On the 12th of October 2022, Mikko held a presentation at Wonderland Helsinki about demystifying search engine optimization. This blog is a summary of the things Mikko talked about. Below there’s a recording of the presentation.
Search Engine Optimization in an art that’s relatively young, only a bit more than 20 years old. There have been momentous changes to the best SEO practices during the last ten years, and tricks that worked a few years ago are potentially obsolete.
A common misconception about SEO is that the most important thing is to fix the technical details on the page, such as missing alt text or a link to a broken page. Things like these are important but less relevant in the big picture. Also, stuffing pages with relevant keywords is something that Google punishes rather than rewards.
The aforementioned operations are tactical. An SEO professional knows that successfully climbing the ladder on SERP requires a more strategic mindset. The foundation of SEO is built upon keyword research.
What is keyword research?
We advise anyone with even an inkling of interest in this to read our ultimate guide to keyword research.
Shortly, a keyword research project investigates the most important keywords (terms used on search engines to find products or services in question) with the most traffic. For example, in Finnish, there’re two names for brownies: “mokkapalat” and “mokkaruudut.” The former receives 60-fold more traffic than the latter.
With this simple change, a website could improve its performance by 6000 %.
Unfortunately, finding the right keywords is rarely this straightforward. Competition between keywords varies a lot. Sometimes it’s more profitable to focus on keywords with less traffic but less competition.
Warning! An SEO specialist should beware of keywords that have lots of traffic and little competition but are not completely associated with the product or service promoted. This might generate traffic but convert minimally.
Keyword research is very simple in principle. In reality, it’s a struggle that takes days per product or service to get right and needs updating a few times a year.
Here’s how we did with a Finnish hot tub manufacturer Novitek.
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