/she is evaluating and comparing the offer to eventually finalize the purchase.

• Navigational keywords: they are used to search for something that they already know and they directly type the name of a site or the brand of the products.

Each type of keyword corresponds to specific phases of the customer journey and needs to be placed in specific positions on the website. Informational keywords can be found in the blog, for example, while transactional keywords fit into product or service pages. Even navigational keywords should not be neglected: think, for example, of hotel sites that are often outranked by Booking in search results.

On-page SEO is all about what can be done within a website to increase its visibility. The main on-page factors are information architecture, titles, meta-descriptions, and URL structure.

Information Architecture

Information architecture focuses on organizing the content and pages of a site in a way that facilitates the user experience. A consistent content structure is also a very important factor in a website's optimization.

How does it work? Content should be structured according to a thematic core that is built around a certain set of keywords that are relevant to a specific target audience.

The pages of the website and blog should be variations, insights, or more general approaches to the same keyword group, in which all products or services are approached and described from different angles.

The title is the page title of a website that appears, for example, in Google search results. It has to be chosen wisely because this is also a major factor in on-page SEO optimization.

As a general rule, the main principles for a good title are:

• do not exceed 60 characters (otherwise, it may not be displayed in full by search engines)

• insert the keywords (even if not too many)

• write something that a human being can understand (not a jumble of words)

The meta-description is the page description that appears below the title in search results. It is a secondary factor, in fact, it affects SEO only in a collateral way. Also, depending on the type of search, Google may use a different description than the one that was set.

A URL consists of the domain name and the extension of the page at hand. This extension can increase the visibility of your site, so it should be properly selected and contain the relevant keywords for the page.

There are many other elements that help to improve site optimization including domain, file name, and image attributes. Another key factor is undoubtedly the writing itself. t is simply not enough to stuff the texts with keywords, in fact, this is often penalizing.

Quality is what counts: they must be well written, from a linguistic, grammatical, and stylistic point of view, and they must be really useful and informative.

In addition, there are some external elements to the structure and content of the website itself that increase its popularity in the eyes of Google.

These factors express the relationship that other websites have with yours.

Getting a link to your website from a reliable and solid website will help increase its authority. Linking must be done in the most natural way possible to be credible. Citations are very important for this very reason.

International SEO is search engine optimization for multiple markets with diverse languages and cultures. How does it differ from "traditional" SEO? The differences are not many, but it requires a lot of work on the back end. The efforts put into national SEO must be multiplied by the number of languages and markets you want to reach.

The SEO strategy needs to be reconsidered for each country, taking into account linguistic and cultural peculiarities. Content needs to be translated, but translation alone is not enough. You need to identify your niche market and draw up a sketch of your buyer personas and search personas in the given country. Perform exhaustive keyword research and adapt or rewrite content for the new target audience.

International SEO is an exciting journey that takes you to new shores. Be prepared to leave your usual patterns behind and don't forget to pack your curiosity.

If you need SEO services and translations to reach your Italian audience, I will gladly take you there!